“Springfield was a refuge”

John Michael Spinelli of Gahanna, Ohio penned an op-ed in the Washington Post about his family’s experience immigrating to Springfield.

My mother and father were born in Italy and immigrated to America as minors before 1925, when America turned off the spigot to mass migration. They married and started a successful family florist business in Springfield, Ohio, once known as “the Rose City,” where where two older brothers and I were born and raised.

My father became a Mason and enjoyed a great measure of respectability as a hardworking small-business man, even as many Italians experienced discrimination, especially before and during World War II. Even so, Springfield was a welcoming city to them. At the time, when my father returned to his hometown of San Marco in Lamis to see old friends and show off his prosperity, Italian authorities wanted to conscript him into the army Benito Mussolini was assembling. He escaped by showing his American passport.

These scurrilous stories propelled by former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, dishonor all the true stories of immigrants present and past who, like my parents, came to a new country and a small but accepting city like Springfield to make a better life for themselves and their families.

The hurtful and xenophobic lies about Springfield only fortify my support for Springfield’s Haitian residents and my contempt for mean and spiteful people who apparently have no sense of history regarding the waves of immigrants who made America, despite its many flaws and shortcomings, the envy of the world. No other nation has so many immigrants, from so many places, yearning to breathe and live freely, lined up to get in, so that they, like Michael and Jane Spinelli before them, can pursue a happiness found only here.