Intro to Immigrant Voices
Hutner, Gordon. “Introduction” Immigrant Voices, Volume 2 (pp. xvi-xviii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Introduction

As a kind of birthright, Americans grow up with the idea that theirs is a “nation of immigrants,” and of course it has been and continues to be. But does this phrase have the same resonance in every generation or even every century? Questions about what kind of and how many immigrants we should have are now as controversial a subject as they have ever been in our past. For at every stage of the history of American immigration, our vigorous welcome of so many of the world’s tired and huddled masses was not something about which everyone agreed. Despite our cherished ideal that this country should be understood as a grand melting pot, there have typically been great detractors throughout our history who have challenged this faith in the vitality of an ever-diverse nation. Yet for all the resentment sometimes greeting newcomers, we should also discern the nation’s abiding passion for the potential growth that immigrants carry with them, whether they arrive here to meet a labor shortage or to escape persecution in their homelands or merely to join in the American pursuit of happiness.

A century ago and longer, immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Russia, Eastern Europe, and China were especially viewed as objects of suspicion. Immigration from Asia, the Middle East, as well as Central and South America, was, for many years, discouraged, even denied; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese laborers for ten years, a law renewed in 1892, made permanent in 1902, and not repealed until 1943. A similar statute, the Asian Exclusion Act (1924), forbade immigration from India, Korea, and Japan as well as from the Middle East. And immigration from Africa was nearly as difficult.

What was behind this atmosphere of mistrust? It was less the case, as it is now sometimes expressed, that immigrants would create an undue demand on U.S. social services, largely because social services were not yet federalized in the early years of the twentieth century. Instead, nativist anxieties hinged on two kinds of fears: economic and social. The first focused on the conjecture that immigrants would eventually develop and control wealth and that it would be disposed according to their loyalty to their church, if they were Catholic, or to their homelands, especially if they were non-Europeans. Immigration was also imagined to threaten social stability, especially through racial and ethnic mixing, which would contaminate the American gene pool. This fear of diluting the nation’s northern and western European “stock” is a biological and sociological fallacy that has long been discredited, though one can hear it articulated even now. Compounding such concerns was the worry that immigrants would also import dangerous political ideas from abroad, such as views opposing capitalism and the presiding understanding of the nation’s democratic ideals. That so many of these despised immigrants were Catholics, Jews, and Asians further contributed to this America-for-Americans prejudice, an anxiety that politicians readily exploited.

Despite these worries, the story of the successful assimilation of a multicultural immigrant population is among the most brilliant chapters in modern U.S. social history. And these immigrants’ rise from generally low origins—during the rise of industrialism, they were much more often peasants than people with trades or professions—into the middle class is an epic tale that gives the phrase “a nation of immigrants” its meaning, perhaps even its glory. This tale is recounted time and again in the novels and tales that immigrants wrote about the challenges of achieving cultural citizenship. Perhaps even more popular were the first-person chronicles of coming to America and of becoming Americans. For one crucial way of conducting the argument over who can and ought to be citizens—and who should not—is found in the rich literary record that immigrants have left behind.

Such autobiographies are often written partly as accounts of how to flourish in one’s adopted country. So it is unsurprising that they often include practical lessons: say this; don’t do that; dress this way. But their more enduring value lies in how they also address the mainstream populace, readers who took up these memoirs both for the vitality of the stories they told and for keeping up with changes in the culture. Written as they are in English, these accounts specifically appeal to the host culture’s interests, while also advertising an author’s mastery of the language as a sign of successful assimilation. Explicitly and implicitly, these books present their authors’ case for belonging, as if to demonstrate for the audience of the native-born that immigrants have a great deal to offer and that they in their own way have a vast potential to make the U.S. an even better place. In this sense, such autobiographies are both personal documents—the story of my exemplary past—and public ones—an understanding of our nation’s shared future. If so much immigrant writing was spurred by the need to model how success in the U.S. might be achieved, they were also written to inform the native-born how to value the ordeals that immigrants endured, how to appreciate the achievements that they might tally, and how fully the belief in the virtue of the nation’s diversity will be rewarded.
Autobiographers probably don’t begin with this larger purpose in mind. They begin instead with the hope that their stories might be illuminating and entertaining. And they are. Their narrative form is often drawn from the bildungsroman, a tale of a protagonist’s growth and education. Such memoirs start with a figure who must navigate between the crippling marginality of present circumstances and the promise of the future. Typically, these narratives begin with the struggle to leave native lands, where the autobiographer faces more or less intolerable social, economic, or political conditions or their combination. Often, there are hurdles that must be overcome. Sometimes, family is the only source of encouragement; other times, family discord worsens these circumstances.

