One story of why italians are refered to as WOPS is that around the turn of the century when there was a large influx of italians entering United States they had to be processed at Ellis Island of the coast of New York City. Many of these new arrivals had no birth certificates or citizenship papers from Italy because the Italian government did not issue them to people outside of the larger cities. The people that had no official documents from the italian government were issued american papers with very large letters on them "W O P" (WITHOUT OFFICIAL PAPERS)