Quote Originally Posted by cajunscot View Post
For many immigrants, maintaining ties to the old country was a safety valve in a country where the "native Americans" wanted nothing to do with them.
A significant proportion of European immigrants to the US up through the last century left their "homelands" for reasons that their native country, to use your words, wanted nothing to do with them. It was not uncommon for entire tribes (ethnic minority communities, families, churches, sects) to move leaving only the most infirm behind. Migration for many was an imperative driven by the want of survival.
Sure many of these communities nurtured feelings and sentimentalities of a "homeland" but much was little more than a projection of what never was. It was not terribly uncommon for people to create personal family histories of life before migration that never held true. Its a natural human response. Few would want to clearly acknowledge the unwantedness experienced. Few would want to recall the personal pain of their persecution or ill treatment. These memories, like all memories of pain, get suppressed and often replaced with stronger memories of more pleasant events to even fictive projections of want (dreams). In stories and recollections people also want to look good. Few want to recall much less pass on to posterity stories of their experiences at extremes of the human ill-condition where they behaved in manners considered from a perspective of a civil society, out of the context, as ghastly (including even cannibalism, prostitution, murder and extortion).
Those families that came to find financial success in America, of course, where often warmly invited to increase contacts with the "homeland" but it was the cash and dollars that was the true welcome guest.