The Time of Our Lives
Page 39
Two generations after my grandmother arrived, I was in the Oval Office of the American president saying “I think you oughta.” And amazingly enough he was listening.
In two generations. Two.
What a country.
* * *
Am I proud of this? Sure. It’s the American way to point out that your people went from zero to 60, or will or can. It’s the American way to acknowledge, too, that someone made the car you jumped into. There was an assembly line. My grandparents were ahead of me in that line, and the Founders were ahead of them. Every time an American brags about where he came from and where he wound up, he’s really complimenting the guys on the line.
In my case before there was the car there was a ship. I do not know the name of the ship that took Mary Dorian to America, and yet it gave me my future. I know she wore an inspection card attached to her clothing. I have such a card, encased in plastic, on a table in my home. It is the card worn by Mary Dorian’s future husband’s sister, who came over at roughly the same time.
It says at the top: “To assist Inspection in New York Harbour.” It notes dates, departure points, “Name of Immigrant.” On the side there’s a row of numbers that mark each day of what appears to have been a 10-day trip. Each day was stamped by the ship’s surgeon at daily inspection. You got the stamp if you appeared to be free of disease.
You know how the card looks? Thin. An old piece of paper that looks vulnerable. I guess that’s why I encased it in plastic, to keep it safe, because it’s precious.
* * *
Here is what is true of my immigrants and of the immigrants of America’s past: They fought for citizenship. They earned it. They waited in line. They passed the tests. They had to get permission to come. They got money that was hard-earned and bought a ticket. They had to get through Ellis Island or the port of Boston or Philadelphia, get questioned and eyeballed by a bureaucrat with a badge, and get the nod to take their first step on American soil. Then they had to find the A&S.
They knew citizenship was not something cheaply held but something bestowed by a great nation.
Did the fact that they had to earn it make joining America even more precious?
Yes. Of course.
We all know it is so often so different now. Perhaps a million illegal immigrants come into the United States each year, joining the 10 million or 20 million already here—nobody seems to know the number. Our borders are less borders than lines you cross if you want to. When you watch videotape of some of the illegal border crossings on a show like Lou Dobbs’s—who is not a senator or congressman but a media star and probably the premier anti-illegal-immigration voice in the country—what you absorb is a sense of anarchy, an utter collapse of authority.
It’s not good. It does not bode well.
* * *
The questions I bring to the subject are not about the flow of capital, the imminence of globalism or the implications of uncontrolled immigration on the size and cost of the welfare state. They just have to do with what it is to be human. What does it mean that your first act on entering a country—your first act on that soil—is the breaking of that country’s laws? What does it suggest to you when that country does nothing about your lawbreaking because it cannot, or chooses not to? What does that tell you? Will that make you a better future citizen, or worse? More respecting of the rule of law in your new home, or less?
If you assume or come to believe that that nation will not enforce its own laws for reasons that are essentially cynical, that have to do with the needs of big business or the needs of politicians, will that assumption or belief make you more or less likely to be moved by that country, proud of that country, eager to ally yourself with it emotionally, psychologically and spiritually?
When you don’t earn something or suffer to get it, do you value it less highly? If you value it less highly, will you bother to know it, understand it, study it? Will you bother truly to become part of it? When you are allowed to join a nation for free, as it were, and without the commitment of years of aboveboard effort, do you experience your joining that country as a blessing or as a successful con? If the latter, what was the first lesson America taught you?
These are questions that I think are behind a lot of the more passionate opposition to illegal immigration.
* * *
There are people who want to return to the old ways and rescue some of the old attitudes. There are groups that seek to restore border integrity. But they are denigrated by many, even the president, who has called them vigilantes. The New Yorker this week carries a mildly snotty piece by a writer named Daniel Kurtz-Phelan in which he interviews members of a group of would-be Minutemen who seek to watch our borders with Mexico and Canada. They are “running freelance patrols”; they are xenophobic; they dismiss critics as “communists” and “child molesters.” How nice to be patronized by young men whose place is so secure they have two last names. How nice to be looked down on for caring.
And they do care, that’s the thing. And pay a price for caring. They worry in part that what is happening on our borders can damage our country by eroding the sense of won citizenship that leads to the mutual investment and mutual respect—the togetherness, if that isn’t too corny—that all nations need to operate in the world and that our nation will especially need in the coming world.
This is what I fear about our elites in government and media, who will decide our immigration policy. It is that they will ignore the human questions and focus instead, as they have in the past, only on economic questions (we need the workers) and political ones (we need the Latino vote). They think that’s the big picture. It’s not. What goes on in the human heart is the big picture.
