ON EUROPE'S BOTTOM RUNG

...Redford and Miss Farrow play kissy-kissy, touchytouchy while Sam Waterston attempts to play Nick Carraway by putting caraway seeds in the bird feeder outside his house...

...Nevertheless, someone is eventually attracted by the book's imposing appearance and obvious authority...

...In Ceylon nearly 40 percent of the 15-24-year-olds are unemployed...

...And it won't be a quickie divorce, Nevada-style...

...Neither are their industrialists finding it easy to substitute capital for labor...

...European industrialists will have to find ways of reducing their labor needs even if this means considering a zero growth system...

...Clearly the the time has come for some radical rethinking on the whole use of immigrant labor in Europe...

...He just looks like a born hacker (around) who is fated to succeed through goofing off rather than, like Gatsby, to fail through taking everything far too seriously...

...The answer of course must be worked at on all these fronts at once...

...The massive postwar migration of Turks to Germany, Italians to Switzerland, Finns to Sweden, Algerians to France, Surinamese to the Netherlands, and Moroccans to Belgium have one thing in common: they are all tightly correlated with economic growth in the recipient country...

...The fact is that the immigrants do jobs that native Europeans would rather be unemployed than do...

...Unemployment in the urban areas of Africa averages 27 percent...

...And it could not, because of the likely events described above, be happening at a worse time...

...In spite of earlier studies which purportedly identified a "caucasian" blood group, there is now a growing consensus in the scientific literature that available blood group markers are inapplicable...

...Redford had played Daisy and Miss Farrow Gatsby...

...in Bogota, Colombia 11 percent...

...It is a coffee-table tome of a movie if ever there was one, a literary classic transmogrified into an illustrated extravaganza, the sort of book/movie that confounds beauty with prettiness...

...Thirdly, there has been the reluctance of first-generation newcomers to get involved...

...The coffee table collapses in inelegant splinters...

...Can one conceive of a Europe with an immigrant population of 22 million by 19807 Just to mention it sounds ridiculous...

...This does not mean that Europe will suddenly decide to send all its immigrants home, awful though the consequences of that would be...

...There is, it is argued, another alternative--to take European capital to Third World labor...

...Redford doesn't add much to the film either...

...Between 1960 and 1970 the rich countries added $700 billion to their annual real incomes...

...This deficit alone is sufficient to account for a reduction in IQ of from 6 to 9 points, based on monozygotic twin studies which have shown that a disparity of more than 1/2 pound between genetically identical twins is associated with long-lasting mental impairment...

...And they will become easy targets for those who need a scapegoat for society's ills...

...Whether the Europeans like it or not, the new proletarians of Europe are irrevocably tied into their economic system...

...Unemployed white youths will find it all too easy to take out their frustrations on beating up people no one likes...

...It is Nick's telling of the story that makes Gatsby himself as insubstantial and mysterious as his own "deathless dream" of Daisy...

...The net decrease of about 200,000 (out of an immigrant work force of 1,300,000) was not due to the dismissal of foreign workers by employers but almost wholly the result of the fall in the number of new immigrants...

...Director Jack Clayton and screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola have assumed that if the movie just falls down and worships the novel, the novel will yield up its secret power to the movie...

...Capital intensive, yes...

...As we know, those American migrations produced enormous turbulence and suffering...

...The adaptation and the direction having failed, all we are left with are the stars, Robert Redford and Mia Farrow...

...Costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge, whose name sounds as if it came off the guest list from one of Gatsby's parties, has attempted to help Miss Farrow take up more psychological space in the film by putting her in hats with brims that require lots of clearance on all sides...

...And it is doubtful if Renault, Mercedes, Vredestein and MAN are going to move either...

...Of course here only the environment can be responsible...

...The result: gathering despair in the countryside and an unending pilgrimage to the towns...

...Approximately 95 percent of European industry...

...The pressure of her hand on the cover is ever so light and respectful...

...Indeed an essay in the World Bank magazine Finance and Development dramatically illustrated the connection by pointing out that it would cost the rich countries $60 billion in aid to create the number of jobs in the developing world equivalent to the number of immigrant workers in Europe...

...This sum alone dwarfs the total annual incomes of the continents of Asia, Latin America and Africa...

...However, one only has to mention the textile example to see how weak the argument is...

...It is not that they are reticent about moving outside Europe when the occasion demands...

