Toward a Better Life

by Peter Morton Coan

  The 1960s were a historic decade for immigration, as America's current system of legal immigration dates back to that time. In 1965, Congress amended immigration law by supplanting the national origins quota system with a preference system designed to reunite immigrant families and attract skilled workers. This change in national policy meant that the majority of applicants for immigration visas were now coming from Asia, Mexico, and Central and South America, rather than from Europe. It marked a radical break with previous immigration policy and has led to profound demographic changes in America. But that's not how the law was viewed when it was passed at the height of the civil rights movement, during a period when the ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality had captured the nation.

  KEY HISTORIC EVENTS

  1960:

  Cuban refugees paroled into the United States.

  1962:

  Special permission granted for admission of Hong Kong refugees.

  1963:

  President Kennedy urges Congress to pass new legislation eliminating the national origins quota system.

  1965:

  President Johnson signs into law the Immigration and Nationality Act or Hart-Celler Act, a historic immigration bill because it abolishes the restrictive national origins quota system, which established country-by-country quotas that discriminated against southern Europeans and Asians. The new measure provides for admission on the basis of skills and family reunification.

  1966: The Cuban Adjustment Act provides permanent residence for Cubans admitted into the United States after January 1, 1959.

  1969:

  President Nixon signs a bill amending the Immigration and Nationality Act by removing its prohibition against acquiring citizenship within sixty days prior to a general election.

  MIGRATION FLOWS

  Total legal US immigration in 1960s: 3.22 million

  Top ten emigration countries in this decade: Mexico (441,824), Canada and Newfoundland (433,128), United Kingdom (220,213), Germany (209,616), Cuba (202,030), Italy (200,111), Dominican Republic (83,552), Greece (74,173), Philippines (70,660), Portugal (70,568)

  (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:

  Yo-Yo Ma, France, 1960, concert cellist

  Carlos Santana, Mexico, 1960, rock guitarist

  David Byrne, Scotland, 1960, musician (Talking Heads)

  Seiji Ozawa, Japan, 1960, conductor

  Plácido Domingo, Spain via Mexico, 1961, tenor/conductor

  Andy Garcia, Cuba, 1961, actor

  Zubin Mehta, India, 1961, conductor

  Oscar de la Renta, Dominican Republic, 1963, fashion designer

  José Canseco, Cuba, 1964, baseball player

  David Ho, Taiwan, 1964, AIDS research pioneer

  Peter Jennings, Canada, 1964, broadcast journalist

  John Cleese, England, 1965, actor/comedian

  Wayne Wang, Hong Kong, 1966, film director

  Neil Young, Canada, 1967, singer-songwriter

  Eddie Van Halen, Netherlands, 1967, electric guitarist

  Leonard Cohen, Canada, 1967, singer-songwriter

  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austria, 1968, actor/politician

  Deepak Chopra, India, 1968, self-help guru

  Emilio Estefan, Cuba via Spain, 1968, music producer

  Daisy Fuentes, Cuba, 1969, model

  Dave Matthews, South Africa, 1969, singer-songwriter

  She emigrated from Cartagena, Colombia, when she was five years old and grew up in New York and Miami. Out of five siblings, she is the only member of her family to go to college. Today she is a nationally recognized public-interest immigration lawyer in Boston, an expert on immigrants' rights who has frequently lectured on the subject. An accomplished writer, she is the author of two poetry collections and the recipient of a prestigious national poetry prize from the University of California, and she recently published her first novel, Try to Remember, which draws on her personal experiences growing up as a Latina in Miami and her experiences as an immigration lawyer. “There's nothing more rewarding than feeling like you're able to earn a livelihood by helping others who are in more difficult circumstances than yourself,” she said. “I really believe that's the greatest way to have meaning—to feel that when I leave this world, I will have hopefully done something to have made it a little bit better for others.”

  I was born in Cartagena, Colombia, right on the Caribbean coast, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I lived there until I was five years old, and my extended family continues to live there. I was just back recently, and I brought my kids and my husband, and it's much developed now in the sense that the old colonial buildings, its heritage really, were all cleaned up, repainted, and propped up so that they would endure. But it's still preserved—its beautiful colonial character, and the balconies and the narrow streets with beautiful poetic names and the walls that go around the city. The Spanish built many of the forts in a similar way as in Cartagena, a very similar style of architecture.

  We came to America in 1960. We came by plane. My father had come the year before and gotten a job in the New York City area. And so when we first arrived, he and an uncle were already working, so we emigrated the following year and made our way through several different housing arrangements until we finally got an apartment in Queens. My father worked in factories that probably no longer exist.

  Unfortunately, when it came to learning English, I had to sink or swim when we first arrived in New York. I went to school, and I'll never forget the first days, just sitting there and not understanding anything that was going on except for people's gestures. Sometimes I think maybe it made me a better writer because it caused me to have to listen very acutely to what people were trying to convey, and I think that sort of helps you to be a good depicter of how people communicate.