Again: What does it mean when your first act is to break the laws of your new country? What does it mean when you know you are implicitly supported in lawbreaking by that nation’s ruling elite? What does it mean when you know your new country doesn’t even enforce its own laws? What does it mean when you don’t even have to become an American once you join America?
* * *
Our elites are lucky people. They were born in a suburb, went to Yale and run the world from a desk. Which means this great question, immigration, is going to be decided by people who don’t know what it is to sleep on a bench. Who don’t know what it is to earn your space, your place. Who don’t know what it is to grieve the old country and embrace the new country. Who don’t know what it is to feel you’re a little on the outside and have to earn your way in to the inside. Who think it was without a cost, because it was without cost for them.
The problem with our elites as they make our immigration policy is not that they have compassion and open-mindedness. It is that they are unknowing and empty-headed. They don’t know, most of them, what others had to earn, and how much they, and their descendents, prize it and want to protect it.
Slow Down and Absorb
Open borders? Mass deportations? How about some common sense instead?
The Wall Street Journal: May 25, 2007
Why do people want to come here? Same reasons as 100 years ago. For a job. For opportunity. To rise. To be in a place where one generation you can be a bathroom attendant at a Brooklyn store and the next your boy can be the star of “Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour,” with everyone in the neighborhood listening on the radio, or, today, “American Idol,” with everyone watching and a million-dollar contract in the wings. To be in a place of weird magic where the lightning strikes. Boom: You got the job in the restaurant. Crack: Now you’re the manager. Boom: You’ve got a mortgage, you have a home.
“Never confuse movement with action,” said Ernest Hemingway. But America gives you both. What an awake place. And what a tortured and self-torturing one. Your own family will be embarrassed by you if you don’t rise, if you fall, if you fail. And the country itself is never perfect enough for its countrymen; we’re on a constant Puritan self-healing mission, a constant search-and-destroy-mission for our nation’s blemishes—racism, sexi
sm, ethnocentrism—out damn spots.
I asked myself a question this week and realized the answer is “Only one.” The question is: Have I ever known an immigrant to America who was lazy? I have lived on the East Coast all my life, mostly in New York, and immigrants both legal and illegal have been and are part of my daily life, from my childhood when they surrounded me to an adulthood in which they, well, surround me. And the only lazy one I knew was a young woman, 20, European, not mature enough to be fully herself, who actually wanted to be a good worker but found nightlife too alluring and hangovers too debilitating.
But she was the only one. And I think she went home.
Everyone else who comes here works hard, grindingly hard, and I admire them. But it’s more than that, I love them and I’m rooting for them. When I see them in church (it is Filipino women who taught me the right posture for prayer; Central Americans helped teach me the Bible) I want to kiss their hands. I want to say “Thank you.” They have enriched my life, and our country’s.
Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill’s Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay’s pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you’re not, you cur, you gun-totin’ truckdriver’s-hat-wearin’ yahoo. It’s all so complex, and you’d understand this if you weren’t sort of dumb.
But it’s not so complex. The past quarter century an unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants has crossed our borders. The flood is so great that no one—no one—can see or fully imagine all the many implications, all the country-changing facts of it. No one knows exactly what uncontrolled immigration is doing and will do to our country.
So what should we do?
* * *
We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we’ve eaten.
We should close our borders. We should do whatever it takes to close them tight and solid. Will that take the Army? Then send the Army. Does it mean building a wall? Then build a wall, but the wall must have doors, which can be opened a little or a lot down the road once we know where we are. Should all legal immigration stop? No. We should make a list of what our nation needs, such as engineers and nurses, and then admit a lot of engineers and nurses. We should take in what we need to survive and flourish.
As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven’t only joined a place of riches, it’s a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they’ve joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed. We stopped Americanizing ourselves 40 years ago. We’ve got to start telling the story of our country again.
As to the eight or 10 or 12 or 14 million illegals who are here—how interesting that our government doesn’t know the number—we should do nothing dramatic or fraught or unlike us. We should debate what to do, at length. Debate isn’t bad. There’s a lot to say. We can all join in. We should do nothing extreme, only things that are commonsensical.
Here is the truth: America has never deported millions of people, and America will never deport millions of people. It’s not what we do. It’s not who we are. It’s not who we want to be. The American people would never accept evening news pictures of sobbing immigrants being torn from their homes and put on a bus. We wouldn’t accept it because we have hearts, and as much as we try to see history in the abstract, we know history comes down to the particular, to the sobbing child in the bus. We don’t round up and remove. Nor should we, tomorrow, on one of our whims, grant full legal status and a Cadillac car. We take it a day at a time. We wait and see what’s happening. We do the small discrete things a nation can do to make the overall situation better. For instance: “You commit a violent crime? You are so out of here.” And, “Here, let me help you learn English.”
