Immigration

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Certain parts of the United States have recently felt a localized impact approximating that of the New Immigration. First on the list would be southern Florida, which received the 125,000 Cuban and Haitian "special entrants" in the course of one year; second, Los Angeles; and third, cities along the Mexican border, such as Laredo and Del Rio, where the human ripples from Mexico's economic catastrophe first touched the United States.

But through most of the country, the immigration of the past ten years has meant a gradual change in proportions, rather than the introduction of startlingly different populations that was so troubling early in the century. Most Asian immigrants are concentrated in the western states, with nearly a third of the nation's total in California alone. Although Asians are increasingly numerous in California, they have been an evident part of the state's population since the mid-nineteenth century, when Chinese contract laborers were admitted to work on the railroads. Although Latin American immigrants now also congregate in Chicago, Boston, New York, and other northern cities, the greatest numbers of them have settled in the same southwestern states where Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are part of the traditional ethnic mix. Neither the Asian nor the Mexican ethnic group has always been welcomed by the white majorities in these areas—the Chinese were the targets of exclusionary laws in the nineteenth century—but they have been there through the years, and their presence presumably blunts the shock effect of additional immigration.

In short, historical comparison suggests that today's immigration should not seem as threatening as the New Immigration did. The country was able to overcome that great dislocation; will it not overcome this one? There is an important qualifier to the confident assumption that it will, however. Precisely because the warnings issued by the racial theorists were taken seriously, the New Immigration came to an abrupt halt. With the passage of the national-origins law of 1924, the ethnic balance of the American population was supposed to be preserved. With the coming of the Depression, immigration ceased to be an issue at all; during the 1930s, more people left the United States than entered it. For more than forty years, until the immigration reforms of 1966, the U.S. had what Roger Conner, of FAIR, calls a "breathing space." The cycles of the assimilative process were able to run undisturbed for more than a generation, slowly bringing the masses of New Immigrants into American culture.

Now there is no let-up in sight. Therefore, if there were signs that the assimilative process was breaking down— that immigrants were not learning English, that they could not participate successfully in economic and political life—there would be grounds for fearing that the society could not bear the strain of further immigration. But if the immigrants are, as all evidence indicates, learning the national language, respecting the rules of political participation, and proving victorious in the economic arena, then precisely what threat do they pose? For better and for worse, America has always been an open, fluid, commercial culture. It has embraced those willing to play the game its way, and today's immigrants are as willing to do so as any of their predecessors have been.

What of the embedded, "ineradicable" cultural differences that today's immigrants may introduce? To judge them we must leave the realm of evidence and enter that of faith. Either you believe that American society, which has absorbed and adjusted to so much, will be overpowered by this new challenge, or you do not. My own, purely anecdotal impression, shaped by stories like those of the Nguyens and their Mexican and Korean and Haitian counterparts, is that American culture will prove resilient. "I certainly don't think the shift from Poles and Slavs to Koreans and Vietnamese is all that significant," the historian Stephan Thernstrom, of Harvard, told Barry Siegel, of the Los Angeles Times, last December. "That's not to say there are no strains, but nothing now portends what the country went through in the mid-nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century."

We are left, then, with the nasty question of how much resistance to immigration arises merely from color prejudice. Some of it undoubtedly does. This is an atavistic emotion, part of American history and perhaps even of human nature. But it is ugly and ignoble, and it deserves no reflection in American law.

At the bottom of all fear of strangers, especially those of a different color, is the idea that they will remain a culture apart, separated by race and behavior and aspirations from the surrounding society. The most sobering impression left by my exposure to today's immigrants—not at all what I started out looking for— is the reminder that such a culture already exists, and it is not made of those new to our shores.

Immigrants rarely get their start in the middle-class enclaves and the high-rent districts. When they move to a city, they settle in today's equivalents of New York's Lower East Side. In most cities, that means that Cubans and Vietnamese are moving into areas that for at least a generation have been home to American blacks. There they do their best to establish themselves. Predominantly black areas of Long Beach, for example, are becoming centers for Cambodian and Vietnamese merchants, doctors, and dentists. From such proximity, poisonous relations have grown.

To many American blacks, it seems obvious that the immigrants, so new to the country, have been more warmly treated than the blacks, who have been here all along. Marvin Dunn, a black psychologist at Florida International University, in Miami, says, "When the first wave of Cubans moved in, there was a deep resentment at all the financial assistance and resettlement aid the government was giving them, at the expense of social programs for people who had been living here. Now there is resentment at a system that would prefer to hire Haitians because they work more cheaply and complain less." Many blacks also point out that the jobs as porters, maids, parking-lot attendants, and hotel workers which their teenagers might otherwise hold are being filled by immigrants.

For their part, Dunn says, "The Haitians have a sense that we complain too much, that our children are out of control, that we don't do enough for ourselves." From Asian refugees, from Cubans, from black-skinned immigrants from the Caribbean, I heard blunt, ungenerous assessments of the black Americans among whom they lived. The contrast is probably sharpest in Miami, where, compared with American blacks, one immigrant group, the Cubans, is economically so successful, and another, the Haitians, seems better loved by the Anglo and Cuban communities, despite its dark skin. The Haitians may live four to a room in ramshackle boarding houses; they may have difficulty finding work, except on the labor gangs in central Florida's vegetable-growing regions. Still, they seem hopeful, determined, convinced that they can make a better life for themselves. "These Haitian families are very hardworking, moonlighting two or three jobs," said a white woman who coordinates Creole bilingual education at a heavily Haitian school. "They have a lot of confidence in the system, they have a lot of trust in the schools. Much more so than many American blacks, who have lost faith in the system."

The immigrants are on their way up, their children guaranteed a better life simply because they will be raised in Los Angeles or Miami instead of Pnompenh or Port-au-Prince. Their optimistic faith that hard work will be rewarded is precisely what is lacking among the black teenagers and young mothers with whom the immigrants share the inner-city streets.

Such an absence of faith cannot be incomprehensible when legalized segregation is but one generation in the past, when extralegal discrimination lives on, and when official policies, especially those built into the welfare system, imply that such people cannot really be expected to take responsibility for their fates. Still, the fact remains that the culture of the black underclass leaves its members worse equipped for economic advancement than immigrants who start out with less.

With some exceptions, such as the criminal minority among the Marielitos, immigrants do not engage in crime and violence. Although fathers often leave their wives and children behind when they migrate in search of work, they typically send money home for support. When I asked young men from Mexico or Haiti about the families they left behind, I usually got a detailed, up-to-date report. Families that migrate together or form after migration are generally stable. There is usually a father as well as a mother to provide an example to the children and to discipline them. There are exceptions to all these generalizations within the spectrum of immigrants, but most immigrants are closer to the pattern the generalizations suggest than are most members of the American black urban lower class.

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