How Americans Think About Immigrants is Some Sketchy Fucking Shit

Sometime in the early 1900s, my great grandfather Ignazio Soriano left Acerra, his village in southern Italy, and came to the United States. In the region of Campania, Acerra is a bit northeast of Napoli, equal distance from the city and the volcano Mt Vesuvius. The ancient town known for three things: Hannibal besieged it in 216 BC, the Nazis carried out a massacre of anti-fascists there in 1943, and the Camorra, Campania’s mafia, made it part of the “Triangle of Death” - an illegal dumping ground for garbage and toxic waste - in the 1990s. Today its biggest attractions are a cathedral constructed over a shrine to Hercules and a torture museum.

After great grandpa Iggy landed in New York City, he made his way the Rome, New York, a town about halfway between the big city and Buffalo. Figuring “This is the place,” he hightailed it back to Acerra to get Theresa, his wife. In 1910, now settled in Rome, NY, Theresa gave birth to my great aunt Maria, the first of four children, the third being my grandfather Dominick.

I never met Ignazio and Theresa, and know very little about them other than Iggy was a stern and brutal man. One Christman eve, so says family lore, Iggy went outside and fired off a few shotgun rounds, then announced to the kids that there would be no Christmas because he just killed Santa – thus blessing the Soriano family with a strain of very, very dark humor.

Like his fellow Italian, Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants who emigrated to the US in the early 20^th Century, Iggy was an uneducated laborer and subject to discrimination by previous generations of American immigrants, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants – or WASPs. The roots of the discrimination were threefold. First, the Italians, Irish, Germans, and Jews who came over were poor and considered their homeland’s worst of the worst. Iggy and other Italians came from southern Italy, then referred to as “North Africa” by many northern Italians. Ireland was looked at as England’s “third world” colony. Though Germans had already established themselves in the US, this latest wave of immigrants were “leftovers.” And the Jews were plagued by centuries of antisemitism and stereotyping.

The second cause of discrimination of Italian, Irish, and German immigrants is that all came from predominantly Catholic countries – Satanic lands full of rapists and robbers controlled by a papist anti-Christ. The Jews, of course, were Jewish and “killers of Christ,” to boot. None of this acceptable to the States’ Protestant majority.

To those of you who haven’t done a deep dive into American immigration and history of racism it will be a surprise to learn that the third reason Italians, Irish, and Jews suffered discrimination is because they weren’t “White.” Understand that the idea of race is a political construct not based in science and this makes sense. Know that along with skin color, (master) race theorists considered forehead height, nose size, body structure, and hair and eye color markers of race. Ironically, this kind of body-typing for racial identification was supercharged by the Italians.

In the late 1800, Cesare Lombroso established the “Italian School of Criminology,” a pseudo-scientific bit of bigotry that still plagues us. A Social Darwinist, eugenicist, and medical doctor, Lombroso was turned onto the skull of a dead, southern Italian peasant/robber named Giuseppe Villella. Villella’s criminal specialty was stealing bread, cheese, and goats. For a time, he was considered an “insurrectionist.”

Lombroso’s interest in Villella’s skull came down to one thing, he wanted to prove through science that certain humans were “atavistic,” sub-humans who had more in common with “the beasts” than with their fellow bipods. For Lombroso, these “certain humans” were southern Italians, which include any Italian living south of Rome or on either the islands of Sicily or Sardinia. Northern Italians referred to southerners as Terrone, or people of the dirt because most were peasant farmers. Sicilians and southerners from the “toe” and the bottom of the “heel” were also considered “African.”

So, how did Lombroso scientifically prove that southern Italians were subhuman, thus supercharging northern bigotry towards the south? He measured heads, specifically foreheads, noses, and jawlines, as well as people’s heights and shoulder widths. He also identified “droopy eyes” and “large ears” as signs of racial inferiority. Those who failed Lombroso’s purity test were labeled criminaloid, or born criminals (as opposed to “insane criminals,” who were considered a higher form of human).

Lombroso insisted that because someone was a criminaloid that did not mean that they were an “active criminal,” merely that they were full of criminal impulses that could be triggered by habit, circumstance, accident, or passion. Riding on his atavistic theory of criminality, Lombroso also pioneered a school of psychology based on biological determinism, the idea that people are born sane or insane (and like criminality, insanity is often latent until triggered).

As with his research on criminals, Lombroso’s studies of madness are also cracked. For instance, Lombroso determined that left-handedness leads to insanity, criminality, alcoholism, dementia, and degeneracy. Even crazier, he claimed that tattoos were a physical sign of born criminality and insanity, though no one has ever been born with a tattoo.

While Lombroso should have been considered a crank from the get-go, he was honored as a “Man of Genius,” also the title of one of his books. His work was furthered by fellow Italians Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo, and used in both criminology and politics. In Europe and abroad, immigrants were classified using Lombroso research. In the United States, southern Italians, like my great grandfather Ignazio, were pushed into ethnic ghettos (as were the Irish, Germans, Jews, and other “non-white” European immigrants) based on their physical features, as well as what part of the globe they came from.

Though Lombroso’s theories have been debunked and laws influenced by them struck down and changed, the cultural influence of the Italian School remains with us in both “innocent” stereotypes and rank bigotry. Television and film still typecast southern Italian and Sicilian looking people as criminals. The swarthy man is not to be trusted, especially with women, and that swarthiness is not limited to Italians. The swarthy man also includes other southern Europeans, Arabs, and Latin Americans – all the physical embodiment of the “bad guy” in entertainment and political propaganda.

Lombroso is alive and well in MAGA. Donald Trump’s language about immigrants and criminality is straight rip from the Italian School, albeit, stripped of its scientific dressing. Trump’s insistence that tattoos are a sure sign of criminality is an echo of Lombroso. His (and Stephen Miller’s) characterization of immigration as an invasion is lifted from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who based his immigration and social policies on Lombroso’s teachings.

Meanwhile, Italian, Irish, German, and Jewish Americans have become “white,” not quite equal to the WASP (in the WASP’s mind) and still subject to gross stereotypes, but now part of the mainstream, with access to power structure. When Irish Americans (and WASPs) wave Irish flags on St Patrick’s Day no one screams “Invasion!” New York City’s Little Italy and San Francisco’s North Beach are not considered “occupied zones.” White America recognizes whiteness as its own, no matter that what is now “white” was once considered foreign and subhuman sole because a people had “low brows” and were swarthy.

Or, look at it this way: Just one-hundred years ago, Ignazio Soriano was Trump’s Latin American. Iggy was “Mafia” (or, using today’s boogieman, MS13). Iggy was “dull witted” yet possessed “criminal cunning.” A “subhuman,” he was not to be trusted around women, booze, or treasure. Though Iggy worked hard, menial jobs that WASPs refused to do, he was a “lazy drag” on the system. Exiled to ethnic enclaves like Rome, New York by the white power structure, Iggy “refused” to integrate or learn English. Any sign of ethic pride shown by Ig and fellow Italian immigrants was treason to America.

And, even when, on July 21, 1925, Ignazio Soriano became an American citizen, swearing off any allegiance to Italy, its king, and the pope, he was not and never was seen as a true American by those in power or the white mainstream. He was an immigrant and his children and grandchildren were marked as immigrants. It wasn’t until his great grandchildren - me and my brother Tim - were born that the Soriano’s became white Americans in the minds of the mainstream. That’s some sketchy fucking shit if you ask me.