Where is ICE when you need them?
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) told supporters this week that he is an undocumented immigrant.
Cuomo: I’m an Italian-American, I came from poor Italian-Americans who came here. You know what they called Italian-Americans back in the day? They called them wops. You know what wop stood for? Without papers. I’m undocumented.
Then there’s this…
A TGP reader AK sent this in — WOP does not come from an acronym “without passport.”
Wop‘s first known use was in the United States in 1908, and that it originates from the Southern Italian dialectal term guappo, roughly meaning thug, pimp, or swaggerer, derived from the Spanish term guapo, meaning handsome. One false etymology or backronym of wop is that it is an acronym for “without passport” or “without papers”, implying that Italian immigrants entered the U.S. as undocumented or illegal immigrants. The term has nothing to do with immigration documents, as these were not required by U.S. immigration officers until 1918.
