I’ve been listening to songs by the Celtic Women lately. In particular, one song—Isle of Hope.

It’s a song about Ellis Island and the immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. By coincidence, my father at age two, his parents and his five other siblings immigrated to the US via Ellis Island.

I’ve visited Ellis Island. My parents and I took a trip and one stop was at New York. Dad had a nephew living in Manhattan. While we were there, we also toured the city and took a trip out to Ellis Island.

This was in 1959, if I remember correctly. The island was closed during WW2 and when we visited, most of the buildings were needing repair. One small building housed the National Park Service staff and all the records of immigrants since 1892 when the Island opened.

I remember my father going through the records for November 1904. I don’t remember the exact date but he found the entries of his family arriving via a German ship via Hamburg. The Park Ranger said that each country, at that time, had a quota—not of individual citizens, but by point of departure. That year, November 1904, the UK and Ireland had filled their quotas. Germany had not. Therefore, my father and his family  entered the  country from Hamburg and were counted against the German quota.

When Dad searched the records, he discoved his family was almost sent back to Hamburg. Once of his sisters was sick. The medical examiner placed her, and the entire family, in quarantine for two weeks—if my father’s family could pay the cost of their food and board during the quarantine. Since I’m here, they paid the costs were released at the end of the quarantine to enter the country.

There is so much controversy about immigration now. The libs what open borders. more welfare recipients, more mouths dependent on government, i.e., democrat largess using taxpayer money. When my father and his family entered the country, there was no benefits—no welfare, no food-stamps, no government housing, nothing that they couldn’t pay for themselves.

One of the requirements, at that time, was that all adult males must have a usable skill, a skill or trade that would allow them to become self-sufficient. My father’s family were miners, a skill in high demand. Specifically, my grandfather, and later my father, was a Master Blaster. He prepared and set off explosions in the mines to provide access to the mine’s coal or ores.

How different are the days from then until now. My father’s parents and his family came to the United States to take advantage of the opportunities present here. My father followed my grandfather working in the mines as a Master Blaster. My two uncles became engineers. My aunts married and moved across the country from the glassworks of Pittsburgh, to the factories at Chicago and Indiana to the plains of eastern Colorado.

The immigrants of today evade the entry requirements. They bypass the legal immigration path to sneak across the border in violation of our law. They commit crimes coming here illegally and continue to commit crimes by staying here. They don’t and won’t assimilate into our culture but by refusing to assimilate, wreck great harm to the United States. These illegals provide no benefit to our nation.Rather, they are parasites, leaching off our country and our taxpayer dollars.