Anchor Baby?

Mary spoke Gaelic as a girl, learning English as a second language at the school in Tong (pronounced “tongue”) that she attended until eighth grade. A few years later, following three of her sisters, one of whom had been banished for giving birth while unwed, she traveled to the United States to live there for good. Even during the Depression, Mary judged, America offered her more opportunity than her struggling, out-of-the-way outpost of Scotland. She boarded the SS Transylvania in Glasgow on May 2, 1930, according to local documents, immigration records and reporting in newspapers in the United Kingdom. In transit, she turned 18.

The person who stepped down the gangway in New York on May 11 was logged on the passenger manifest as 5-foot-8 with fair hair and blue eyes. She told authorities she would be living with one of her sisters in Astoria, Queens, and that she would work as a “domestic.” Decades later, her oldest daughter would say in a commencement speech that her mother was “a nanny.” A teenage pen pal of Mary’s who wrote a memoir discovered by a Scottish reporter last year said she worked “with a wealthy family in a big house in the suburbs of New York.” In 1934, on federal documents Mary filed to receive a “re-entry permit” at the tail end of a trip home, she noted she was still living in New York with a sister and still working as a “domestic.”

Acknowledging the large numbers of Europeans in the United States without proper authorization, the government devised ways for them to remain in the country legally. The 1929 Registry Act allowed “honest law-abiding alien[s] who may be in the country under some merely technical irregularity” to register as permanent residents for a fee of $20 if they could prove they had lived in the country since 1921 and were of “good moral character.” Roughly 115,000 immigrants registered between 1930 and 1940—80% were European or Canadian. Between 1925 and 1965, 200,000 unauthorized Europeans legalized their status through the Registry Act, through “pre-examination”—a process that allowed them to leave the United States voluntarily and re-enter legally with a visa (a “touch-back” program), or through discretionary rules that allowed immigration officials to suspend deportations in “meritorious” cases. In the 1940s and 1950s, several thousand deportations a year were suspended; approximately 73% of those who benefitted were Europeans (mostly Germans and Italians).

confuzzled dude wrote:

Mary spoke Gaelic as a girl, learning English as a second language at the school in Tong (pronounced “tongue”) that she attended until eighth grade. A few years later, following three of her sisters, one of whom had been banished for giving birth while unwed, she traveled to the United States to live there for good. Even during the Depression, Mary judged, America offered her more opportunity than her struggling, out-of-the-way outpost of Scotland. She boarded the SS Transylvania in Glasgow on May 2, 1930, according to local documents, immigration records and reporting in newspapers in the United Kingdom. In transit, she turned 18.

The person who stepped down the gangway in New York on May 11 was logged on the passenger manifest as 5-foot-8 with fair hair and blue eyes. She told authorities she would be living with one of her sisters in Astoria, Queens, and that she would work as a “domestic.” Decades later, her oldest daughter would say in a commencement speech that her mother was “a nanny.” A teenage pen pal of Mary’s who wrote a memoir discovered by a Scottish reporter last year said she worked “with a wealthy family in a big house in the suburbs of New York.” In 1934, on federal documents Mary filed to receive a “re-entry permit” at the tail end of a trip home, she noted she was still living in New York with a sister and still working as a “domestic.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/03/mary-macleod-trump-donald-trump-mother-biography-mom-immigrant-scotland-215779