Cracks in the Melting Pot
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & writing CRACKS IN THE MELTING POT BY BARRY GEWEN in the period after World War II, when I was growing up, there was an official piety that declared Americans came from many countries...
...Having helped to destroy the myth of the melting pot, he now finds himself upended by a centrifugal whirlwind of conflicting ethnic demands...
...A smuggler can earn $1,500 a night...
...The garment industry, one of his two major examples of industries dependent upon illegal labor, is said to employ approximately 350,000 undocumented workers out of a total workforce of 500,000...
...Ignored are family background, attitudes toward education, average age, physical location, work habits, and so on...
...In part he is simply wrong about this...
...In the schoolyard one learned that racial, religious and ethnic bonds were extremely important...
...Since 1977, it hascaught about 1 million each year...
...Nonetheless, they have not fully cohered into a community...
...On a subject he has made his own, affirmative action, Glazer traces the shift from a national campaign against discrimination to a policy that favors particular groups through the establishment of statistical quotas...
...With so many people sneaking across the borders, there is a great deal of money to be made in transportation and phony identification...
...Crewdson, from his perspective, calls this suggestion impractical, and perhaps he is right...
...No one knows how many have successfully evaded arrest...
...During the 20 years since the book's appearance, the issues it raised have thrust themselves brusquely into the center of public discussion, and while one of the two authors has loosed his considerable energies upon theU.S...
...Surely, we want to bring these jobs up to acceptable standards...
...Writers & writing CRACKS IN THE MELTING POT BY BARRY GEWEN in the period after World War II, when I was growing up, there was an official piety that declared Americans came from many countries and climes, yet were basically alike...
...workers can successfully withhold their labor from undesirable jobs, employers must make the positions more attractive—unless desperate undocumenteds can be found to toil at minimum and subminimum wages in sweatshop conditions...
...Norman Mailer, for one, commented somewhere that only an American liberal could believe whites danced as well as blacks, and Norman Podhoretz brought a storm of abuse down on himself for suggesting in his essay "My Negro Problem, and Ours" that the tensions between blacks and whites (or blacks and Jews) did not all flow in one direction...
...If Ruritanians are 1 per cent of the population, 1 per cent of AT&T employees should be Ruritanians...
...should learn to live with borders that' 'could scarcely have been open wider,'' because illegal aliens perform work Americans do not want to do...
...The popular media beat out this message in an insistent tattoo, from every Sidney Poitier movie ever made to the Broadway musical West Side Story, whose lovers ended tragically because those dancing juvenile delinquents up on stage had failed to behave like brothers...
...The melting pot ideal must be revived, not as the reality it was mistaken for in the '50s but as a norm to guide our efforts in the '80s and beyond...
...As impressive as the affirmative action pieces are, to my mind the most provocative articles in Ethnic Dilemmas are those addressing the issue of American pluralism...
...Quotas, he observes, arebased on the belief that groupdif-ferences don't really exist...
...Nor does discrimination explain why there is a disproportionate number of Chinese-American dentists, why second-generation West Indian blacks outearn native-born whites, why the children of Finnish immigrants fail to become managers, or why Jews make up one-quarter of all law school faculties...
...Just as inevitably, corruption breeds brutality...
...We are no longer as con fident as we once were about the character of our nation...
...The CIA says 4 million, the State Department 7 million...
...Even where undocumented workers are not competing directly with Americans, Crewdson's contention is at best a half truth...
...At home one heard groups spoken of in generalizations that would never be repeated on television or portrayed on film-and these generalizations, far from being expressions of mere mindless prejudice, comported at least as well with the facts of one's existence as the genteel homilies on tolerance that filled the air...
...Sixteen of Glazer's articles have now been collected in Ethnic Dilemmas, 1964-1982 (Harvard, 359 pp., $20.00...
...A crucial step would seem to be to prohibit employers from knowingly hiring easily exploitable illegals...
...Especially persuasive is the one that links the present Glazer with the Glazer of Beyond the Melting Pot...
...The ostensible differences between groups were superficial, easily overcome through mutual love and understanding and, of course, through our common loyalty asUnited States citizens...
...But any New Yorker knows that culture and history matter, that Koreans open fruitstands and Greeks open restaurants...
...According to government investigators, "a top official in Washington had arranged for the regular delivery of illegal Mexican farmworkers to the LBJ Ranch while its owner was living in the White House...