...The countryside of the developing world has been neglected...

...A poverty that although absolutely bad is heightened by the widening relative gap between town and countryside and between them and us...

...Some movie...

...of violence proliferate...

...Even when there is opportunity in the countryside, the young man often finds the town more appealing...

...The most obvious is the deep economic insecurity into which Europe has been plunged...

...While Mr...

...Redford is too substantial to play Gatsby, Miss Farrow is not substantial enough to play Daisy...

...Since Mr...

...Speed up the economy and they pour in...

...Labor emigration that developed to solve a real need is in danger of becoming counterproductive...

...yet it proves to be the ounce beyond endurance...

...The rest of Mr...

...This varies in its effectiveness from country to country...

...Politicians will find it all too easy to stand up and say the immigrants must go...

...In fact the movie would have been altogether better east if Mr...

...Yet for all that, it has not been able to reduce its dependence on foreign labor significantly...

...But it is not a silent gap...

...Some researchers may wish to pursue genetic hypotheses, however unlikely or apparently untestable concerning such matters as black/white differentials in IQ: but for these hypotheses to be promulgated or accepted as serious candidates for a new approach to solving social problems speaks not at all of our high devotion to science but of the low state of our public morality...

...And they are not particularly thankful for having the opportunity to work in Europe rather than starve in Jamaica or Algeria...

...It is a gap that has been made vibrant and real through mass communications...

...If this proves to be so, and similar hypotheses prove similarly untestable, then to continue to propose genetic explanations of black disadvantage is highly suspect...

...Since any genetic test of IQ differentials between blacks and whites ultimately depends on making mea7urements on populations where intermarriage has given varying degrees of "white admixture," testing requires some reliable genetic marker which measures this quantitatively...

...The return flow was only very slightly larger than it would have been during boom conditions...

...I haven't seen Tom Ewell since The Seven Year Itch...

...Every country in Europe except Britain has seen this clearly...

...When substance and prejudice are so far apart and when the "culprit" is so easily identifiable and locatable, there before us is the best recipe in the book for social turbulence...

...Secondly, immigration has helped European job mobility: the native workers have been able to move up a peg or two --they may not acknowledge why it has happened, but that does not detract from the sense of achievement...

...As it worked out, the Government could not afford to increase its labor force, but private employers did and this speedily attracted additional new workers into the urban labor market...

...The fragments JONATHAN POWER is a British economist, ]ournalist and filmmaker...

...Certainly the hospitals, subway systems, roadsweepers, building sites, and coal mines are not going to move, and they are major immigrant occupations...

...Further, it is argued that increased urban employment in developing countries merely induces increased urban migration, and the example is cited of how in 1964 private employers in Nairobi and the Kenyah Government agreed to increase their payrolls by 15 percent at once, on condition that the trade unions agreed to accept a wage moratorium...

...And the jagged holocaust in Marseilles last year laid to rest the myth that France was the civilized non-racist society of Europe where Africans became cabinet ministers and no one noticed...

...Indeed, to use these hypotheses as interim explanations for the failure of social programs in the absence of remedial environmental action may be immoral...

...But why are the immigrants here...

...Former German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard once suggested that if Europeans were willing to work longer or harder, they could dispense with most of the foreign workers...

...Fourthly, and more difficult to measure, has been the patient legwork done by social and church agencies, trade unions and action groups...

...Strangeness, antagonism, withdrawal, hostility, reaction are feeding on each other...

...Indeed the excitement that swept Holland last year when a major textile firm announced it was moving lock, stock and barrel to a Third World country was quite disproportionate...

...Only the British could erect immigration barriers in a time of slow growth...

...Redford-and his teeth too, for that matter--looks suited to only one activity in life as well as on the screen: hacking around...

...Between 1920 and 1960 the Latin American work force grew by nearly 54 million...

...The book has been placed that way to give the impression that someone in the family might have been reading it and casually put it down...

...The break-up of the shot-gun marriage between the poverty of the developing countries and rich European economic needs will not be an easy business...

...They're touchy, and they can easily be set off...

...And immigrant workers who feel forced by a combination of economic pressure and raised expectations to leave their homelands...

...ON EUROPE'S BOTTOM RUNG JONATHAN POWER Immigrants do jobs native Europeans would rather be unemployed than do There are 10 million immigrants in Common Market Europe, not including intra-EEC migrants...

