Meet my father, the birthright citizen

His name was Morris Cocco, and he was born on the kitchen table of his immigrant parents’ home just outside Boston in 1924—amid a nativist backlash, racist discrimination and stereotyping of Italian immigrants that included at least one mass lynching of Italians.

The very year my father was born, virulent anti-immigrant sentiment inspired legislation imposing a complete prohibition on immigration from Asia and the imposition of strict immigration quotas imposed on people emigrating from Eastern and Southern Europe. Motivated by the racist eugenics movement, the law was a transparent effort to restrict Jews and Italians, who were deemed racially inferior to those fairer migrants who were still flooding into the United States from Northern Europe.

Upon signing the measure into law, President Calvin Coolidge remarked, “America must remain American.”

Notwithstanding the political hostility directed toward those deemed undesirable, and the irony of having been born the year Italians were targeted under federal law, my father was a citizen—his birthright under the 14th Amendment--and a proud, dedicated one.

When he was 17, Pearl Harbor was attacked, drawing the United States into World War II and prompting young Morris to quit high school and volunteer for service in the Navy. He immediately deployed to the Pacific theater, where he served on a crew of a troop carrier that transported American soldiers to all the major battles--Okinawa, Leyte Gulf, Guam, the Philippines. One of his duties was to shoot down Japanese kamikaze planes as they bore down on the packed vessel.  

Meanwhile at home, his mother, Amelia Costantino Cocco, was declared an “enemy alien.”

Like many Italian immigrant women, she never really learned English since her duties at home in what was then a neighborhood filled with others from the Abruzzo region of Italy surely didn’t require it.

Once declared an enemy alien, she was subject to constant check-ins with the FBI and other authorities. When he was home on shore leave and in uniform, my father sometimes had to take her to these appointments to have interviews and her “enemy alien” card stamped.

Of course, this was light treatment compared with the internment of Japanese Americans—citizens and non-citizens alike—that was carried out under the same law, the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Nonetheless, about 600,000 Italian-Americans, some of them U.S. citizens, were interned during the war. Baseball great Joe DiMaggio’s father, a fisherman in Northern California, had his boat confiscated and his business ruined. Thousands of Italian immigrant families, especially on the West Coast, were separated, as non-citizen spouses were declared enemies and relocated to internment camps (with their citizen children) or to interior cities.

Little was known about this episode until Italian-American groups pressured members of Congress to bring it to light. Eventually, Congress passed the “Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act” and tasked the Justice Department with providing a comprehensive report.  

In short, there was no due process; citizens and non-citizens alike were rounded up; families were separated and relocated; businesses and livelihoods were destroyed. All these circumstances are about to repeat themselves on a larger scale today—without the justification of the U.S. being at war. And with the added awfulness of President Donald Trump’s effort to wipe away, by executive order, the constitutional right of citizenship by birth. A federal judge has temporarily stayed the order, but there is no doubt the Trump administration will appeal, likely all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

What would the country have lost had Morris Cocco not been born into U.S. citizenship?

A fiercely proud, honorable member of the U.S. armed forces and a decorated veteran. A municipal housing inspector who was among the earliest to recognize the severe health hazards of lead paint, and work to eliminate it. A father who would count among his children an FBI agent who for years put his life on the line in high-risk undercover investigations.

This is what we lose when animosity motivates our body politic. And especially when it animates our leaders.