By the time my 18-year-old grandmother set off alone on a grueling ocean voyage to America from Sačurov in eastern Slovakia, the United States had severely limited the number of people from eastern and southern Europe who could enter the country. It was at the height of the eugenics movement and growing nativism in the U.S. after WWI. Congress had passed increasingly restrictive immigration laws that put a new emphasis on “desirables” and “undesirables” in deciding who was allowed to emigrate from where.
