Toward a Better Life
Page 3
Well, we've done that. In a little over two hundred years, the country has grown up. The West has been settled. There is no more “California Dreamin'.” With the country conquered from sea to shining sea, there is precious little land left to develop. The great westward push has turned inward to the few remaining open spaces left in middle America. This once holy ground, traversed by native Americans across the Great Plains and European settlers forging blindly ahead in rickety Conestoga wagons and on horseback, is now the growing domain of new immigrants: Latinos (mainly Mexicans), but also Bosnians, Sudanese, Iraqis, Laotians, and others from all walks of life who have come to America's heartland in search of the same “golden promise” once extended to their predecessors. This promise was best symbolized by the Statue of Liberty after its October 28, 1886, unveiling in New York Harbor. Today, as open land slowly recedes and economic opportunity with it; as ethnic enclaves that gave neighborhoods their distinctive character and charm disappear; as whole towns become annexed, gobbled up with Pac-Man-like efficiency, to form the endless suburbs of cities; as America's once mighty manufacturing economy has become a hollow service sector led by low-wage jobs and an endless loop of mind-numbing strip malls and disingenuous corporate brands, which have homogenized the face of America—from Pasadena to Maine, it all looks the same—new immigrants, for the first time, have begun to question whether coming here is still the answer. After the start of the economic crisis in 2007, we experienced for the first time “reverse immigration,” whereby many immigrants returned home unable to find work, and the unprecedented trend of “reverse revenue,” in which Mexican families actually began sending money north to the United States to help support relatives who could not find employment. Have the light and luster from the original promise of Lady Liberty begun to dim?
Yes, the world has changed. The game has changed. Immigration has changed. But the fact remains that for many, America is still their best bet.
What has made life harder for new immigrants is their difficulty in obtaining a visa at a US consulate. US visa laws have changed significantly and become much more complex since the days of Ellis Island. The visas today are, by and large, limited to the educated, the affluent, or those who have parents or spouses in the United States. “If the ancestors of most Americans had tried to immigrate to America under today's rules,” said one immigration attorney, “their American Dream would have ended at the docks because they wouldn't have been able to get on the boat.”
This has consequently created a huge surge in illegal immigration that involves risks many are prepared to take to escape poverty, exit the Third World, and enter the First World. There's a never-ending stream of customers waiting to take their chances. They may go on their own or pay guides known as “coyotes.” In 2009 alone, more than three hundred thousand people were arrested for crossing the sixty-mile stretch of California–Mexico border known as the “Tortilla Curtain.” US border patrols sit and wait: each patrol truck armed with guns, helicopter backup overhead, and state-of-the-art night-vision surveillance equipment with which patrols can easily spot illegal immigrants crouching in the dark because their body heat appears luminous on the surveillance screen. Like moths to flame, the immigrants don't have a chance, except to scatter and hope that there's enough distraction so that one or two can slip through undetected.
Save sneaking across the border or hiding in the cargo hold of a boat, plane, or tanker ship, the usual scenario (for those lucky enough to get a US visa) is for a visitor to come here as a student or on holiday and simply stay. Then, over time, the new immigrant finds a sponsor to get a permanent resident alien card (“green card”), marries an American citizen, or pays someone to be their spouse. In the latter scenario, the husband and wife appear at the immigration interview for the green card, providing all the necessary paperwork to make it appear that they are a loving, married couple living under one roof. Once the green card is in hand, the “couple” go their separate ways.
In recent years, illegal immigration at the Mexican border has escalated, though statistics vary widely; one number puts illegal immigration at more than two million people entering the United States in 2009. The migration is largely influenced by the drug trade. “Drugs are the Microsoft of Mexico,” said David Cardoza, a senior California Border Patrol agent for more than twenty years. “This trade has infiltrated into the United States at a massive rate with many of the illegal immigrants stuck in the middle and some getting involved.” Drug cartels and gang killings have turned border cities and towns into war zones, but some operations are sophisticated. In a recent bust, US authorities discovered thirty tons of marijuana that were part of a smuggling operation using a tunnel under the California–Mexico border. The 600-yard tunnel, like something out of a James Bond film, featured a high-tech rail system, lighting, and ventilation; it connected a warehouse in Tijuana with one in an industrial area south of San Diego. The problem has become epidemic, to the extent of spawning a reality show called Border Wars on the National Geographic Channel. But it wasn't until a wealthy Arizona rancher, along with his dog, was shot dead by an illegal alien on his property near the Mexican border that push came to shove: in 2010, Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law. The controversial measure requires Arizona police officers to question anyone they reasonably suspect of being an illegal alien as to their immigration status, and to detain them if they cannot provide proof of their status. Critics of the legislation said it encourages racial profiling; supporters said the law simply enforces existing federal law. Either way, this was not exactly immigration's finest hour.
I hope you will find that taken as a collective, the stories in Toward a Better Life form a moving elegy of the human longing for freedom. In one sense, this book is the ultimate reality show, with stories of love and loss, sorrow and sacrifice, inspiration and success—a poignant meditation on the ebb and flow of the hopes and dreams of immigrants everywhere who decided to gamble it all and come to America in their quest for a better life.