  Both my parents, particularly my father, really wanted the children to have a better life, and he struggled because he was one of eleven brothers and sisters and he lost his father at a young age. And so no one had a higher education or even the opportunity for that, and he really wanted that for his kids, and he really believed in the American Dream and saved up the money to bring his family here. At that time, there were three children, and my parents had two more when we got to the United States, but that was their hope: that we would live out the American Dream by getting a college education and doing better for ourselves than they had been able to do with working-class employment.

  We were fortunate in that we were able to buy a house. We later moved to Miami, where a lot of our extended family had settled, and that was a time when the south Florida real estate market was much more affordable, so that people who worked in factories and were single breadwinners could actually accomplish that.

  I was the oldest, so I was able to go to college. I went to Michigan State and eventually to law school and to graduate school. But my siblings ended up not going to college. My older brother went into the service and held ordinary employment jobs in Miami. Another brother died when I was twenty-one. My next younger brother became a UPS worker and committed suicide. I was already away in law school in Boston at the time, so I wasn't privy to all the details of what was happening in his life. He was still living at home. It was a real tragedy and a heartbreak for my mother, as you could imagine. My father had already died by then, so it was very sad and hard on her.

  We went to Florida in ‘67, and for me it was a really wonderful experience in some ways because the growth of the Cuban community was just taking off down there and I felt a real home in my relationships with friends in my neighborhood, which was increasingly becoming a place where Cubans, as they got settled, got the support they needed as refugees to then buy houses, so our neighborhood in southwest Miami became very Hispanic. I found a sense of community in that culture even though we were Colombian, but I felt very grateful to have peers who were living l
ike me in an American society, but also had families where Old World culture, traditions, and customs were very much a part of our consciousness.

  I pursued writing; I just didn't pursue it as a career. I have always written since I was a young girl. I had a great interest in poetry; I just loved to write. I was always very good in my English classes. I edited my high school newspaper, and then in college I took courses in the writing program even as I was earning what was called a Community Services degree because I knew I wanted to have a job working with low-income communities. Then in law school I went to Boston University School of Law. I took courses in the graduate writing program in poetry while I was in law school just for the joy of it, so I've always kept my hand in it as a labor of love.

  The great thing about my novel is that I was able to tell two important stories. One is the immigrant experience and coming-of-age experience of a Latina in a culture that is very strong in family values and in honoring your family and being true to them, but also there's a part of a society that expects young women to become independent and autonomous. How does a girl from a traditional culture navigate that without betraying either herself or her family?

  Miami came from its roots in the old South. It was a quiet and sleepy town. There was always some degree of diversity, certainly in the African-American community that had been there a long time. There was, for example, the Bahamian culture that rose up in the Coconut Grove area, but in general, the city had some racial diversity but it had not been developed that much. The drainage of the Everglades was a process that took time and eventually freed up the land in south Florida so that as migration was occurring from both the north and the Cuban exodus, there was land available to be developed. So as that process escalated, Miami grew up really fast and became very international, very cosmopolitan. So I thought it was a really beautiful setting for the coming-of-age, multicultural experience such as that of Gabriela, the protagonist in my novel: a person who is forced to grow up quickly in circumstances that involve not just her own family but a larger society that itself is changing. So for me that was an interesting way of telling people about how Miami changed because nowadays people go down there and no one would even imagine that Miami was once this sort of sleepy place with canals and newly finished sidewalks that is now just so shiny and large and the gateway to commerce with Latin America, and just completely different.

  For me, I had a very positive experience growing up in Miami. There were not that many Colombians. Now the Colombian community in Miami has just flourished. It's an enormous population down there. The Central Americans also grew in large numbers between the time of the Cuban diaspora to today, but when I was there I felt a lot of affinity. Now it could be that the part of Colombia where I'm from, Cartagena, is a coastal area that shares many similarities with other Caribbean cities in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, so perhaps I was drawn and felt immediately at home with the food and the music and their way of speaking Spanish. Everything resonated with me, so I think I had a very wonderful Latinization process in that respect. I did not feel a sense of competition—which perhaps did exist, but it wasn't my experience.

  The other story I wanted to tell in the novel, which draws on this other part of my life, is my career as an immigration attorney. I wanted to tell about the unique reality of lawful immigrants, people with green cards, who are allowed to be here and are not the undocumented people we hear about so much in the press. Yet they are subjected to many of the same rules that apply only to immigrants, so that they can lose their green cards easier than a US citizen who would never lose their right to be in the States. I felt that story was very much a part of my professional experience and has really broken my heart time and time again. I wanted to tell that story so that one could reflect on the morality of that kind of double standard and how it affects the immigrant's sense of whether or not he or she is included as an equal member of society.

