A Personal Immigration Story and Thanksgiving

 

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite secular holiday.  As a child, I loved the food and family gatherings.  Most of all, I loved the story that my mother would share on Thanksgiving—the story of her father’s family and their journey to America.  They were a family that literally arrived on the wings of a storm.

On the morning of August 15, 1635, off the coast of Pemaquid, Maine a ship thrashed at

anchor. The 250-ton Angel Gabriel was a big ship with heavily gunned decks and a reputation for successful transport of immigrants and cargo.  It had arrived at one of the most beautiful harbors on the east coast of the New World the day before.  While those with a weather eye may have known that trouble was brewing, none could have guessed that the Angel Gabriel was about to be set upon by a storm that history would call the “Great Colonial Hurricane.”

That hurricane was the first great storm recorded by the Europeans who were steadily populating New England and the Mid-Atlantic Seaboard. Though no such scale existed at the time, the hurricane probably came ashore as a Category 3, like Hurricane Sandy. The Angel Gabriel was torn from its moorings and dashed onto the solidly pre-Cambrian rocks of Maine, destroying it completely.  Among the immigrants huddled on shore, watching as their only link to the old world sank beneath the gray waves, were Ralph and Elizabeth Blaisdell, and their three-year-old son, Henry. Ralph and Elizabeth are my direct line ancestors, eleven generations back. They had risked all, left the family and home they knew in England, and traveled to a primitive land, burning every bridge behind them.

Grandpa Blaisdell is my connection to these immigrants, part of the Great Migration from England that accompanied the national unrest, authoritarian behavior, and brutality of King Charles I.  My other three grandparents were born in Northern Europe and immigrated to America in the late 1890’s.  By strict definition, all these people came here outside of the law.  The first immigration laws that dictated a process for entry and assimilation did not appear until 1903, and quotas did not appear until 1921.  It should not surprise you that these early quotas were meant as much to decide who stays out as to who gets in. 

On Thanksgiving, I do take seriously the opportunity to evaluate my life, count my blessings and observe a humbling gratitude for those things which I have not earned, but were simply given me by an accident of birth.  Being born in the United States, the child of ancestors who came from elsewhere, is most certainly one of those things. 

This year my sense of gratitude was started a bit early by Pastor Gabriella Conklin at First Lutheran Church in Edinburg.  As she completed the sermon, she said that each of us need to be the justice we seek, the love we want, and the forgiveness for which we ask.  This is a powerful message.

When I think of the immigration from which I have benefited and the immigration that is such a heated point of hate, discrimination and vitriol in today’s world I feel compelled to address this issue.  If we want justice, why not increase the number of human beings that can come here legally?  If we want our country to be loved why not subsidize countries in Central and South America, Mexico and the Caribbean that improve the lives of their people, thus reducing the desire for emigration? If we want forgiveness for our past sins, why not confess them, ask forgiveness and then build schools, hospitals and housing in those countries with money that is currently going to building walls?    

Hate is cheap and easy.  Gratitude requires introspection and the admission that we have received grace without merit.  This Thanksgiving, don’t just count your blessings, think about how you can pass a few around to the rest of mankind.  Have a happy Thanksgiving and keep the