My inspiration to write this book came from readers. During public speaking engagements and book signings over the years, people often came up to me, asked when I was going to write a book about today's immigrants, and expressed how they are nothing like our Ellis Island ancestors.
It wasn't until modern-day immigration stampeded my own backyard that I became motivated. I had recently married for the second time, and though I had already personally lived through the immigration process with my first wife in the 1980s, I did not remember any of this being the nightmare undertaking I was about to endure while helping my second wife get her green card in 2008. I well understood that Immigration and Naturalization authorities had always been concerned that new immigrants carry their weight so as not to become public charges, but what I encountered was ridiculous. There were rigorous background checks and seemingly endless requests for paperwork, substantiating not just income, but ample income plus savings, investments, you name it. The necessary fees, including the attorney's, were absolutely egregious!
In the past, when people came through Ellis Island, all they needed, by and large, was a ton of courage, somebody to vouch for them, and maybe some cash stashed in their shirt.
What had changed?
After experiencing the excruciating journey through the immigration process with my second wife to get her a green card and permanent legal status, I thought: This is insane. My wife and I are well educated and reasonably OK financially; what do people without such wherewithal do? How is the new immigrant experience different from the Ellis Island era?
I had to find out.
To best understand America's new immigrants, one must first understand America's old ones. As a result, Toward a Better Life is written in two parts. The first part covers the Ellis Island era (1892–1954); the second one, America's new immigrants in the modern era (1954–2010). In this way, the book seamlessly bridges the old world of immigration with the new one and tracks 120 years of American immigration, dec
ade by decade, through the first-person accounts of the immigrants who actually lived it. The book tells their stories in their words—sometimes sad or angry, other times joyous, tragic, or bittersweet, but always honest, candid confessions told straight from their heart and their lips. These come from ordinary people doing extraordinary things like fifteen-year-old Ava Rado-Harte's late-night escape to Austria during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the bittersweet story of New York City doorman and Austrian immigrant Steve Keschl, and they come from celebrities like the von Trapp family portrayed in the movie The Sound of Music and Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” and his dramatic story of blind determination to cross the border from Mexico.
Each chapter covers a decade in American history, with firsthand immigrant stories representative of that decade. The immigrant stories contained in each chapter appear chronologically in order of the year of emigration and essentially answer three fundamental questions: Why did they leave their homeland? What did they endure in coming here? And what subsequently became of them and their family?
The immigrants selected for this book were chosen because their stories were representative of their nationality for their decade, but also because their stories were both unique and compelling. Since 120 years of immigration is being covered, the goal was to be not comprehensive, but rather representative, and provide a balanced mix of stories across nationality, gender, geography, occupation, and time lines—for both the famous and common folk alike—to give you, the reader, a real sense of the complexity of American immigration and how it has changed over time. This is important because each decade has experienced a different immigration profile, and so migration flows are researched on a decade-by-decade basis (see appendix).
There were dozens of wonderful stories that did not make the final cut for the book. So what you have here, as part of the distillation process, are the very best stories. Rather than providing shorter stories and more of them, I chose quality over quantity, and decided to focus on providing fewer stories that went into greater length, depth, and detail about the lives of each immigrant. Stories where the emotion was strongest tended to be the most accurate and telling. I therefore let the stories go where the emotion took them. Some stories centered on the “old country” or “homeland”; others ended soon after arrival here, while still others extended through the assimilation process in America. It depended on the material. I edited to avoid redundancy, and I moved material only when necessary to preserve chronology so that their stories would make sense. At all times, I preserved their voice. Some of the immigrants chosen for the Ellis Island era came from interviews originally done by National Park Service personnel for the Ellis Island Oral History Project, with follow-up interviews by me during the 1990s to confirm facts and gather additional information (which invariably jarred their memory, however faded, for another anecdote or two). Many of these immigrants were advanced in age then, and virtually all have since passed away; these were not issues (old age, memory loss) when I interviewed the new immigrants of the modern era.
If there was any personal indulgence on my part in writing this book, it would be my love of cooking, French cuisine in particular. So I particularly enjoyed sharing immigrant stories of some of the world's great French chefs. I permitted myself this opportunity only because the food industry is a natural entry point for new immigrants, both legal and not, to earn a living, and for employers it's an opportunity to save money by hiring cheap labor “off the books.”
