Were there ways for Italian immigrants, like Mexican immigrants, to enter the country illegally back then? Particularly criminals, who would otherwise not be permitted to enter the country when they left Italy?
If so, how would such immigrants appear on Census records today, you would figure that they never even naturalized if they had a criminal record.

I am new here. I have heard of things such as "stowaways". I also heard that most of the times that these rumors are not true. Wish that I knew how to help you.

The term i've always heard was when someone "jumped ship." This is often in reference to merchant marines or commercial sailors simply not getting back on the boat after docking in New York or Boston...etc..

At some point, i believe some of these men were granted some sort of amnesty..... but i'm not clear on the details

European Illegals entered by sea. The most notorious were the Norwegians since many of them walked off their vessels. They did what all illegals do when they get here to legalize. They marry US citizen gals and got to stay here legally or they worked and avoided immigration agents for 7 years and thenwere given legal status after that time by applying for suspension of deportation. Some would pay their congressman to submit a law that would give them a grace period of 1 year before they had to appear for deportation giving them time to find a gal to marry. Some marriages were family arranged, others were not bonafide and after a few years they divorced. Some did not even divorce since they were married in god forsaken "churches' and nobody bothered so they married in church and went to confession.

There were always the occasional stowaways who would be pre arranged to be sheltered onboard ship bysailors and then when they docked given clothes and walked off the gang plank with the crew and into the USA!!!

Criminals and fruadulent documents was another financially sound activity with fraudulent documents of all types. The most prevalent for a long time was fraudulent US citizenship certificates which was whythey had to put the citizenship numbers onthe ships manfiest to establish if they were legally USC since the manifest were inthe hands of the Immigration service.

Thus anyone who presented a US citizenship certificate for a passport would have to have their entry manifests checked for the annotations that their certificate was bonafide.

When WW11 erupted all that was stopped and after the war the old maerriage for pay, phoney tourist visas and thenthe US State Department started using issuing of tourist visas as a way to control foreign governments actions thruout the world. They would tighten and not issue anything until the local governments "corrected their behaviours" or they would turn on the spigots and issue visas like confetti knowing full wellthey would overstay and give the lawyers inthe USA another avenue to reap big bucks to "represent" aliens who became "constituents of Congressman (even though they could not vote!!) and the one year "STOP do not deport" went for big bucks.
=Peter=

I know I'm responding rather late here, but I've only recently learned how prevalent "jumping ship" was amongst some of my male ancestors during the early 20th century. Except for one great-uncle, all of them returned to Italy and never settled in the US permanently. Clearly due to their status, I haven't been able to find any records of their stay.

However, in the case of the aforementioned great-uncle, I did find a document pertaining to his legal re-entry into the US from Canada, which he did in order to attain citizenship. Interestingly, this document does mention some details regarding his initial entry into the country.

My family was illegal in the sence that we bought our papers from the alderman here in chicago. It cost $10 and as the alderman said, saves then the trouble of waiting 5 years and going throught all that hastle. Thankl goodness they belived him, saved me my Italian citizenship