Immigrant nation
McCarthy, Abigail
ABIGAIL MCCARTHY IMMIGRANT NATION A mixed history On the coverage of the popular reaction to the death of Princess Diana an interesting observation was made more than once. The demonstration of...
...Hostility toward immigrants is long-standing...
...Nevertheless, they and their descendants transformed Boston, the most Irish of American cities, and other centers as well...
...Going into derelict ghettos, they have refurbished crumbling buildings and created middle-class neighborhoods...
...Together they gave way to emotion and voiced their sorrow without shame...
...Reviewer Stanley Karnow, discussing Joel Millman's current book, The Other Americans (Viking), says, But as Joel Millman amply illustrates, the case against immigrants is flimsy...
...It seemed evident that the English people had been changed, at least in part, by immigration...
...We, too, are being changed by immigration...
...Millman, for example, credits recent immigrants with reviving New York...
...By nature they are a superior breed...
...As Glenn C. Loury notes in the New Republic (August 25), "It is no great secret, that thanks to the rapid growth of America's Latinos and Asian population, whites of European desecent stand to become a minority in this country sometime in the next century...
...It is our history, in Ireland, in Boston...
...But historian O'Connor puts a more positive spin on the transformation: "The Boston Irish have become people of education, culture, and refinement...
...For that reason he concludes that they have a special obligation to return to the city the benefits of the skills, the associations, and resources they have acquired, and thus help new immigrant peoples to share their advantages...
...In the very first years of the republic, Pennsylvania residents of English origin protested the influx of the German-born...
...Japanese-American citizens were forced out of their homes into internment camps during World War II...
...The story of the famine Irish is a case in point...
...Before midcentury, the Know-Nothing party accused the immigrant Irish of Romish plots...
...See Peter Feuer-herd's "A New American Tribe," Commonweal, September 12...
...The demonstration of grief in England seemed to come from a people very different from the stoic and doughty British of World War II days described so movingly in the recitation, The White Cliffs of Dover...
...Many of us remember the comely brown-skinned woman on the cover of Time some time ago...
...And the values of the new immigrants are those historically prized in America devotion to family and a strong work ethic...
...Refugees from the Irish famine encountered "No Irish Need Apply" signs in Boston and New York...
...Nevertheless these immigrants encounter hostility...
...floral tributes were brought by those wearing dreadlocks as well as by fair-haired Saxons...
...The Washington Post recently carried a headline: "Anti-Asian American Incidents Rising, Civil Rights Group Says...
...The immigrants of the last quarter-century are merging quite successfully into our society...
...Their crime rate is remarkably low, and contrary to allegations that they are a fiscal bur-den, they generate more tax revenues than they take in service (Washington Post Book World, July 20...
...The rate of intermarriage is high...
...The Poles, Czechs, and others who later manned the mines and steel mills were objects of sneers and opprobrium...
...The way in which the Irish changed Boston and its region is perhaps the most dramatic story of immigration changing America...
...To a great extent, in their prolonged struggle for survival and achievement, they did turn Boston into an Irish city...
...She was projected, in an issue on immigration, as the typical American woman of the twenty-first century...
...Many were ill with typhus, smallpox, and cholera...
...It is a great source of shame for many people," said Mary Robinson, Ireland's former president...
...Asian-exclusion statutes, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, were enacted well into the present century...
...It is understandable that they were not wholly welcome...
...Unlike the sturdy Irish immigrants who arrived in the 1820s and 1830s, the refugees from the famine who flooded into East Coast cities in the 1840s were pallid, emaciated, weak, impoverished, and unskilled, according to Thomas O'Connor, Boston College historian and author of The Boston Irish...
...Knowing that they face adjustment problems in a strange and probably hostile environment, they are nevertheless ready to leave their homelands in hope of improving their lives...
...The Boston preference for "sports, politics, and revenge," its proliferation of pubs, and rough-and-tumble politics influencing the region's social order: All are marks of that transition according to Cullen not all positive marks it must be said...
...Italians were stigmatized as probable mobsters...
...They are accused of stealing jobs from native-born Americans and downgrading neighborhoods, among other things...
...The effects of immigration have not always been quite as rosy as Millman describes and the success of immigrants in entering the economy not always quite as immediate...
...To learn from history, you must know it...
...Korean "mom-and-pop" stores have been attacked and boycotted...
...If we study the history of immigration we are certainly encouraged to acknowledge the changes newcomers bring and to welcome them as re-newers of our strength as a nation...
...Although we are a nation of immigrants, such hostility to every new group has been common throughout our history...
...But there are many others...
...In a long and well-researched story in the Boston Sunday Globe (August 24) marking the unveiling of the first American memorial for famine victims, Kevin Cullen traced the transition of Boston from a city of Yankee reserve and elitism to a city where it has been said, "We're all a little Irish by osmosis...
...Loury also notes that over two-fifths of Hispanics and half of Asians in the twenty-five to thirty-four-years-old bracket had spouses from different ethnic or racial groups...
...Dark skins mingled with the fair...
...It is only in the last few years that the Irish of Eire itself and the members of the Irish diaspora have begun to acknowledge the fact of the famine and to come to terms with it...
...And, while they often encounter difficulties, on the whole they contribute significantly to the American economy as entrepreneurs, craftsmen, farmers, and unskilled workers...
...It shouldn't be...
...And indeed the Britons we saw on television seemed a very different mix...
Vol. 124 • October 1997 • No. 17
