Often we hear that today’s immigrants are different. We are told that Ellis Island’s immigrants were hard-working people willing to assimilate to American ways. On the other hand, today’s immigrants are cast as criminals who will end American culture as we know it. But even a cursory study of the Ellis Island period shows us that not only were many Americans then concerned about crime and cultural change as a result of immigration, they had good reason to be.
Two infamous immigrants who came through Ellis Island would help to create the most powerful criminal enterprise in the history of the United States. Italian Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Jew Meyer Lansky were essential to the birth of the mafia Commission, a national network of criminal syndicates. The Commission and its borgatas, or families, used small armies of immigrant soldiers to build a violent and lucrative empire that authorities for decades were unable to stop.
By the early 1980s, however, another descendant of Italy, Rudolph Giuliani, would use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act to take down that very Commission. What becomes quickly obvious is that for all the murder, theft, and corruption that the Italian mafia engaged in, the net benefit of Italian immigration to our country far outweighs it. It was, in fact, a very small price to pay.
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