Next, the writer is likely to describe the bewilderment and bedazzlement greeting the newly arrived immigrant in the U.S., first impressions that turn out to be illusions needing to be modulated or overturned. Writers are likely to record several of their most vivid scenes of instruction, tests that they go through with varying degrees of success, often related with a humorous eye at some bumbling misadventure. Frequently, newly arrived immigrants are aided by a guide of sorts—a kind stranger, a predecessor, a teacher, a benefactor, an investor—who appreciates their talent and helps them to find the opportunity they need to make the next step of their journey. Ultimately, these autobiographers manage to make the most of their chances and define themselves within a new cultural identity, although passing that threshold often comes at a price, like an adjustment in their family relations, and entails a diminishing of their previous sense of identity. By the close, they have come to know more about what America will make of them and what they will make of America.

This is the vision of immigration that has proven such an unshakable force in U.S. culture. In these pages, readers will find examples of many individuals whose stories more or less follow this basic scenario from the nineteenth century and that recount privations borne and persecutions withstood. But in ways both superficial and profound, immigration stories at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first differ from their predecessors.

A previous volume, Immigrant Voices, assembled some of those nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stories of success and their animating trust in hard work and initiative that Americans believe in with all the force of a national creed. Those narratives of becoming Americans remind us that tales of personal striving are often punctuated with a lucky break, an unpredictable circumstance, even a coincidence, or the intervention of an informal support network, like a benevolent aid society such as immigrants from one country might set up for those who follow. Even so, the overwhelming feeling that such narratives convey is the solitude—the often profound loneliness—of the immigrant. And the first difference between contemporary immigrants and their predecessors may be this crucial one. Today’s stories more frequently begin as family tales: families uprooted by war and politics, families denied economic security or legal rights, families needing new opportunities so that they might stay together. Perhaps one family member, the author, has needed to split off and has come as a student or is sent as a sort of emissary to the future. An author’s connections to family and homeland may be troubled, but they remain sustaining, much more so than in earlier generations. Family ties and community connections assert themselves more forcefully now than they were generally represented to do in the past. Immigrant stories, at least in this crucial respect, are evolving.
This book assembles, with just one exception, narratives of immigrants entering the U.S. under the Nationality and Immigration Act of 1965. This was the most important piece of immigrant legislation in the second half of the twentieth century, and it was cosponsored by Emanuel Celler, a long-standing congressman from New York City, himself the grandson of immigrants. Celler’s tenure in the House was so enduring that he actually began his career, forty years earlier, by opposing the notorious Immigration Act of 1924. Stirred by traditional nativist protest, along with the recent surge in distrust that World War I excited, this reactionary law curtailed immigration from eastern and southern Europe by establishing limits based on the 1890 census. The desired result was achieved by creating geographical quotas: the origins of 70 percent of all future immigrants would be limited to three countries—the United Kingdom, Germany, and Ireland. The Johnson-Reed Act, as it was called, continued to exert control throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century and was invoked to deny refuge to Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied countries. Hart-Celler repealed the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which had essentially sustained Johnson-Reed and which had passed despite President Truman’s veto—he called it “un-American.” The 1965 law struck down these obsolete discriminatory prohibitions, even as it gave new preference to immigrants with special skills. Perhaps even more significantly, it allowed immigration among those who had preexisting family relationships with U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Plus, the 1965 law set aside some 170,000 visas for immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and South and Central America, effectively reversing the percentages from the early part of the twentieth century. It was eventually supplemented by the Refugee Act of 1980, which significantly enhanced immigration for asylum seekers.

