Yogi Berra, Pope Francis and the dying dream of American immigration

"I am deeply grateful for your welcome in the name of all Americans. As the son of an immigrant family, I am happy to be a guest in this country, which was largely built by such families."

-- Pope Francis, speaking this morning at the White House with President Obama.

The very first words uttered by Pope Francis on his six-day U.S. odyssey that ends up here in Philadelphia were about immigration. Not that there should be any doubt that -- along with climate change and income inequality -- this is the heart of the holy trinity of issues that really matter to this pontiff right now. He's going to speak a lot more about the immigration issue when he talks in front of Independence Hall on Saturday. He's even slated to meet immigrants -- including some who are undocumented -- during the New York part of the visit.

That's not a surprise. The spiritual artist formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio is himself the child of immigrants who fled from Italy -- and the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini -- for Argentina in the late 1920s, less than a decade before he was born. As pope, he's spoken eloquently of the plight of migrants -- most recently from the fighting in Syria -- and how human decency must be stronger than walls and fences. But at the moment this morning when Pope Francis spoke about how immigrants built the U.S., I happened to be thinking about another son of Italian immigrants...Yogi Berra.

The Hall of Fame catcher and malaprop philosopher-king of America's national pastime died yesterday at the age of 90. Most of the obituaries of a beloved baseball icon focused more on his colorful language -- "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded," he once said of a popular restaurant -- but the truth is that people wouldn't have listened to Berra so much if it wasn't for this: The man knew how to win. Berra played in 17 seasons for the New York Yankees, and, unbelievably, his teams went to the World Series 14 times, winning 10. That wasn't a coincidence -- Berra was a major reason for why that remarkable streak happened. He was a power hitter who bashed 358 home runs on offense and a master of calling a game -- including Don Larson's legendary perfect game in the 1956 World Series -- behind the plate.

Berra's life story is about as all-American as it gets -- including this part of it: To make it there, in New York, he had to overcome the ghettoization and the prejudice -- some of it casual, a lot of it blatant -- that existed against Italian immigrants and their offspring in this country in the early 20th Century. The son of a construction worker and brick layer who came from northern Italy in 1909, Berra was born and grew up in the so-called Hill District of St. Louis, a place that many outsiders instead called "Dago Hill," even though the term "Dago" has always been a slur against Italians. But a lot of non-Italians apparently didn't see the term as as harmful or dismissive -- even when Berra arrived in New York to play for the Yankees, some people -- usually opposing players, for what it's worth -- harassed him as "The Little Dago." Slurs against Italian-Americans were common, including "wop" -- an abbreviation for "without papers." Or, as we might say today, undocumented.

By all accounts, growing up Italian in the Hill District in the 1930s had its pros and cons. Families were strong, and so were neighborhood institutions like the Catholic Church. But kids were routinely hassled by gangs of other youths whenever they wandered from their compact neighborhood. In the schools, children faced what George W. Bush described decades later as "the soft bigotry of low expectations." A social worker who studied The Hill in that era said that many school teachers viewed their Italian-American students as untrustworthy delinquents. Before 1940, only a handful of Italian-Americans in the neighborhood had finished high school; Berra completed just the 8th grade, a fairly common experience.

But sports -- especially baseball (although St. Louis was long considered a soccer hotbed, due to its immigrants) -- became a vehicle for Americanization. So did something else -- World War II. Berra fought for the Navy in the European Theater with bravery and distinction -- a gunner's mate at Utah Beach on D-Day who was wounded a couple of months later in the south of France and was awarded a Purple Heart. Today, as we mourn Berra's passing, his generation of Italian-Americans and their descendants are no longer mocked but viewed as one of this nation's great success stories.

But at some point since then, the American dream of immigration has gone murky. Some things seem little different about American immigrants than in Yogi Berra's youth. Like Yogi's father Pietro Berra, most arrivals from Latin America and elsewhere are willing to take back-breaking jobs. Like researchers found with Italians in St. Louis 75 years ago, Latino immigrants have low crime rates. The bonds of family and church remain strong, too. Even the willingness of the sons of immigrants like Berra to fight for America in World War II reminds us how tens of thousands of green-card holders fought for the U.S. during the Iraq War.

What changed? The desire of "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" has remained strong but clashed with immigration laws that have become much more restrictive than when most arrivals came from Europe. Now, there are 11 million undocumented people inside the United States, and no politician has a clue how to solve the problem. And for a host of reasons -- from newfangled economics to old-fashioned racism -- we have so-called leaders happy to exploit anti-immigrant passions. The rise of Donald Trump -- with no other platform than a giant wall on our southern border and mass, forced deportation of families -- is warning that the American dream of immigration is on its deathbed.

No one will be hurt more than American cities, including Berra's native hometown of St. Louis. "We are not going to grow unless we have immigration," said Charlie Dooley, the former St. Louis County executive, said in 2013, after the city's population shrunk from about 850,000 in 1950, when Berra's Yankees were beating the Phillies' Whiz Kids in the World Series, to just 318,000, But serious efforts to attract more foreign-born people -- the next generation of Pietro Berras -- have been stymied in part by Missouri's drift to the political right.

This is why Pope Francis feels the need to speak out, and why immigration is the cornerstone of his American visit. The death of Berra was another poignant, timely reminder of the stakes, even as hostility seems to be hardening ahead of the 2016 election. As Berra himself once said, it gets late early out there.