Americans remain sharply divided in the run-up to the presidential election next month. One issue raised repeatedly during this campaign is immigration, and what it means to be an American.
This week we’re getting answers to that question from voters across the country. Rhode Island Public Radio spoke with two state lawmakers, who both come from immigrant families. One is a Republican, and the other is a Democrat.
Anthony Giarrusso runs the jewelry manufacturing company A G & G in Johnston with his four brothers. They started it in 1986, and the company’s still going strong despite the shrinking of Rhode Island’s jewelry industry.
“So when you think about an American dream, here we are, five boys from another country, that have been responsible for millions and millions of dollars in the US economy,” Giarrusso said. “I mean, I can’t tell you after 30 years of business, how many hundreds of thousands of paychecks we’ve signed and how much business we’ve done with local businesses around here.”Listen to the audio version of this story in which Reps. Anthony Giarrusso and Shelby Maldonado share their thoughts about what it means to be an American in a stormy election year.
A G & G designs and manufactures jewelry for national retailers like Nordstrom, JCPenney, Kohls, and Dillard’s. Not bad for a kid who emigrated from Italy to Rhode Island with his parents when he was just 4 years old. Giarrusso remembers how his father worked hard and saved money.
“You know, my father was always a great saver,” he said. “If he made a dollar, he seemingly saved $2. So he saved enough money from his jobs that he was working like a mule and within 9 months, he had enough to buy a house, and he bought that house, he paid cash for it, I believe it was like $4,500.”
That house where Giarrusso grew up was on Holden Street in Providence – not far from the Statehouse. That’s worth noting since Giarrusso now represents East Greenwich as a Republican state representative.
Despite his success in business and politics, Giarrusso is concerned about the future. He said America has not been this divided since the 1970s. Giarrusso believes the Black Lives Matter movement shows a lack of respect for law enforcement. He’s worried about foreign terrorists. And he thinks immigrants are less willing to assimilate the way his family did.
“I think it used to be extremely important to come here and learn the US, the customs, the lifestyle and the language. That’s paramount,” Giarrusso said. “And today it doesn’t really seem like it’s all of that. When we came here, we couldn’t press two to continue in Italian.”
Giarrusso plans to vote for Republican Donald Trump for president, although Trump wasn’t his first choice. Giarrusso says that for him being an American means having a strong sense of pride in the country: “I can’t think of anyone more patriotic than my parents or my brothers, so I’ve always had great value in being an America and what America means to me and my family – it really is the land of opportunity. And when I see things are not going great, it breaks my heart, and I hope that it does get back on track sooner rather than later.”
A few towns away from Giarrusso’s business in Johnston, I talked with Democratic state Rep. Shelby Maldonado in Central Falls. We met over breakfast at Georgia’s Restaurant on Dexter Street.
Maldonado is a first-generation Rhode Islander. Her mother emigrated from Guatemala when she was in her early 20s. Maldonado’s mother went on to become a nursing assistant and sent enough money back to relatives to help them start a market in Guatemala.
“She’s a strong woman,” Maldonado said. “I’m not just saying that because she’s my mother. Just her story of how she was able to get here and why she stayed in America – because she wanted a different opportunity for her life and for even her family that she was leaving behind. She understood that.”
After graduating from URI, Sheldby Maldonado served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in a village in Zambia without running water. That experience still shapes her outlook.
“They taught me so much,” she said. “I mean, what it means just to be a neighbor, to forgive and to share what it is you have, even if it’s very little, you still share it, because it means a lot to a community for you to do that.”
In 2014, Maldonado became the first Guatemalan-American elected to public office in Rhode Island when she won a seat as a state rep. She says being an American gives her an appreciation for the freedom and sense of opportunity that she enjoys.
“It is an honor, to be honest – it deserves that type of term – because it’s a privilege for me to be able to sit here with you,” Maldonado said, “and share my story, and be able to speak about my beliefs, and not be sort of discriminated against in any way, and that’s so key.”
Maldonado works as the communications director for Local 51, Plumbers and Pipefitters. Unlike her Republican House colleague Rep. Giarrusso, she said the Black Lives Matter movement is shining a light on overlooked concerns about violence by police. Maldonado supports Hillary Clinton and said she’s nervous about Donald Trump: “A lot of people are a little bit fearful about what the outcome could be if it were not Hillary. But for me, she’s someone that I feel is going to move this country forward in the best way she can.”
It doesn’t seem surprising to find differences between Democratic Rep Maldonado and the Republican lawmaker we heard from earlier, Anthony Giarrusso.
Yet the two lawmakers also share quite a bit in common, including pride in the hard work their parents did to make it in this country. As we edge closer to an unusual presidential election, both lawmakers say Americans need to listen more to each other to move the country past its current divisions.
