With the Trumped-up debate about deportation, birthright citizenship and a border fence stealing the GOP presidential-campaign show, the immigration story in U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar's new memoir seems propitiously timed.
Many Minnesotans know the state's 55-year-old senior senator as the daughter of a Star Tribune columnist, granddaughter of an Iron Range miner and great-granddaughter of Slovenian immigrants. That's the Klobuchar line.
"The Senator Next Door," the book released last week in which the senator demonstrates that she inherited a goodly portion of her father's writing chops, includes a less familiar story about her mother's line, the Heubergers. Those grandparents were Swiss immigrants who settled in Milwaukee.
Her grandpa Martin got there by way of Ellis Island, then Toronto, then Detroit. At Ellis Island in October 1923, he was told that month's quota for Swiss immigrants had been filled. No problem, he replied; he was merely passing through the U.S. port of entry on his way to Canada. When he turned up in Detroit less than a week later, U.S. authorities admitted him as a Canadian "resident alien."
Martin Heuberger had gamed the system. He got away with it until 1940, when the U.S. government set out to register all resident aliens — the better to deport or imprison them in the event of war, his family feared. He crossed his fingers and registered without incident, then hurriedly applied for citizenship. His naturalization papers arrived less than three weeks before Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II.
"If my grandpa had come in under these terms today — an alien, entering the country twice to beat the quotas, at one point filling out a form without giving all of the correct details on his place of entry — I often wonder what would have happened to him," Klobuchar wrote. "Would he have been deported after living in the country for 18 years? Maybe. Would he have been affected by the anti-immigrant sentiment so commonplace now? Absolutely."
A lot of Minnesota families — maybe most of them — have immigration stories of their own. Most don't involve a sneaky sidetrip through Canada. But many involve enough hardship and hostility for harsh memories to be passed down to the third and fourth generations. Most are retold today with a sense of pride in what those in the first generation accomplished for their offspring and their new homeland.
That heritage is one reason I doubt that Donald Trump's immigration ideas will win wide support in the North Star State. To be sure, Minnesotans dislike illegal immigration. "No one wants that," Klobuchar said when I caught up with her last week. She has long favored policies to make illegal immigration more difficult and legal immigration a more accessible norm. She voted for a bill that would have done just that in 2013, only to see it die in the U.S. House.