...In a sense, Glazer is like the revolutionary who has been swallowed up by his own revolution...
...Assimilation should be encouraged, yes-but, one is left wondering, assimilation to what...
...The Tarnished Door is weakest in its conclusions...
...In the '50s and early '60s, few were the writers impolite enough to challenge the taboo of good intentions with honesty...
...In 1969, Crewdson notes, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) apprehended a total of 4,457 illegal aliens...
...In the light of such facts, those who wish to impose quotas to combat discrimination seem as dogmatic as the simple-minded Marxists who, when challenged, will come up with an economic explanation for tap-dancing...
...Basically, Crewdson believes the U.S...
...Oddly and rather contradictorily, he supports educational vouchers, although these would undoubtedly exacerbate centrifugal tendencies...
...His book is an expanded account of a problem that has only been getting worse...
...Yet in warning that "what we risk is a real Balkanization," he comes up against our nation's oldest question: What does it mean to be an American...
...That is, hundreds of thousands of Americans work at jobs Crewdson says Americans don't want...
...As Crewdson indicates, illegal aliens work under the crudest circumstances: "Look for a job that is physically demanding or dangerous, dirty, demeaning or boring, offers little security or opportunity for advancement, and pays badly to boot, and t he chances are excellent that it is being done by someone without permission to live and work in this country...
...No clear answer emerges-this is, after all, a book about dilemmas-yet Glazer does point to some important clues...
...At the moment," declares Crewdson, "more people from other countries are attempting to enter the United States-legally or illegally, to visit or to stay-than ever before in the nation's history...
...Over half of the illegals come from Mexico, where the birth rate is one of the highest in the world...
...Thus, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission operates on the assumption that, absent discrimination, agroup's representation within an occupation or corporation will reflect its percentage in the society as a whole...
...An American hotel chain keeps smugglers on its payroll to maintain a supply of cheap labor...
...Two years ago Crewdson won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on illegal aliens...
...Senate, the other has continued to write cogently about social groups and their interactions...
...For some of the details on social developments in the U.S...
...But the least we can do is try...
...But 1LGWU officials point out that the true illegal figure is actually about 50,000...
...In the village of Ahuacatlan, a padre told Crewdson, "the young boys dream only to go to the United States...
...Americans are indeed a "people," as they recognize when they travel abroad...
...The single most important work attempting to grapple with the very real conflicts among groups, however, was Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot...
...Crewdson describes beatings, rapes, child abuse, the kind of official thuggery usually associated with Latin American dictatorships...
...In our schools, he declares, "we are involved in the making of Americans...
...Nor is it only the illegals who pay...
...Still, even readers who agree with Glazer may close Ethnic Dilemmas with a feeling of uncertainty verging on uneasiness...
...Lamenting the lack of attention paid to the persistence of ethnicity and group loyalty, they wrote that the melting pot was an event which did not happen, and in cutting through the pieties to insist on the apparently ineradicable pluralism of American life, they produced a seminal study...
...This, it seems to me, is a commendable stand...
...If U.S...
...One ring was said to be clearing $24 million a year...
...It may be that the sole remedy is to disband the Service and start all over again, as was done with the New York City Police Department's Special Investigating Unit...
...The reality was very different...
...Inevitably, money brings corruption, particularly when the INS agents who are supposed to enforce the law earn as little as $ 12,000 a year performing one of the country's more frustrating jobs...
...today, go to John Crewdson's muckraking volume, The Tarnished Door: The New Immigrants and the Transformation of America (Times Books, 354 pp., $17.95...
...Although this volume is not groundbreaking in the way Beyond the Melting Pot was, it is, 1 believe, indispensable to anyone who wishes to understand the domestic problems facing the United States in the 1980s...
...Can anyone blame those Americans lucky enough to be in a position to refuse such work...
...Geography, not discrimination, tells us why farmers of Scandinavian descent are more prosperous than those who are wasps...
...For Glazer, whatever the concessions to pluralism about such matters as bilingual education or preferential treatment of minorities, the long-term goal must remain the forging of a single people...
...We have changed, he says, from a color-blind to a color-conscious society, and over several chapters he marshals a battery of arguments in opposition to this transformation...
Vol. 66 • November 1983 • No. 21
