By TomL
I am going back many years where some people I knew help me understand the process of Immigration. The story starts where a family came to the Promise land, the United States of America!
You could get a job, work hard and live a life out of poverty. I won’t put a name on them because some are still alive. An Immigrant got a job on the Rail Road and later married his sweetheart and had five children. The father died in a Rail Road Car accident, where he was knocked off the top of a rail road car, laid in bed over night and passed away.
One of the daughters told the story. She was the second oldest and was not yet a teen. The mother was working any job she could to make money. Taking in washing, altering clothes, ironing clothes, scrubbing floors to feed the children. The daughter telling the story said that “They were never were so poor as they were in America”. On the way home from school the children would walk the railroad track to pickup up coal that fell off the Railroad cars. Some of the local people did not like that, why because they were immigrants and poor, so they stopped them every day until they stopped walking the tracks home.
The oldest girl became a teen quit school and went to work to help feed the family, family a better chance at a better life.
Then the second oldest became a teen and she quit school and went to work, So the pattern went on until a couple of the boys came of age and things were not perfect but they were doing better.
As time went on the girl telling the story met a young man and they were married. He was working for the Rail Road as a mechanic. The war broke out and by that time he had built a house for him and his bride. Not big, nothing special but perfect for a simple life. He went to war to fight the Germans he found out his wife was pregnant. He sent every cent home he made for them to live on. His wife banked money being very thrifty. He lived threw the war and came home to his wife and a child he had never seen. He got his job back on the Rail Road and they snuggled in as a family. They were not rich but comfortable. Rich in their lives as a family.
Nothing was given to these people but pride, hope and opportunity.
NOW fast forward to today! What do you think about today’s immigrant system?
tloury@att.net
