Family going back 2-4 generations is from a coal mining area, up until my parents generation.
The Welsh part was coal miners, probably back in Wales too. The other side I don't know.

Grandparents: Paternal Grandfather, coal mine for at least part of it. Maternal Grandmother eventually owned a bar (probably the second largest industry in any coal town) and small farm.

Parents: Mother worked with phone company then clothes factory. Father was military, then factory, then repair shop in factory. I remember the story of him helping throw railroad cars into the river, to try to plug up the hole when the mine dug too close. It didn't work.

Way back, it would be sustenance farming, indentured servant, or slave, most likely. There are tobacco farmers, coal miners, a police officer, a shop keeper, and my grandparents worked in a dry-cleaners. They were the first people in their family to go to school - at all.They had an 8th grade education. We were the first generation to graduate from high school and college, although it took us a while.

For our children, college is a given, but they are the first generation where this is true.,

My maternal family came here from Ireland. Like most Irish immigrants to big cities, my grandfather got a patronage job - this one with the railroad. He was a conductor on the commuter trains in Chicago. He and my grandmother raised four children on a conductor's wages in a small apartment outside Chicago. All four of the children went on to live a better life than their parents did.

Was it worth it to him to be here? He thought so. He watched his children pursue opportunities that were not available to them in Ireland, followed the White Sox, drank the one Old Style a night my grandmother would allow, and was generally happy.

This is where we are folks: If you defend low-skill immigrants who come to US and work hard (at lower pay because lower skilled), you're POS, not the exclusionists. Dude, my grandparents were low-skill immigrants, I was a low-skill immigrant. They build skills, get more money. ~ Nick Gillespie

My grandparents were low-skill immigrants. But the gap between the skills they had and the ones they needed was small. Today, that gap is much larger, and much harder to traverse.

Costs, especially for college, have skyrocketed. Read old biographies and you'll find people putting themselves through Harvard as typists, tutors, or editors. Try doing that today.

The complexity of the things non-college immigrants used to be hired to work on has risen as well. When I was young, I did almost all of my own engine repairs. I don't even know what to look for under the hood anymore. And don't try to eyeball a measurement on an engine anymore either; today's tolerances are much tighter and less-forgiving.

There are still jobs low-skill immigrants can do here. But to pretend that those jobs are pathways to high-skill, well-paying jobs is fantasy.

Perhaps, for them, living here as a low-skill employee is preferable to living in their old countries as medium- or even high-skill employees. Or, perhaps the opportunities open to their children here make it worthwhile. That's up to them.

But we have to ask ourselves whether we're doing a Third World immigrant any favors dumping him into a First World economy and saying "have at it."

There are still jobs low-skill immigrants can do here. But to pretend that those jobs are pathways to high-skill, well-paying jobs is fantasy.

That also applies to third-world nations too. Or at least here in Murderland.

For the better part of the 20th century the major corporations/institutions -Chiquita brands, Zamorano- were run by Americans who back then valued hard work and good labor ethics.

Once they left and the locals were in charge? Everything went downhill, and ever since it has become a cesspool of nepotism.

Once they left and the locals were in charge? Everything went downhill, and ever since it has become a cesspool of nepotism. ~ Sixclaws at July 2, 2018 9:16 AM

I worked for an international freight expediter and nepotism was a major problem for us in our Mexican and Central American offices.

Once one person in the family got a job, they were expected to get other family members hired on. No one expected that the family members would work, just get a seat on the gravy train.

So, we'd have a local manager running the office and three or four workers on staff, all of who did nothing all day. The manager knew they did nothing, but he couldn't go home to Mom and tell her he fired Cousin Joey.

Were it not for the Second World War and the GI Bill, my dad and uncles, all engineers and one Physicist, would never have gotten a shot at college.

Dad's dad raised chickens and drove the school bus. Mom's dad was a laborer, who built the family house by himself, including digging the basement by hand.

In the Great War, WWI for those who don't know, Dad's dad shovelled coal on a navy cruiser. Mom's dad got to see the Europe, over the barrel of a rifle. I think it was actually 1-2 generations before my grandparents that came from the old countries.

Well, on Dad's side there was a long tradition of men being circuit preachers until great-grandpa decided the moonshine business paid better.

On Mom's side great-grandpa and grandpa were chauffeurs for low-level Chicago gangsters. At some point grandma made grandpa quit and go to work in the steel mills in Hammond--something to do with a bullet hole in his cap brim.

I have no problem with low-skill immigrants. The hispanics in my area are doing well in the building trades: Hernandez painting, Guerro roofers etc. But let's not conflate immigrant with illegal immigrant. Every country on Earth has always reserved the right to control their borders. Even way back when Rome lost the ability to do so and Germans flooded over the Rhine it did not turn out well for Rome (perhaps the Germans should learn their own history).

I think there is another lesson here: America has always been about opportunity. That is why people come here, including the immigrants I know. But many gov policies (restrictions on food trucks, cutting hair, opening a shop, min wage, on and on) are making it harder to move up than it used to be.