I would like to thank several people in connection with this book. Usually this is the part where the author overzealously, and sometimes disingenuously, thanks everybody involved with the project or not so involved with the project, or even those who had nothing to do with the project, turning a two-paragraph exercise into three pages of pretentious hyperbole. I have been guilty of this in the past, and I promised myself I would not do it here. No mothers-in-law. No fifth-grade history teachers. No thanking people who don't deserve to be thanked. So, out of respect to you, the reader, here goes:
I would like to thank all of the immigrants who so kindly cooperated to be interviewed for this book, in particular Cesar Millan, Jorge Munoz, Iris Gomez, Yakub “Jay” Shimunov, Gail Boliver, Martha Garcia, Johannes von Trapp, Maria von Trapp, Jacques Torres, Alain Sailhec, Ariane Daguin, Jacques Pépin, Ava Rado-Harte, Steve Keschl, and legendary French chef André Soltner. I would also like to thank Jeff Dosik of the Ellis Island Museum; Peg Zitko of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation; Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute; Patricia Brennan for her meticulous copyediting of the manuscript; photographers Cengiz Ozdemir and Mustafa Kizilcay; my literary agent, David Fugate at Launch Books, for his consummate professionalism and infectious enthusiasm; the whole crew at Prometheus Books, especially editor Linda Regan; and, of course, Ellis Island historian Barry Moreno for writing the foreword; Stephen Briganti, president and CEO of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation for writing the preface; and my family: to my wife, Nur, for her love and inspiration, to Harry Weinberg and Rhona Liptzin, and to my daughters, Melissa and Sara, for joining me on some long car trips.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I would like to thank new immigrants everywhere, who have made the decision, for one reason or another, to take a leap of faith and come to America in search of a better life. Welcome!
Peter Morton Coan
This decade was dominated by the depression of the 1890s, which was on par with the Great Depression of the 1930s. A deep agricultural crisis hit Southern cotton-growing regions and the Great Plains. The shock waves reached Wall Street and urban areas by 1893 as part of a massive worldwide economic crisis. A quarter of the nation's railroads went bankrupt; in some cities, unemployment among industrial workers exceeded 35 percent.
KEY HISTORIC EVENTS
Immigration to America began in 1607 at Jamestown, Virginia. In the pre–Ellis Island era, traditional large-scale immigration began with the Irish potato famine in the 1840s, leading up to the 1890s, the Ellis Island era, to present day.
1846:
Irish potato famine triggers large-scale emigration to the United States.
1848:
Chinese immigration spikes with start of California Gold Rush.
1855:
Castle Garden opens as an immigrant reception station in New York City to accommodate mass immigration.
1861–1865:
During the American Civil War, large numbers of immigrants serve the military on both sides.
1880:
US population exceeds fifty-one million; more than 6.4 million immigrants enter the country between 1880 and 1890.
1882: Chinese Exclusion Act curbs Chinese immigration; first federal immigration law bars “lunatics, idiots, convicts” and those likely to become “public charges.”
1886:
The Statue of Liberty is dedicated, ironically, just when resistance to unrestricted immigration begins to escalate.
1890:
New York is home to as many Germans as Hamburg, Germany, is. Pogroms in Russia trigger significant Jewish immigration to the United States.
1891:
The Bureau of Immigration is established to administer immigration laws. Congress adds health qualifications to immigration restrictions: “the insane, paupers, persons with contagious diseases, polygamists and persons convicted of felonies or misdemeanors of moral turpitude are barred from entering the United States.”
1892:
Ellis Island replaces Castle Garden as the reception station for immigrants; Chinese immigration to the United States is prohibited for ten years.
1893:
Economic depression widens.
1894:
The restrictionist movement emphasizes the distinction between “old” (northern and western European) and “new” (southern and eastern European) immigrants.
1897:
President Cleveland vetoes literacy tests for immigrants. A fire on Ellis Island destroys
buildings; no lives are lost, but many years of federal and state immigration records are burned along with the pine buildings, so the US Treasury orders that all future structures on Ellis Island be fireproof. During reconstruction, immigrant processing temporarily moves from the island to the Barge Office in New York City until the new “fireproof” Ellis Island buildings are built, of stone instead of wood, in 1900.
MIGRATION FLOWS
Total legal US immigration in 1890s: 3.7 million
Top ten emigration countries in this decade: Italy (603,761), Germany (579,072), Russia (450,101), Ireland (405,710), United Kingdom (328,759), Austria (268,218), Sweden (237,248), Hungary (203,350), Poland (107,793), Norway (96,810)
(See appendix for the complete list of countries.)
FAMOUS IMMIGRANTS
Immigrants who came to America in this decade, and who would later become famous, include:
Gus Kahn, Germany, 1890, lyricist
Annie Moore, Ireland, 1892, pioneer
Antonín Dvorák, Czechoslovakia, 1892, composer
Rudyard Kipling, England, 1892, writer
Irving Berlin, Russia, 1893, composer
Francis Hodur, Poland, 1893, priest
Knute Rockne, Norway, 1893, football coach
Warner Oland (“Charlie Chan”), Sweden, 1893, actor
Frank Costello, Italy, 1893, gangster
Mary Antin, Russia, 1894, writer
Felix Frankfurter, Austria, 1894, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Asa Yoelson (“Al Jolson”), Lithuania, 1894, actor/singer
Kahlil Gibran, Lebanon, 1895, writer
Al Dubin, Switzerland, 1896, lyricist (“We're in the Money”)
Samuel Goldwyn, Poland, 1896, producer
Moses Teichman (“Arthur Murray”), Austria-Hungary, 1897, dancer
James Naismith, Canada, 1898, inventor (basketball)