By Effie Caldarola | Catholic News Service

During July, some of our family traveled out to rural Nebraska to a little graveyard on a hill where my father and his family are buried.

The occasion was the 100th anniversary of my dad's birth. He was born in a farmhouse a few miles north of the Platte River on a hot day in July 1914. A few days earlier, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo. That violence would signal events that culminated in the cataclysm of World War I and changed the direction of history.

But on the day of Dad's birth, with the prairie wind blowing the fields of corn, my grandparents were probably paying little heed to whatever "world news" managed to make its way to their home.

Today, with 24-hour news clamoring around us, I'm not sure we're much more mindful of the consequences of events than our peers of the early 20th century.

The news is yammering away about immigration right now, about "unaccompanied minors." But what are we hearing?

It's impossible to journey to our family graveyard, Kelly Hill, without feeling a deep kinship with immigrants.

Kelly Hill's official name is St. Patrick's Cemetery, the resting place for the Irish-Americans who populated this part of the prairie. The little churches Kelly Hill served are now long gone.

You can ask anyone in my family, and they'll agree that there's something otherworldly about Kelly Hill. People often think of Nebraska, if they've driven through it on the interstate, as flat and monotonous. But if you drive the dusty gravel roads that take you to Kelly Hill, you stand high above a sweeping vista from which miles of verdant farmland extend as far as the eye can see.

The horizon, at dusk when we visited, was misty and a shade of somber blue. While we were there, walking through the wet grass and avoiding the prairie dog holes, we never once saw another vehicle or even the telltale clouds of dust that herald a distant traveler. All was peaceful and still.

Immigration? The old Irish used to put up impressive gravestones to herald their success in the new land. Feeling ties to ancient roots, however, they engraved not just their country of birth, but the Irish county from which they hailed.

My father's grandfather died a couple of years before Dad was born. Family lore offers different stories of his immigration saga, but on this much all sources agree: He came to the U.S. when he was about 12, from County Galway, having seen his parents die in the famine that killed millions and sent millions more into exile.

Did someone let him tag along on this perilous journey? Did he have papers? I doubt it. Years later, he signed his last will and testament with an "x."

There was Ellis Island and other ports of entry where people were quarantined and sometimes held back. But we generally accepted the tired, poor, huddled masses. As I stood before his great, gray monument, it struck me: My great-grandfather was probably an unaccompanied minor. He was no less than any poor little kid showing up on the border today, part of the wretched refuse of a foreign shore.

It's the American story. It's our story.

As a nation, we need controls on immigration. We need rules. But that's why we need Congress to quit playing politics and face their responsibility to legislate. We must join with the U.S. Catholic bishops who advocate for immigration reform. We must demand action. And first and foremost, as Christians, we must experience and act on compassion.