The Erdmans: deport the illegals, except for Mom!
Jacob Siegfried and his wife Eva, and a family of one boy, also named Jacob, and several girls, emigrated to the US through Texas, from Saratov, on the Volga River, in 1908. Though they came from Russia, they spoke German. They settled in Logan Township, just outside Enid, Oklahoma. Volga Germans had been encouraged to immigrate to Russia by Catherine the Great, in the hopes of civilizing her still mostly barbarous country, and remained until Tsar Nicholas started to revoke their privileges. Then many of them came here.
During WWI, they were driven out. Germans were not welcome in much of the United States. So they made the long trek up to Saskatchewan, where there was a community of Volga Germans. We have record of Jacob and family crossing the border legally in August 1918.
Since there was wartime internment of German immigrants in Canada, it's a little unclear why Saskatoon was a safe haven for them. Possibly it was just remote from the nonsense happening in Ontario. Or possibly the 'Russian' on their documents bamboozled the Canadians.
Another family, the Ebels, also came to the United States from Saratov. They settled in Salina Kansas, where their daughter Olinda was born in 1904. They also moved to Saskatchewan, in 1914, although it's unlikely this was a result of hostility; the war, in 1914, was a purely European thing. It was far more likely they left Kansas because their irregular family structure, which featured a female-to-male transgender head of household, became common knowledge. More about that anon.
Anyway, Jacob junior, who was now Jake and had moved away from home, met Olinda. They married in 1924, and had three children in Canada, one named Margaret. In 1929 they decided to move back to the US, to Morrill County, Nebraska. We don't know when exactly, because there are no documents, and therefore no evidence they reentered the US legally. Jake may have been under the impression that having been legally admitted to the US once, he could re-enter again without paperwork, after 13 years in Canada. It ain't so (I had to be very careful on my postdoc in Germany not to lose my green card).
But these were poor farmers with eighth-grade educations; how could they be expected to be familiar with the arcana of the 1924 Immigration Act? In fact, Olinda was lucky; until 1922, she would have lost her US citizenship simply by marrying an alien husband.
They might not have been able to immigrate legally. Reading the racist 1924 Act, Volga Germans would have been considered Eastern Europeans, and therefore subject to a much stricter quota than Germans from Germany. On the other hand they were the husband and children of a US citizen, so the 'chain-migration' thang was working for them.
They probably just drove a farm truck across the vast open northern border, thinking nothing of it. I myself crossed the Canadian border accidentally, from North Dakota to Manitoba, in 2007. Then I looked at the GPS, which read 49° 00' 02", said 'oops!', and turned back south.
Jake and his three oldest kids are still listed as aliens on the 1940 census. As far as I know, they died illegal aliens, although likely no one knew. Maybe not even them.
In any case, happy ending. Margaret met a nice man called Mike, also descended from Volga Germans, but born in the US, and married him in 1946. And in 1949, the young couple had a son, whom they christened Henry Steven. He now calls himself Steve Erdman, and he's a Nebraska Senator, succeeding his son, Phil Erdman, who was also a Nebraska Senator, and a rabid anti-immigration bigot.
false. She said she entered in late 1931, but it's clear from the 1930 census they were already here in 1929.
Since she's now dead, Margaret's immmigration status is somewhat of a moot point, except for the cosmic irony that the son and grandson of an illegal immigrant, who was naturalized under false pretenses, are vociferous immigration opponents.
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