...Renault has 19 factories in the Third World...

...By far and away the overwhelming majority were of European stock and Judeo-Christian culture...

...But since everyone in the family, heaving together, couldn't lift the book, the intended impression is, like all the other pretenses at this party, a bit ridiculous...

...in the Philippines 14 percent...

...Recently the Dutch Government has begun to talk about it...

...But despite that it has had a continuing tendency to overrun its traditional labor supply...

...The difference between us and Asia is now about $2,000 per head...

...But if economics dictate that Europe must fuel its growth with increasing amounts of immigrant labor, will the electorate tolerate it...

...Albert Coppe, who was until twelve months ago the EEC Commissioner responsible for social affairs, espoused this view...

...And by the time he has reached that age he has lost his attachment to the land...

...But we should, as father would have said, have thought of that before...

...Slow it down and they begin to stop coming...

...It won't, and doesn't, because that power resides in Nick Carraway's narration rather than in the plot or dialogue...

...Redford has teeth that look as if they would like to eat Miss Farrow's hats, it must be admitted that, though not suited to the roles they play, the two stars are at least suited to each other...

...Family size grows, feudal land ownership systems remain untouched despite millions of words of reforming legislation, agricultural technicians are primitive, the 26 April 1974:186 markets for cash crops are unstable and fluctuating, and governments give low priority to agricultural development...

...It's hard to say which is the most miscast...

...That would be nearly half as many as emigrated from Europe to the New World in the great 19th and early 20th century migrations...

...If books were movies and movies books, the new film version of The Great Gatsby could be one of these fancy editions that are seen only at the wrong parties...

...Now in Europe we have Turks, Moroccans, Jamaicans, Algerians, Pakistanis, Surinamese, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Antilleans, South Koreans, Filipinos--moving onto the bottom rungs of a society totally different in conception and mores...

...Neither "illegitimacy" nor its implied effects are amenable to testing as long as the offspring of such matings continue to suffer from the environmental deprivation they now experience...

...But the hard fact is the Europeans don't want to sweep the streets, work on conveyor belts or wait on tables...

...Moreover, increased capital investment must offset the effects of lower birth rates, earlier retirements, shorter working weeks, longer holidays and increased years at school, before it can make an impact on the demand for immigrant workers...

...Moreover, it is doubtful if European governments with their new oil-induced balance of payments deficits will smile benignly on large-scale overseas investment...

...At least two of these factors are changing...

...At this end is our economic growth...

...After all, European industry is loath to invest in its own underdeveloped regions, much less then in uncertain and unstable countries overseas...

...Quickly a situation of passive intolerance will pass to one of active animosity...

...No, something more subtle and perhaps worse will happen...

...But the movie tries to recapture this ephemeral quality in the novel only ineptly with pastel colors and hazy, soft-focus photography...

...Yet although immigrant recruitment dropped, 151,900 new workers were engaged during 1967...

...For the better part of two-and-a-half hours, then, Mr...

...At bottom they feel they have a right to a job, social mobility and respect...

...At the moment we have the following line-up: Industrialists in Europe who need labor...

...Opinion polls in all the European countries confirm the mounting displeasure with the foreigners in their midst...

...Farming, however, only offered 12 million new jobs...

...She wanders over to it with nonchalant discomfort in a gown that's a little too snug, and with a completely tentative and indifferent gesture she lifts the cover to peep inside...

...But relative to what is happening today, it was a homogeneous migration...

...In Belgium the trade unions are very good, in Britain appalling...

...As a result Miss Farrow has attempted to cope with her problem, it appears, by getting silicone injections in her cheekbones, adapting the technology of underprivileged strippers in order to flesh herself out for the role--to appear less a shrinking violet than usual...

...And that we must revise our whole miserly attitude towards support for development both in the underdeveloped parts of Europe and the Thir/t World itself...

...In all likelihood it would cause more young people to leave the land...

...The other major factor that is changing is the age structure of the immigrant population...

...That the outbreaks of violence so far have been localized and relatively small is probably fairly easily explained...

...On recent trends it will widen to $7,000 by the end of the century...

...A UN forecast (pre-oil crisis) foresaw a total immigrant labor force of 22 million by 1980...

...Commonweal: 187 Finally, there must be a vast program of education of the European electorate, to make it realize there is no soft ride to prosperity on the backs of immigrant workers...