* * *
Let’s take time and find out if the immigrants who are here see their wages click up and new benefits kick in as the endless pool stops expanding. It would be good to see them gain. Let’s find out if it’s true that Americans won’t stoop to any of the jobs illegals do. I don’t think it is. Years ago I worked in a florist shop removing the thorns from roses. It was painful work and I was happy to do it, and I am very American. I was a badly paid waitress in the Holiday Inn on Route 3 in New Jersey.
The young will do a great deal, and not only the young. The dislike for Americans evinced by the Americans-won’t-do-hard-work crowd is, simply, astonishing, and shameful. It says more about the soft and ignorant lives they lived in Kennebunkport and Greenwich than it does about the American people.
Digest, absorb, teach. Settle in, settle down, protect our country.
Happy Memorial Day.
We Need to Talk
America can’t afford to lose its common language.
The Wall Street Journal: July 6, 2007
It is late afternoon in Manhattan on the Fourth of July, and I’m walking along on Lexington and 59th, in front of Bloomingdale’s. Suddenly in my sight there’s a young woman standing on a street grate. She is short, about 5 feet tall, and stocky, with a broad brown face. She is, I think, Latin American, maybe of Indian blood. She has a big pile of advertisements in her hand, and puts one toward me. “MENS SUITS NEW YORK—40% to 60% Off Sale!—Armani, Canali, Hugo Boss, DKNY, Zegna. TAILOR ON PREMISES. EXCELLENT SERVICE LARGE SELECTION.” Then the address and phone number.
You might have seen this person before. She’s one of a small army of advertisement giver-outers in New York. Which means her life right now consists of standing in whatever weather and trying to give passersby a thing most of them don’t want. If this is her regular job, she spends most of her time being rebuffed or ignored by busy people blurring by. You should always take an advertisement, or 10, from the advertisement giver-outers, just to give them a break, because once they give out all the ads, they can go back and get paid. So I took the ad and thanked her and walked on.
And then, half a block later, I turned around. I thought of a woman I’d met recently who had gone through various reverses in life and now had a new job, as a clerk in the back room of a store. She was happy to have it, a new beginning. But there was this thing: They didn’t want to pay for air conditioning, so she sweltered all day. This made her want to weep, just talking about it. Ever since that conversation, I have been so grateful for my air conditioning. I had forgotten long ago to be grateful for it.
Anyway, I look back at the woman on the street grate. It’s summer and she’s in heavy jeans and a black sweatshirt with a hood. On top of that, literally, she’s wearing a sandwich board—MENS SUITS NEW YORK. Her hair is long and heavy, her ponytail limp on her shoulders. She’s out here on a day when everybody else, as she well knows—the streets are not crowded—is at a ballgame or the beach. Everyone else is off.
So I turned around and went back. I wanted to say something—I don’t know what, find out where she was from, encourage her. I said hello, and she looked at me and I patted her arm and said, “Happy Fourth of July, my friend.” She was startled and then shy, and she smiled and made a sound, and I realized: She doesn’t speak English. “God bless you,” I said, because a little while in America and you know the word “God” just as 10 minutes in Mexico and you learn the word “Dios.” And we both smiled and nodded and I left.
I went into Bloomingdale’s and wrote these words: “We must speak the same language so we can hearten each other.”
* * *
The question of whether America should have an “official language,” of whether English should be formally declared our “national language,” is bubbling, and will be back, in Congress, the next few sessions.
When you look at papers outlining the facts of the debate, things break down into dryness very quickly. Should “issues of language diversi
ty” be resolved by imposing “linguistic uniformity”? This is like asking if the robots should speak logarithmically or algorithmically. There are few things you can rely on in this turbulent world, but one is the tendency of academics to use language poorly, even when discussing language.
But there’s something odd about the English question. It feels old-fashioned. Because we all know America has an official language, and a national language, and that it is English. In France they speak French, and in China they speak Chinese. In Canada they have two national languages, but that’s one reason Canada often seems silly. They don’t even know what language they dream in.
The real question, ultimately, is whether America wants to go that route. Should we allow America to devolve into a nation of two official languages—in this case, following recent demographic trends and realities, English and Spanish?
We’ve never done that in more than 200 years. It would be radical, and destructive, to do it now.
We speak English here. It’s a great language, luckily, a rich one. It’s how we do government and business. It’s the language of the official life, the outer life, in America. As for the inner life of America, the language of the family, it would be just as odd to change longtime tradition there, which has always been: Anything goes. You speak what you came over speaking, and you learn the new language. Italian immigrants knew two languages, English and Italian. They enriched the first with the second—this was a great gift to all of us—and wound up with greater opportunities for personal communication to boot. Talk about win-win. And so with every group, from every place.