One million immigrants a year flock to US By Rupert Cornwell 5 January 2001 America is experiencing the second great tidal wave of immigration in its history, literally changing the country's face before its very eyes. To grasp the scale, imagine a city almost the size of London mushrooming from the earth every five years. Today more than 28 million immigrants legal and illegal now live in the US, three times as many as only 30 years ago. According to a study issued yesterday by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), based on the latest census data, their number is growing by 1.2 million a year, and now accounts for more than 10 per cent of the population, the highest proportion since the first great migration to America in the decades before the Great War. The phenomenon is not confined to the other side of the Atlantic. Britain and the other rich, weary old countries of Europe are experiencing their own millennial immigration boom and mostly hating every minute of it. So, too, is America, a nation whose very invention is the work of immigrants. Hard as it may be for those who gape at the awe-inspiring open spaces of the New World, Americans feel they are being swamped. And not for the first time. "Most Americans think of immigration as a problem that has come to the fore in the last half century or so," writes the late Henry Steele Commager, whose history books have for generations been a staple of American schoolchildren. "And when they think of immigrants they think of olive-skinned Italians or bearded Jews or Polish peasant women with bright shawls coming down the gangplank on to Ellis Island. They do not think of the Pilgrim Fathers or the French Huguenots or the Scots Irish. Certainly they do not think of the poor black folk enduring the hell of the Middle Passage." In those days the "native stock" descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers looked down on the olive-skinned Italians. Today the latter look with suspicious disdain on the Chinese, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Indians, Haitians and the rest as they flood into America. No one after all is keener to protect a nice neighbourhood than the last people to move on to the block. The urban black underclass, meanwhile, look resentfully at everyone, as one new group after another threatens to vault over them in the scramble up the economic ladder. In some ways great cracks remain between the groups, papered over by the formal rituals of America from "have a nice day" to the ubiquitous political correctness. The European liberal intelligentsia may mock such nonsenses: for those already there these conventions level the playing field, but for the millions who aspire to live in the United States they are a nonexistent price to pay. Americans themselves are ambivalent about immigration. They know full well the contributions made by the Einsteins and the Enrico Fermis, they understand that the issue of green cards to tens of thousands of computer specialists from the Indian subcontinent is vital if America is to retain its lead in information technology. The foreign restaurants and the entertainers with the foreign sounding names, all are a universally appreciated addition to national life. But Americans are as unwilling as Europeans to admit that without immigrants to fill the menial jobs they shun from home pizza deliveries to autumn leaf sweeping, to hospitals and rubbish collection many public and private services could not function. Speaker after speaker at the 1996 Republican convention in San Diego, for instance, railed at the threat to their cherished "American Way of Life" ignoring, however, that most of the cleaners and catering staff who made the happy occasion possible were day workers from Tijuana, Mexico, 10 miles to the south. But other, and nobler, myths still operate, on both sides of the divide. For the impoverished majority of the world's inhabitants, America with its power, its social and geographic mobility and its rags-to-riches potential, is and for ever will be the promised land. Many of today's immigrants will become US citizens; the "wetbacks" who dodge floodlights and tracker dogs to cross the Rio Grande from Mexico calculate that whatever the immediate hardships, sooner or later an amnesty will come along, giving them a chance one day to become citizens, with the same opportunity for their children born in this modern eldorado. Their motives are the same as those that brought their predecessors to Ellis Island a century ago: escape from war, famine, persecution and poverty, the desire to give their children a better life. And despite itself America can't help being flattered by the attention. Buried beneath American prejudices still flickers an instinctive idealism, and that much-tarnished, much-abused notion of "the American dream". For the newcomers the goal is that stirring occasion, a US nationalisation ceremony. This is America as it prefers to see itself, a place where the national motto of E Pluribus, Unum "Out of Many One" still means something. Britain confers citizenship in a Whitehall brown paper envelope and a pro-forma warning to "keep this document in a safe place because it cannot be replaced". America summons its fortunate "petitioners" to a special federal courtroom to watch a uniformed military detachment present the colours. There follows much rousing speechifying, and then the Oath of Citizenship with its daunting requirement: "entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince or potentate, state or sovereignty". Typically 100 people will take the oath, from 35 or 40 different nations. But the federal courthouse is the rainbow's end. The reality is not dissimilar to that first tide of immigration, when 20 million people arrived in the 40 years between 1870 and 1910. More than half of post-1970s immigrants live below or at the official poverty line, according to the CIS. The Immigration and Naturalisation Service has a well-deserved reputation as the most bureaucratic, incompetent and unhelpful agency of the federal government. In California, where 26 per cent of the population the highest proportion of any single state are immigrants, only the courts stood in the way of a referendum result that would have barred illegal immigrants and their children from health and social services, and public education. The stockyards, slaughter-houses and grimy, freezing factories of Upton Sinclair's novels about the urban hell of turn-of-the-century Chicago may be no more. But sweatshops, ghettos and rapacious landlords remain, joined by late 20th-century innovations such as "snake-head" gangs, charging a king's ransom for organising illegal entry. Now, as then, those who survive this gauntlet can expect little support from America's traditionally weak labour unions. If the threatened economic downturn materialises, they can expect less still. _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