...As evidence, one could start by citing demographic statistics (circa 1964-68) which show that "illegitimate" black newborns weighed more than 1/2 pound less on the average than did white newborns--and more than onetenth of the black newborns weighed less than 51/2 pounds at birth...

...European electorates who have benefited from it but now feel enough is enough...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Commonweal: 185 First there is the social stability of the European postwar system, strengthened in particular by the economic advance most people have benefited from...

...The critical hypothesis of the IQ/hereditary debate --that the IQ deficit reported for blacks is to some large extent genetic in origin--is similarly difficult to resolve...

...Put them in a tight situation and the unpredictable might happen...

...My goodness he's grown fat...

...It is no wonder then that young men, unemployed, marginally employed or unsatisfactorily employed in these sprouting Third World cities should take the chance when it offers to move on to our cities...

...The Swiss Government, fearful of the mounting proportion of immigrant workers--they now make up 30 percent of the total work force, the highest in Europe--has been putting the squeeze on industry for some years now...

...If gathered together, they would be a nation the size of the Netherlands...

...These hat brims also have the appeal of looking edible, like some extraordinary dough flayed to translucent thinness and starched into rigidity...

...Certain clauses in their contracts made this impossible, though, so both had to struggle along in roles for which they weren't suited...

...The other part of the machinery forcing the migrant stream uphill is their poverty at home...

...Many of the migrants who came in the early 1960s now have teenage children who have spent most of their lives in Europe...

...An adolescent is bound to earn more in a town job than he could hope to earn at home until he is old enough to farm independently...

...In the end Tom Ewell makes a "special appearance" to deliver the famous eulogy at Gatsby's funeral, "The poor son-of-a-bitch...

...Once a protected European industry moves to where their comparative advantage dictates, where they should have been anyway, what have you left...

...It matters only marginally-whether they have European nationality--as do Commonwealth immigrants---or they don't, as do most of the others...

...In 1967 Germany's economic growth dropped to -0.3 percent...

...The anti-Turkish riots in Rotterdam in 1972 shook to the very roots a society that thought--because of its successful experience in integrating 300,000 Indonesians in the fifties--that it knew how to conquer racism...

...That for those who are here with their children, going back is unrealistic and they must be decently integrated...

...By and large, they have kept a low profile...

...Of course the Commonwealth immigrants who arrived in Britain before 1972--and the Surinamese and Dutch Antilleans--are in a rather unusual position in a European sense: they cannot be evicted without substantial changes in the law...

...Unless there is a long-lasting recession of unprecedented proportions (at least in a postwar sense) leading to a major change of work habits, the vast majority of immigrants will stay...

...In Britain and Holland the community action groups are impressive, whereas in Belgium and Germany they are few and far between...

...Secondly, developing countries will have to reorientate their development policies more in the direction of rural development and away from the urban/industrial syndrome that only ends up feeding the emigration process both in its domestic and foreign manifestation to the point where it has become counterproductive...

...For most Europeans they are there to take advantage of their wealth-creating system, to compete for their scarce housing and to partake of their social services...

...Her stomach, meanwhile, was fleshing itself out too, in ways not so desirable for this role...

...The fact is, not only will a job give him a higher income but he and those like him feel that in the town they have the chance of an income that will not depend on weather or market prices and will be paid regularly week by week...

...The one book that this film could not be, however, is the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote back in 1925, despite the film's slavish adherence to Fitzgerald's plot and dialogue...

...To make his misapprehending guests feel at ease the host has unerringly misappointed his home right down to the last detail, which is one of those massive fifty-dollar books ($19.95 special pre-pub, price good only until December 24) placed slightly off-center on the coffee table...

...OOO THE GREAT GAPSQUEAK OO0 OOOOOO0 THE SCREEN There is a certain kind of dinner party where everyone reeks of elegance, or would, except that no one has enough of a feel for these things to realize that elegance doesn't reek...

...Even if they did, we could doubt if the kind of industrial development they would introduce in the Third World would benefit the rural/urban imbalance...

...and hence, for the foreseeable future the satisfactory resolution of the controversy will be impossible...

...In short, Mr...

...That they are there to do the jobs Europeans no longer want to do is an article of faith held by detached intellectuals and company personnel officers...

...But they are only going to do it when it pays--when local demands are high and when production runs are long...

...26 April 1974:188...