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Some Thoughts Occasioned by My Nephew’s Return From Germany

Posted August 26, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

When I created a Facebook page for myself a couple of years ago, I began getting concerned e-mails from old friends worried that I’d gone off the deep end. They saw Facebook postings from Pat Young indicating a strong interest in freshman college girls and an abnormal love of beer.

I had to reassure them that, while the postings did in fact come from Pat Young, they were from my nephew Pat at the University of Florida.

On Friday, I met up with Pat at Kennedy Airport. He was returning from a two month study-abroad program in Germany. As a history student, he spent a lot of time visiting museums and historic sites there.

Pat told me that he had been to two different museums tracing the history of German immigration to America. One included a mock-up of an immigrant ship that you boarded to begin the journey and that ended in a recreation of Ellis Island.

It reminded me that there are many countries that commemorate their peoples’ migrations to America.

A lot of us know that there is a statue at Ellis Island of Annie Moore, the Irish teenager who was the first immigrant processed at the inspection station. But there is also a statue of her at the harbor in Ireland where she embarked on her journey (see the image above).

We don’t always think about the impact of immigration on the countries that send us their sons and their daughters.

It can be profound.

There are two countries that might not exist today, Ireland and Israel, but for immigration to the United States.

Polish immigrants focused America’s attention on the Solidarity movement that helped shatter the Iron Curtain.

This year we had another example of this effect when Haitian immigrants led efforts to bring relief to their homeland after the devastating earthquake in January.


Image courtesy of amerune via Flickr.

Tags : immigration history

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