Italian immigrants peering through a window on Ellis Island to catch a glimpse of the New World (From Emanuele Criales's acclaimed film "Golden Door").
When President Trump signed his Executive Order, I was preparing for my classes, and happened to be working on a lecture and discussion of Emanuele Crialese’s Golden Door (Nuovomondo – in Italian), a film about historical migration from Italy to the U.S. The story follows the travails of an extremely poor Sicilian family, the Mancusos, embarking on the transatlantic journey to reach the U.S. at the time of Mass Migration; it offers its take on concepts that in these days are omnipresent in the public debate: the image of the U.S. as a land of immigrants; the process of vetting those arriving at its boundaries; and the rejection of those deemed “unfit.” Mutatis mutandis, it’s not hard to extrapolate to a Syrian family searching for a new opportunity after much deprivation and suffering in their home country. For those of us living so close to that very statue that lifts its lamp beside the golden door in the New York Bay, the question about where the new world of the Mancuso family, “America,” is heading has never been more pressing.