So many immigrants since 1965 have turned to the U.S. as a place to practice their talents; so many have come to reunite with their families or to avoid political suppression; and so many have come for their education or to escape poverty. Although many immigrants came from terrible poverty, readers may be surprised by how many enjoyed comfortable, sometimes affluent economic backgrounds. What doesn’t change is the exhilaration of freedom that these immigrants find in their new lives, nor does their pleasure in the expansive power of the American promise. We follow them wherever their careers—in business, in various professions, in service to others—may take them. They generally find some help along the way, but they often have to battle prejudice. Immigrant memoirs tend not to see the resistance these newcomers face as being systemic or debilitating, but rather as challenges to surpass. None of these authors cares to be seen as a victim. Especially is this so for women whose multiple sources of vulnerability—being female, being immigrants, being poor, being people of color—compound the obstructions they must surmount.

The stories that immigrants tell are always negotiating between the world they leave behind and the new life upon which they have embarked. “Life on the hyphen,” as one autobiographer has termed it, describes how hard it is for immigrants to feel wholly a part of either world. This split can be experienced in a person’s heart. Nowhere is that story more vitally encountered than in the tales of generational divide. An older, less malleable generation of immigrants—parents—finds adjusting to contemporary American life too demanding, whereas the children have an easier time making America their own. Often that assimilation is achieved through the grasping of popular culture, like music or slang, even though the child may be torn between full immersion in a new culture and loyalty to parents whose ways represent the values left behind. It’s the classic immigration plot. The Jazz Singer (1927), the very first “talkie,” is about a young Jewish singer who departs from the old-world religious tradition of his father, a cantor. Some of the narratives collected here tell similar stories of what it is like to come as children to the U.S., where they are socialized in school and grow apart from their families, while others record what it is like to start new in a new country without the double bind of opposing allegiances.

That new life is also a story of immigrants finding their niche, their new way of being. Whether they are coming into their own as writers or businesspeople or athletes, these figures make their presence in America felt in various ways. They may do so by cultivating an aptitude they already had or by gaining a skill or expertise they could only attain when given the chance to create themselves anew. Sometimes, the impact that these autobiographers make on the U.S. is modest, their success merely average. Still, the success of immigrants is not merely measured by fortunes or illustrious careers. Rather, we see how indispensable they are to American well-being as people who by reaching their best thus contribute to the sum of the nation’s happiness. Perhaps the interest of these immigrant lives is merely to suggest that the U.S. is still the place where the everyday level of dreams achieved remains possible for newcomers. When this country first understood itself as a nation of immigrants, it was probably true that there really weren’t too many other places where immigrants were welcomed, where their lives might be improved and where they, in their turn, might benefit those countries. But now, more than two centuries later, more nations see themselves as heterogeneous and make room for immigrants suffering from upheavals and economic distress around the globe. Yet even as these nations are becoming more diverse, America remains the refuge so many millions continue to seek, certainly in its own hemisphere. The burden this creates can sometimes seem unsustainable.

Perhaps, in the near future, another new law will enable the country to strengthen its capacity to bolster itself by absorbing new immigrants. If so, as these autobiographies demonstrate again and again, such a law will help to renew the nation’s faith in itself and in its most treasured resource. Once it does, new immigration narratives will then be written, new memoirs recording the rewards and consolations of becoming Americans.

The memoirs selected for this volume are stories we need to know, not just because they help us understand the new challenges facing immigrants, which they do, and not just because they familiarize us with an array of new countries and the reasons immigrants come to the U.S., which they also do. We read these new immigrant autobiographies because the more familiar we are with them, the more we understand this new America, an America made different—better and more fulfilled—as a result of immigration. We read these stories to appreciate the United States we are always in the midst of becoming. —Gordon Hutner