Like many oral histories, Al Santoli's New Americans tends to grow repetitions if one tries to gulp it down at one sitting. Yet it would be a great pity for any reader to leave the book unfinished on that account. For implicit in the observations of the recent immigrants and refugees who provide its raw material are important insights into the past--and future--of the United States. And it is precisely the sounding of identical themes by people who came to this country from vastly disparate homelands--Ethiopia and Cambodia, Poland and Guatemala--that lends those insights exceptional force and veracity.
As Santoli notes in his introduction, our national attitudes toward immigration have always been ambivalent. In our official mythology, America is proudly portrayed as welcoming with open arms the dispossessed of less fortunate and less enlightened nations. And in the hoopla that marked the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty three years ago, Ellis Island was effectively enshrined alongside Plymouth Rock as one of the cradles of the American nation.
What was really being celebrated at the birthday bash that Lee Iacocca threw for Miss Liberty, however, was what might be called the old immigration--the enormous influx of impoverished Europeans, particularly southern and eastern Europeans, that the United States experienced during the latter part of the last century and the early decades of this one. At the time that influx was actually occurring, of course, it aroused vocal apprehension and even outright hostility among many Americans of the "old stock," but that reality is gradually fading in the national memory now that the descendants of these earlier immigrants have for the most part joined the mainstream of American society.
Time and assimilation, however, have not yet had a chance to work their healing magic on the more than ten million immigrants, legal and illegal, who settled in this country in the 1980s alone. And so the same litany of charges once leveled at Italians, Poles, and eastern European Jews is now directed at Vietnamese, Dominicans, and Mexicans. The newcomers, it is alleged, work for substandard wages, take jobs away from native-born Americans, and put an undue burden on the nation's social services without contributing to tax revenues.
Most distressing of all to alarmists is that today's immigrants, the overwhelming majority of whom are of Third World rather than European origin, are conspicuously different from the established American population, both culturally and linguistically, and are often unable or unwilling to shed their non-American ways completely. It is this state of affairs that a few years ago prompted that paladin of Democratic compassion, Speaker of the House Jim Wright, to raise publicly the specter of the potential "Cultural Balkanization" of the United States.
The Forgotten Past
There is just one problem with all of this: As Santoli's oral history strikingly illustrates, every one of the accusations and fears I have so far cited is either groundless or indefensibly exaggerated.
Admittedly, the statement that sentiments so widely held can be without serious foundation may at first blush seem improbable. But the explanation, I fear, lies in another widespread
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