A few years ago I asked officials in Germany and German American organizations in vain to protect a unique building in the Bronx, that symbolized the democratic history of today’s Germany and at the same time honored the history of immigration in the United States and especially in the Bronx, as well as the history of the abolition of slavery and the Civil War. It was called the Melrose Turn Verein and I took a picture of it in 2008, when I first moved to the South Bronx. It has since unfortunately been torn down which is why I am memorializing it here. The history of the building on Courtland Avenue and E. 150th Street was closely associated with the German revolutionaries of the 1848er ge
The ancestors of most Americans of European descent immigrated to the United States without any legal restrictions on immigration. Had the same legal restrictions on immigration existed then that exist today, many would have been considered illegal immigrants. There was no “line” to stand in (however ill defined) and no excessive paperwork to complete like I experienced when I went through the immigration process between 2000 and 2014. The laws restricting immigration to the United States today have a distinctly racist origin. The reasoning behind them was historically driven by a wrong-headed Eugenic ideology that imagined humanity to be separated into different biological “races” (an idea