Did any of your ancestors arrive through Ellis Island in New York City? Furthermore, do you oppose allowing illegals entry into the United States? Then you might be a bigot, suggests Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In fact, she finds it “ironic” that those same descendants are “branding innocent human beings as illegal.”

Here’s what she tweeted:

Gotta love the rich irony of people who fondly recount stories of how their family’s last names were changed on Ellis Island after their relatives snuck onto a boat escaping some horror now taking fervent anti-immigrant stances & branding innocent human beings as “illegal.”

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 28, 2019

Oh, where to start unpacking this ignorance?

Here’s a response from a woman who is a legal immigrant:

Ellis Island was a LEGAL port of entry, you derp potato.

xoxo a LEGAL immigrant

— Rabid Sparkle Badger (@Nicki_F) June 29, 2019

But of course AOC has her defenders, like this person who uses the History Channel as proof of something, but who still refuses to acknowledge that Ellis Island was a legal port of entry.

Why is that so difficult for these nimrods to understand?

All of these butt hurt conservatives are trying to make AOC seem wrong about what she said regarding Ellis Island, but y’all end up looking dumb in the process. One simple google search would have prevented y’all from looking stupid pic.twitter.com/ccJ2MTpKRf

— Nessa X (@rillywakanda) June 29, 2019

Plus there’s much more to the story of Ellis Island than AOC probably even knows.

Now I’m no expert on Ellis Island, and I’ve never visited the museum there, although I would like to. That’s because my mother’s parents came through Ellis — my grandfather and great-grandfather in 1905, while my grandmother and her sister arrived there around 1910 or 11 — I’m not sure. They were ethnic Germans from Lithuania.

I don’t know their specific stories, since my grandfather died before I was born, my grandmother when I was barely 3. However, their arrival in the US, and their subsequent lives, were hardly the cakewalk AOC and her minions envision.

First of all, they would’ve had to contend with greater scrutiny which resulted from the Immigration Act of 1903. Here are some of the criteria they would’ve met:

• whether able to read or write;
• whether going to join a relative or friend and if so, what relative or friend, and his name and complete address;
• whether ever in prison or almshouse or an institution or hospital for the care and treatment of the insane or supported by charity;
• whether a polygamist . . . an anarchist;
• what is the alien’s condition of health, mental and physical, and whether deformed or crippled, and if so, for how long and from what cause.

And that’s not a complete list, either. They were also asked about their race, nationality, whether they had been promised work, and if they had a ticket to their final destination.

So easy! thinks AOC and her sycophants who have no sense of history.

Sick immigrants could not enter the country. Instead they stayed in a hospital on the island, until they recovered or were sent home.

“Concentration camps,” AOC?

Did you catch what the narrator said in that video? “These immigrants were expected to do physically demanding work.” Indeed. My grandfather and great-grandfather went to Chicago to work in its steel mills, and my great-grandfather later died in a mill accident. A chain holding a pot of molten metal broke and spilled the contents on him. He died instantly. There was no OSHA at the time to conduct safety inspection of factories.

As for those who didn’t pass inspection: they fell into four categories, which included the following:

• Dangerous contagious;
• Insanity and idiocy;
• Loathsome;
• Likely to become a public charge.

Could you imagine such categories today in our easily-offended atmosphere?

Oh, and if you happened to be a stowaway and entered illegally, you got deported, like this tattooed German. And by the way, even though AOC tweets about relatives who “snuck on a boat,” the reality is that rarely happened.

Credit: “Tatooed German Stowaway Deported May, 1911″/New York Public Library/public domain.

But the fact remains: the people who came through Ellis Island came through a legal port of entry, which is something AOC always ignores. Moreover, our immigration laws have not always allowed large numbers of immigrants into the country. During the years my grandparents arrived, Chicago was a growing economic powerhouse, with factories needing willing and healthy immigrants. But those days are gone.

The bottom line is that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants open borders. She wants anyone to be able to come here for whatever reason, their health or allegiance be damned. And if you don’t like it, you’re a racist.

She’s on a roll, folks:

The history of Citizenship in the US is deeply woven with the history of racism. It has been used as the legal enforcer of racism for most of US history.

Citizenship affords power, & that’s why citizenship of African Americans was long denied too – to both slaves & descendants.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 29, 2019

But with these comments, AOC not only insults legal immigrants living now, but those hundreds of thousands who came across the Atlantic to enter Ellis Island legally and become Americans.

Featured image: Immigrant Building, Ellis Island/cropped/Library of Congress/public domain.