Let’s change the conversation
Es gibt Konservative, die gegen die sogenannte “Kettenmigration” sind, obwohl ihre eigenen Familien genau auf diesem Weg nach Amerika gekommen sind.
My friend Jennifer was extremely upset when Donald Trump was elected more than a year ago. And I was extremely worried about her. “You need to calm down on Twitter,” I told her.
She was getting into virtual screaming matches about politics with total strangers — the kind of arguments in which no one convinces anyone; the kind that feeds everyone’s rage and mutual loathing.
I warned her that she needed to find a healthier way to channel her distress. She was doing nothing to help improve a conservative’s view of liberal politics. She was simply doing her own small part to exacerbate our national epidemic of anger. Of course, my advice at that moment was to turn off her computer — and that would have been a mistake.
Jennifer stayed online. But she threw herself into a completely unrelated passion: genealogy. She was driven to learn more about her own family history and about her grandparents’ cousins who died in the Holocaust. She became adept at using the various research tools now on the internet to construct a family tree, and she would help friends or even strangers she met through genealogy forums to trace their own past. When she started jumping into political fights on Twitter again, she was calm, well-informed, and able to take her arguments much further.
The Trump administration has taken a hard line on immigration, attempting not just to curb illegal immigration (and treating undocumented migrants much more harshly), but also to reduce the number of immigrants allowed here legally. Some of the rhetoric has been harsh, bordering on racist.
In January, a Trump aide named Dan Scavino tweeted about the need to end “chain migration,” the policy of allowing legal immigrants to sponsor relatives to join them in the US. Jennifer started researching his family. “So, Dan,” she typed, “let’s say Victor Scavino arrives from Canelli, Italy, in 1904, then brother Hector in 1905, brother Gildo in 1912, sister Esther in 1913, and sister Clotilde and their father, Giuseppe, in 1916... Do you think that would count as chain migration?”
Gildo, she had found out, was Scavino’s greatgrandfather. Scavino would never have been born American had his great-great-uncle not been allowed to sponsor his relatives. More than 20,000 people retweeted her message.
Since then, Jennifer has merrily pointed out the hypocrisy of anti-immigration politicians by researching their immigrant-rooted family trees. She has become a bit of a sensation, with more than 35,000 Twitter followers. Now people are offering her jobs, telling her to write books, or just hiring her to research their own family trees. More importantly, she is changing the political conversation — maybe even winning some arguments — in a way that a Twitter screaming match never could.