The Talkies/Let Them Come

...Consider in this context two recent films dealing with immigration...

...Gregory Nava, in E! Norte, gives us a Los Angeles with exploitative day-labor bosses and U.S...

...His circus visits New York City under KGB escort...

...Both films also illustrate the connections between economic and political freedom...

...Their first " c o y o t e " (a Tijuana Mexican specializing in getting illegal immigrants over the border) tries to rob them...

...Life is hard and confusing in New York and Vladimir is often sad and homesick, but the future is in front of him, he has a girlfriend and, who knows, he may someday play the sax like his jazz idols...

...I t is no doubt better to be a Russian emigre in New York than an illegal Guatemalan in Los Angeles...

...Mosco~e on the Hudson is a marvelously executed, poignant, and charming comedy about a Russian circus saxophonist...

...Both of these films make it very clear that the immigrant's lot is very tough...

...What we should understand, in any event, is that there is room in our land for people who want to do well for themselves...

...Paul Mazursky, who directed Moscow on the Hudson, shows us a New York which is grubby, often bitter and uncaring...

...Good immigration movies have never sought to deny that the temptations and difficulties of starting from scratch are real...

...Our America remains a land of plenty not only because of its fortunate geography, but principally because we have maintained the conditions that have given generation after generation of emigrams from less happy places reasons for believing that Roger Kaplan is a New York writer and reviewer...

...they encounter for the most part hard people with overwhelming problems of their own...

...They come to America because the air is filled with liberty and the streets are paved with gold...

...In El Norte, the dream of a better life, with cars and flush toilets (we'd be wise not to smirk at the frequent obsession with basic sanitation), is directly associated by the Indians with the perception that the Creoles never will allow them to buy the landdhey work on...

...COMING NEXT MONTH Excellence in Education: The First Year here they will have a chance...

...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984...

...Inevitably, films of this sort do not portray America in a consistently flattering light, even while they underline the country's fabulous attractiveness to the immigrants...

...they know this as well as anyone can, but they also think that in "el norte" they will find all the things they've seen in back issues of Good Housekeeping...

...Just so: Our literature and cinema are full of the toil and trouble of making a new life in our land of bountiful and boundless freedom-from Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky to the epic movies of Jan Troll (about the Swedish emigration to the Middle West) or Ella Kazan (about the Greeks...

...U n f o r t u n a t e l y , the wisdom of our forefathers is not to be found in our present immigration policy...

...I honestly do not know what the answer is, but what passes for official policy in this country at the present is ludicrous, Simpson-Mazzoli notwithstanding...

...It would be foolish and dishonest to pretend that things are otherwise...

...And they expressed their understanding simply by working and thriving, by building a continental empire, a democracy that spanned the earth's two greatest oceans, a land of refuge and hope and progress...

...The distinction in many cases is impossible to make, and it invariably leads to exclusions that are capricious, arbitrary, and cruel...

...They are easy marks for sharks of all kinds...

...And in every generation, millions come here for two intertwined reasons...

...Soldiers had murdered their parents because their laborer father was trying to break out of peonage...

...A strange distinction between "economic" and "political" refugees has been advanced in recent years: Quotas for national groups can be overcome by individuals if they can demonstrate they are "political" refugees, rather than, for example, merely shoeless peons...

...For son and daughter, the alternative to going north is death...

...But the clown loses his nerve at the last minute, whereas Vladimir, astonished by the designer jeans in Bloomingdale's and stunned by the beauty of a perfume salesgirl (Maria Conchita Alonso), makes a successful run for it...

...In Gregory Nava's quite different film, E! Norte, the continuing nightmare is bearable only because the principal character's moral courage prevents him from giving up his dream of a better life, despite the blows that are struck against him...

...They come legally and illegally, by hook and by crook, they come even when they have only the vaguest idea of how they will earn a living...

...Vladimir Ivanoff (Robin Williams) knows very well that life in the Soviet Union is atrocious, politically speaking, but he is more concerned, truth to tell, about the scarcity of such items as toilet paper...

...The question is, as Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for human rights, is wont to say: "What do you do...

...The story is about two adolescents, Enrique and his sister Rosa (David Villalpando and Zaide Silvia Gutierrez), who flee their Indian village in the mountains of Guatemala...

...It is a story relived in every generation by millions...

...The story of their new life, and of the innumerable hardships they have to surmount, is one of the central stories of American history...

...The cops and a security guard, played by Cleavant Derricks, protect him from his babysitters and Derricks, full of sympathy ( " I ' m a refugee from Alabama"), gives him his first American couch to sleep on, with his family in Harlem...

...Vladimir has a friend in Moscow who is sent to a psychiatric ward for protesting the rape of Afghanistan: He learns this while waiting in line for a few rolls of coveted toilet paper...

...Even without a wide-opendoors policy, we ought to be able to appreciate this and take advantage of it...

...They make it to Los Angeles where for a brief time every one of their dreams seems possible, until they discover the meaning of their illegal status...

...Resuming this column next month will be John Podhoretz, critic-at-large for the Washington Times...

...As a matter of fact, he is reluctantly spying on his friend, the starring clown (Elyia Baskin), who, as the KGB goons know, wants to defect...

...But it is better to be an illegal Guatemalan in Los Angeles than a dead Guatemalan in Guatemala...

...citizens desperate enough for work to denounce their fellow workers to "la migra" (the immigration authorities) in order to get their jobs...

...Our forefathers well understood the profound connections between economic and political freedoms...

...A clever CubanAmerican lawyer, Alfonso Rey, himself a refugee from Castro, quickly gets Vladimir his political defector status, work papers, and his first job as a busboy...

...The first time he goes shopping in a grocery store in New York, the amount and varieties of coffee available so astonish him that he faints (to be sure, he is suffering from accumulated tensions...

...The story ends grimly, Rosa dying in a hospital and Enrique selling his arms as a day laborer...

...They expressed them in some of the most elegant statements of political philosophy in Western literature...

...by Roger Kaplan Moscow on the Hudson is a film whose dominant note is hope, with counterpoints of sorrow...

...The immigrants, especially the illegals from Central America, are at the bottom of the economic ladder...