Walt Whitman

A Society Of Immigrants

The USA is not like the Old World, a place of relative permanence and continuity, adapting only so far as it preserves what has been. The USA continually reinvents itself, turning ‘them’ into ‘us’. It is a nation that does not grow from affinity with the soil or even with one language whose origins are lost in time. Instead the USA is polyglot, an ingathering of all the races, peoples and religions of the earth. It has always relied upon attracting peoples from elsewhere. Even the native peoples (mistakenly taken for ‘Indians’) came from Siberia in the dim and distant past.

Recent Newcomers

Europeans came initially to dominate the modern influx, but just as the British came by the turn of this century to be outnumbered by peoples from eastern and southern Europe, so too this once novel combination has recently been overtaken by a continuing influx from Latin America, south-east Asia, and even from Africa. The dominant black and white mix has recently given way to browns and yellows.

Thirty years ago most immigrants came from Europe or from Canada. By the early 1990s most are Mexicans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, Indians, Chinese and West Indians. They arrive on jumbo jets; they walk across the border; they are washed ashore on the Florida Keys.

Fears And Suspicions

A flickering fear says aliens are overrunning the country. If the USA is a lifeboat in a world of trouble maybe it is in danger of being swamped. Racism re-emerges, fuelled by fears of recession returning.

Even current prosperity involves great disparity between different regions and different sectors of the economy, with many ordinary people losing their jobs. The long-standing mutual fears and suspicions of blacks and whites give way to mutual apprehension that those browns and yellows recently let in will throw open the gates to one and all, levelling down, with English but one of many possible tongues.

But this has always been the fear. Benjamin Franklin feared that the Pennsylvania of the 1750s would be overrun by Germans. In the 1840s the Irish seemed about to swamp the towns and, while digging the canals, the countryside too. Later Jews, fleeing Czarist hostility, brought their Yiddish language, their Hebrew writing, and their Saturday Sabbath into the growing cities which many Americans feared were being turned into foreign countries. Working for the good of their children, immigrants stood together when necessary and plunged into the mainstream when possible, learning English, voting, investing their lives in almost any job that would keep the family intact.

Beginning Life Anew

John F. Kennedy, son of an Irish family made good in the USA, saw his country as ‘a society of immigrants, each of whom has begun life anew, on an equal footing’. For him America’s secret was that it was ‘a nation of people with the fresh memory of old traditions who dared to explore new frontiers’. It was in his memory that the USA abandoned the old 1920s quota system which, if too late to keep the USA White Anglo-Saxon and Protestant (WASP), at least had kept it predominantly European. Since 1965 new waves of immigration have brought newcomers not just from Europe but increasingly from the Third World. Of over 600,000 legal immigrants each year the largest number came from Mexico (about 100,000) the Caribbean (100,000), the Philippines (50,000) and Vietnam (35,000), about the same as Britain and Ireland combined.

Recognising The Changes

For British settlers (or even visitors) recognition of this change is essential. The British have a very ambivalent attitude towards the USA. The temptation is to see it as a richer, larger version of the south of England with more snow and more sun, but still recognisably British (if not quite English). If this were ever true the mass influx from southern and eastern Europe of Italians, Yugoslavs, Jews and Poles last century has long since swept over this British heritage. The countryside is full of people originally from Scandinavia and Germany, as the place-names of the Midwest tell us (see Harrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegone Days, Penguin 1986, for a loving but caustic look at such people in Minnesota).

Today’s Third World influx is changing the very language and landscape of America. Where once there were small ethnic enclaves like San Francisco’s Chinatown, now there are vast Spanish-speaking neighbourhoods in most cities. The Governor of New York City may be from an Italian background, but city mayors are likely to have been born in the Philippines or in Cuba. Each year the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) catches over a million illegal immigrants. The US Census Bureau reckons they missed between two and three times more. Most are from Mexico, crossing the land border in a dash from the conditions of Bangladesh to those of Switzerland in one night.

No wonder that the INS requires visitors to provide proof they intend to leave. A cynic might say that the less the INS can control the 2,000 mile land border to the south the more it needs to demonstrate its authority where it can with those coming openly into the USA at airports.