Meet the woman confronting public figures with their immigrant histories

JANUARY 17, 2018

Jennifer Mendelsohn uses census records and ship manifests to put anti-immigrant hypocrisy on blast with #resistancegenealogy

Earlier this month, White House Director of Social Media Dan Scavino Jr. tweeted out an enthusiastic call to end “chain migration.” ... Also known as family-based migration—or, in the parlance of our immigration system, family reunification—chain migration is the common-sense process by which immigrants to the U.S. gradually bring their families over to join them. It’s as old as the Mayflower and a favorite buzzword of the Trump administration, typically followed by exclamation points and fear mongering over the very bad hombres moving to our fair land.

Scavino had no idea that Jennifer Mendelsohn was watching. ... “So Dan,” Mendelsohn wrote on Twitter. “Let’s say Victor Scavino arrives from Canelli, Italy in 1904, then brother Hector in 1905, brother Gildo in 1912, sister Esther in 1913, & sister Clotilde and their father Giuseppe in 1916, and they live together in NY. Do you think that would count as chain migration?”

A Baltimore-based freelance journalist, Mendelsohn is a passionate genealogist and the creator of #resistancegenealogy, viral Twitter burns in which she confronts anti-immigration public figures with their own family histories. The ancestors she finds often have plenty in common with the immigrants they’re now condemning.
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What’s been the most interesting thing you’ve uncovered so far?

I guess the one that got really big was Tomi Lahren from Fox News. That one was almost too good to be true. … What was sort of puzzling was the records connected to her great-great-grandfather. One popped up in a database on Ancestry that usually indicates there’s some sort of irregularity with the naturalization. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything sinister. When I looked at it, it said prosecuted for forging his [naturalization] papers. So I ordered the grand jury indictment from the national archives, and it’s quite a document. He was indicted by the grand jury; he was acquitted by the trial jury. So he was allowed to stay and become a citizen. ... People in genealogical glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and we’re all in genealogical glass houses metaphorically speaking.