Abstract
Since the end of World War II intercountry adoptions became an integral part of child welfare services in the United States. One of the American organizations more actively involved in this process was the National Catholic Welfare Conference and, since 1951, most part of the cases handled by this organization and by the Catholic Committee for Refugee involved minors from Italy. The massive campaign for adoptions, carried out within the American Catholic community, created a huge demand for Italian children: during Fifties and Sixties, more than 3500 of them were welcomed by US families, mostly of Italian origin, creating a sort of unusual “migration chain”.
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Notes
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- 30.
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Child Welfare League of America, Standards for Adoption Service (New York: Child Welfare League of America, 1960), 60–61.
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- 33.
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- 34.
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- 35.
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- 36.
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- 37.
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- 38.
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- 39.
Consenso all’emigrazione e adozione negli Stati Uniti, s.d., ACS, CRI, Servizio madrinato, busta 88, f. Adozioni.
- 40.
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- 41.
A real “trade of children” was discovered in 1959, when Italian police stopped at Rome airport a group of children under the responsibility of Peter Giambalvo, lawyer and esteemed figure of the Italian–American community in Brooklyn. Giambalvo suffered, in 1961, a trial for facilitation of illegal immigration (from which he was acquitted). “Due bimbi adottati da americani ridati alla madre che non se ne vuole separare,” Il progresso Italo-Americano, July 14, 1959.
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Cassamagnaghi, S. (2022). Emigration for Adoption: The National Catholic Welfare Conference and the Adoption of Italian Children in the United States. In: Mourlane, S., Regnard, C., Martini, M., Brice, C. (eds) Italianness and Migration from the Risorgimento to the 1960s. Palgrave Studies in Migration History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88964-7_10
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