Did I mention that he was an illegal alien?

He took a ship to Canada from France, then entered the United States across a border that immigration historians tell me was famously porous then. A train deposited him in Manhattan, and soon after he settled in the nearby city of White Plains, which had a populous Italian community. He was undocumented, living off the books and outside the law, and remained so for about a decade before finally becoming a citizen.

Image Frank Bruni Credit... Earl Wilson/The New York Times

The details of all of this are fuzzy: he died in 1980, and his wife — my grandmother, also an Italian immigrant — is long gone as well. What remains are their sons’ imperfect memories. But my dad and his brothers know that for a long time, like the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants at the center of our current political debate, Mauro Bruni wasn’t supposed to be here. He was trespassing in the country he came to love more fiercely than the one he’d left, the country in which his children and their children would lead highly productive lives, pay many millions of dollars in taxes over time, and get to be a small part of the decision, as voters, about how we were going to treat his spiritual descendants, who traveled here as he did: without explicit invitations or official authorization but with such ferocious energy, such enormous hope.

More Americans than admit or even know it have roots like mine and are the flowers of illegal immigration. And while that doesn’t diminish our need to make cleareyed and sometimes difficult assessments about how many newcomers we can accommodate and what degree of present forgiveness equals future enticement, it must inform our understanding of the people whose tomorrows are in the balance. Their countries of origin tend to be different from those of the illicit arrivals in my grandfather’s day. Their skin might be darker. But they’re really his kin. My kin. And to see them as some new breed of takers or moochers is to deny history and indulge in a cynical generalization, tinged with an insidious racism, whose targets simply change over time.

The uncertain journeys that wave after wave of immigrants have undertaken and the daily sacrifices that such transplants have made reflect a degree of grit that many of the American-born people I know have never been forced to muster, a magnitude of drive that we don’t possess. It wasn’t necessary for us. Wasn’t make or break. And these qualities have contributed in a mighty and essential way to this country’s dynamism, to its competitiveness.

Coming from southern Europe, Mauro Bruni was considered different from, and less desirable than, an immigrant from northern Europe. Donna Gabaccia, the former director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, noted that in some circles back then, “Italians and others were ‘not quite white’ or ‘in between’ people.” From 1899 to 1924, she said, immigration officials even made distinctions among Italians. Those from the country’s north were more welcomed than those, like Mauro, from its south.