My great-grandpa on dad's side was a stone cutter in the summer, and a coal miner in the winter. He left Imperial Germany from very west Germany with his 10 year old son, my grandpa.

I presume they went Hamburg->NYC. Very nearly got sent home, until immigration decided that GGP's cough was black lung, not TB. Had to be sponsored by someone in the USA. Moved to Chicago where the sponsors lived. Picked up work on the Great Northern Railroad, and went as far as eastern South Dakota. Had saved enough money to start a farm, so quit the railroad. Probably bought the land from the railroad. Died in 1892 from the aforementioned black lung, aged 57.

On Mom's side, I'm not sure of the time of the arrival, but it was earlier, probably in the 1840s from Ireland/Scotland. They came to Pittsburgh, so I'm pretty sure they were steel workers or in a related industry. At least one relative from that side fought in the Civil War.

But many gov policies (restrictions on food trucks, cutting hair, opening a shop, min wage, on and on) are making it harder to move up than it used to be.

Rent seekers gotta seek rent. Now, perhaps you've seen or heard about the folks who called the cops on the kids accidentally mowing on the wrong side of the property line:

https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2018/06/30/neighbor-calls-cops-on-kid-mowing-lawns/

Reggie said he’s trying to save the money he earns to buy new equipment and grow his business.

That's great, kid. Did you know you need a business license? insurance? and you have to pay your employees minimum wage? do withholding on their income taxes and social security? workers comp? probably exempt from unemployment taxes, as that's a seasonal job.

And don't tell me he's just a kid and should be exempt. That's just age-dependent crony capitalism - he's competing directly with other businesses in the same space. We like you, therefore we will give you a competitive edge.

Father in geophysics. Grandfather in geology. Beyond that there are doctors and there are drunks but there is a strong strain of nerdery in my family tree.

I'm not a fan of large scale immigration right now. There are over 100 million people who could be working in the US but currently aren't. Now I recognize that there are good reasons and bad reasons to not work. If you are independently wealthy then there really isn't much cause to work. But that isn't the case for all 100 million of those people.

In addition labor participation and unemployment vary greatly based on income. People in the lowest income brackets were the hardest hit during the Obama years. Now that the economy is finally picking up and those people are finding jobs you want to bring in a lot of competition for them and drive them back out of the workforce?

On my Mom's side, great grand parents where frontier missionaries sent from Europe - both sets and I am told that it was quite the county scandal that my grand parents got together as they were from different religious denominations.

On father's side we know one set were farmers that lived their whole lives in Montana except for a few short (few years each) attempts at farming in Washington State. Great grandma also worked in the school some. Farther back we have several trades men and even a college professor.

On my father's other side little is known. We know they also farmed in Washington State and Montana some as well as well Ohio or some where in that area.

Reason has gone off the rails in its zeal for open borders. For some reason, they have forgotten the maxim about how you can't have a social welfare state with open borders.

My father's ancestors were Kentucky hillbillies. Early in the 20th century, they relocated to Gadsden, Alabama to get mill jobs. My grandfather on that side worked his entire adult life in a cotton mill. Like MarkD said, my dad and several of his brothers went to college on the GI Bill. My dad got a degree in electrical engineering and then wound up working on the Saturn moon rocket program.

I don't know as much about my mom's background. I know she had one branch of her family who were middle class; she had a great-grandfather who owned a grocery store. But there's also another branch of the family that's pretty much white trash. Her father left them some money when he died (at age 55, of COPD from a lifetime of heavy smoking), but before that, he had gotten the family through the Great Depression by wheeling and dealing in a bunch of different lines of business, some of which were not strictly legal (bootlegging). From what I understand, his main thing was buying broken-down cars, getting them running again, and then selling them to people who needed basic transportation.

My ex-wife's family were Christ-punchers from Bavaria. They took any work they could when they arrived here: slapping salvationists, kicking creationists, wrestling greased Calvinists, that sort of thing.

Eventually the militia was formed, the family joined up and made steady work of eye-gouging obnoxious Royalists.

Not the most fun job, but the income was steady for a few months, and it set the tone of her family for generations to come.

My Mom came to America from Switzerland when she married my Dad.

My Dad's paternal like was kicked out of Ireland for supporting King James and sent to Barbados in chains for forced servitude. They ended up in Baltimore. Later generations fought in the against the Brits again in the Revolution, this time with more success. They headed "west" to Tennessee where they built a fort and fought the Cherokee and got a mountain (by American east coast standards) named after them. They lived in the hills, chaplained in the Civil War (losing side). They eventually migrated out of their Cove due to public works projects and the rest of the area becoming a national park and lived in various parts of Appalachia.

Dad did foreign study in Europe where he met my Mom at a German language program in Austria. He went to Vietnam, came back, married Maman in Geneva, was stationed in Taiwan, then they both got scholarships at different Boston area schools and moved there where they settled and lived happily ever after.

There are other family lines that came over earlier but basically if ancestry.com is to believed they were colonists and indentured servants (and a slave or two, which I glean from ancestry.com) who stuck around in the South and Appalachia. Some were French or German but most were English Irish and Scottish.