  In some respects, the culture is very welcoming, in the sense that we have this very noble tradition here of being what the Statue of Liberty embodies: a place where people can find refuge. And in Massachusetts, I also feel we have a really wonderful tradition in that respect. For instance, Senator [Edward] Kennedy was behind the [1980] US Refugee Act, which I am so proud of—that we were able to enact a law that really eliminated barriers, so that people would not be persecuted and they'd actually be able to get legal protection here. So I think on the one hand, that is a wonderful tradition, but I do believe that many of the laws have gone too far, such as those that involve the commission of crimes by immigrants who are lawfully here. And so, for example, in the novel, the father is losing his mind and he doesn't understand what's happening to him and his experience is very unpredictable, and so his conduct is also unpredictable. So when he gets into trouble with the law and potentially hurts someone, it raises the question: Should he be punished beyond whatever the ordinary criminal consequences are with exile? Loss of legal status? Loss of his home in the United States? To my mind, I think that's too harsh a penalty and it interferes with the ability of immigrants to have faith that they really are as welcome as the Statue of Liberty and the cultural message suggest. So it creates a sense that there's a double standard.

  The organization I work for is a legal services institution—legal policy work, litigation, training, education materials—all aimed at bettering the lives of low-income people. And then my focus is on low-income immigrants in our state [Massachusetts]. So I will do all kinds of things, ranging from training public and government officials about the different kinds of immigration statuses and documents, to suing the government or an entity that is violating the rights of immigrants, to trying to persuade the government that a particular policy or interpretation that hurts low-income immigrants ought to be reconsidered or adapted or changed. So, for example, the Haitian earthquake victims were given temporary protected status. We are involved in efforts to make sure that the information about the details of that status is distributed to people in the Haitian community, including the clergy. So this is my way of giving back. There's nothing more rewarding than feeling like you're able to earn a livelihood by helping others who are in more difficult circumstances than yourself. I really believe that's the greatest way to have meaning—to feel that when I leave this world, I will have hopefully done something to have made it a little bit better for others.

  As for the Arizona controversy, as a matter of law, I think that the litigation that has been filed by all the national groups against the law will ultimately prevail because the states are not supposed to be in the business of regulating immigration. But on a deeper level, I think it's very tragic because what it means is it sends a message—not just to undocumented people or, in this case, undocumented Latinos—that immigrants aren't welcome in Arizona, and that's very inhospitable and sad, and it can only hurt Arizona.

  There are two key aspects to this. One is the mythology that immigrants are committing crimes, which is not borne out. Pretty much if you read any study, go to the American Immigration Council or online and find recent data specific to Arizona, which shows that immigrants actually commit lower levels of crime than the native born, and that immigrant crime rates go up the longer their time here in America because this is where they learned it. [She laughs at the irony.]

  So protection against crime is not a valid, rational justification for it. As far as the federal government's abdication of its duty to act, I agree that the federal government should be enacting legislation to rationalize our immigration law system, which has been broken for a long time. The right way for the state to address that is to pass other kinds of resolutions, perhaps encouraging Congress to use its clout to influence its own leadership to act on immigration reforms rather than simply enact the laws themselves. And that would be an equally valid and democratic response that would be legal, and Arizona would not be shooting itself in the foot.

  I have found that most immigrants want to work and make their own way, even though
there is a public perception that they wish to take advantage of public benefits. That's counter to my own experience. My experience, from young people to old people, is that they want to work and need a legal avenue for doing so and getting work permission. I've recently been working a great deal with the students, the young people—we call them the “DREAMERS.” They're part of the movement to reform not only the entire immigration system but create a pathway for children who came here as undocumented kids brought here by their parents, perhaps as infants, and they have grown up here with essentially all the same aspirations as kids who are native born, but they get to a point in their lives where they can't get to college or can't get jobs because, lo and behold, they don't have legal documentation. It's called the DREAM Act, and it's pending in Congress.

  It's a very promising piece of legislation that, if enacted, would allow young people who have lived here for a certain number of years, and who are planning to go into the service or to college, to access instate tuition in the state where they live and a path to obtain legal status. I'm on the board of directors for NILC [National Immigration Law Center], but I've had organizational clients who are involved in championing that legislation, so I have a lot to do with it and supporting them. And it's been very interesting: as I've been going around reading from my book or talking about it, some of these students have come to my readings and then talked to me afterward about their life experiences….

  Anything that would be legislated by Congress would have to be a compromise of all the different interests in this area from all sides. But some of the elements that I think would rationalize the immigration laws so that they make more sense for the future are some sort of a legalization program for the people who have been here working hard, contributing to our society, paying taxes—who want the same thing we all want, which is security [and] to be able to bring our kids up right. And secondly, the numerical limitations on bringing relatives to the United States are just completely unrealistic. You shouldn't have waiting lists for a sibling to be reunited with his or her lawful relatives. The numbers are not logical anymore. They don't really fit with today's realities and the global nature of our society. And thirdly, this whole issue of fairness and proportion in how we treat people once they're here, like the one I've written about in my novel, about subjecting people to loss of their green cards many years later for very small crimes that, if committed by a citizen, would not incur such a harsh penalty.