By Tom Deignan

Ken Cuccinelli’s grandfather was born in Hoboken, the son of an immigrant who came to the U.S. through Ellis Island by way of Avellino, in southern Italy’s Campania region.

Maybe that explains why Cuccinelli -- born and raised in Edison and currently serving as Trump’s Acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director -- fancies himself such as expert on immigration that he suggested changes to Emma Lazurus’ famous Statue of Liberty poem.

“Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,” Cuccinelli told CNN, before cryptically adding that the poem “referr[ed] to people coming from Europe.”

The president’s critics pounced, but the Cuccinelli kerfuffle also illustrated an inconvenient truth for Democrats: Donald Trump won the 2016 election - and may well win again in 2020 - because he got so much support from immigrants. Ellis Island immigrants.

Feel free to roll your eyes. It is precisely because so many pundits are dismissive when it comes to past immigrants that folks like Cuccinelli - and Trump - are able to count on support from the offspring of yesterday’s huddled masses.

Right after the 2016 election, political analyst and author George Marlin exhaustively analyzed the “white Catholic vote” - descendents of millions of immigrants from Poland, Ireland, Italy and elsewhere - in the “economically depressed Rustbelt states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.” Trump won all four states; voters we might call “Ellis Island Americans” were crucial to that victory.

Even in true-blue states like New Jersey and New York, Trump performed well on the outer rings of urban centers - north of Newark, south of Union, south Brooklyn, Staten Island - where white ethnics predominate.

In other words, if an anti-immigrant wall had been built in, say, 1900, Hillary Clinton might well be president. That wall would have stopped the flow of millions upon millions of European immigrants who continued to flow into the U.S. during the first two decades of the 20th century, who gave birth to children and grandchildren who ended up providing crucial swing votes to Republicans -- up to and including Donald Trump in 2016. But rather than creatively confront the effect this migration has had, Democrats have stuck to familiar talking points.

“This administration finally admitted what we’ve known all along,” Beto O’Rourke tweeted during the Cuccinelli kerfuffle, “They think the Statue of Liberty only applies to white people.”

Even if you agree with this, a crucial question remains unanswered: Why do so many grandchildren of yesterday’s immigrants support a president who calls immigrants animals, drug dealers and rapists, language that often echoes 1900s anti-Italian, anti-Semitic nativists?

True, it would be no easy task for Democrats to make the case that yesterday’s immigrants have a kinship with today’s. But many white ethnics -- look no further than Cuccinelli -- have convinced themselves that their ancestors were made of sturdier stuff. They were more willing to assimilate, and far too proud to become “public charges.”

Which is hogwash.

A persuasive argument could actually be made that Ellis Island immigrants challenged the American status quo far more forcefully.

Not only did millions of immigrant Jews and Catholics not convert to Protestantism, they built extensive, decidedly unassimilated, cradle-to-grave social systems - and eventually powerful political machines - ensuring the faithful received assistance when necessary, and stayed in touch with their roots. (Even in death, thanks to religiously segregated cemeteries.)

Meanwhile, yesteryear’s ethnic criminal syndicates -- The Black Hand, Murder Inc., right up to La Cosa Nostra -- make MS-13 look downright tame. And don’t forget the tens of thousands of German, Irish, Italian and Jewish supporters of political terrorism in the U.S. -- from the Haymarket Square bombers and the Molly Maguires, to anarchists like Luigi Galleani and Emma Goldman, to name just a few.

But such points are not made easily, or pleasantly, in the heat of an election.

Then, there is, well, the “white” elephant in the room - race.

Democrats are currently in full “shore up the base” mode, meaning it’s not enough to call Cuccinnelli’s comments ill-informed. They must also be racist.

Whatever the merits of that argument, it’s not likely to resonate with, say, an undecided Italian-American voter in Pennsylvania.

And maybe it shouldn’t, as religion was the factor at issue.

As many historians have documented (most recently Daniel Okrent in his best seller The Guarded Gate), not only were Catholic and Jewish immigrants - like Muslims today - considered dangerously un-American and unassimilable because of their “foreign” religion.

It was not even a given that all European immigrants were, in fact, “white.” Not that you’d know this listening to Republicans or Democrats.

If you did, “Rust Belt Catholics” just might hear in Trump speeches the echoes of eugenicists who used junk science to “prove” that yesterday’s immigrants - grandma and grandpa, to many - were “members of the lower races... scarcely human,” as Okrent puts it.

For now, though, Democrats, seem content to dismiss most of these voters as “deplorables,” rather than acknowledge -- crazy thought here -- that there is actually some diversity within the white vote.

So, stick to the talking points. Hope for the best in the Rust Belt in 2020.

What could go wrong?

Tom Deignan, a regular Star-Ledger contributor, has written about history and immigration for The New York Times, Washington Post and National Catholic Reporter. He lives in Woodbridge.

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