|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
Refilling the Reservoir
| Article
# : |
16391 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
2,438 Words |
| Author
: |
Robert C. Christopher
Robert C. Christopher, the author of the Japanese Mind: The
Goliath Explained; Second to None: American Companies in
Japan; and Crashing the Gates: The De-Wasping of America's
Power Elite, is administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes and
adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism,
Columbia University. |
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
... (1993 of 14663 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
