New York immigrants

A couple of nights ago, three or four of us were sitting around performing the usual inquest on the news we'd just seen, the first ten minutes of which on any given evening is stuck in a groove, almost as monotonous as it was in the spring during the Battle of the Falklands, but now it's Mr Begin and Mr Sharon and Mr Habib back to his thankless air shuttle and Mr Arafat being welcome in various cities, lacking only a chariot to have him mistaken for Caesar return to Rome in triumph.

There was one lady present. A practical type who is not insensitive to politics but possibly too sensitive to dwell on its present obscenities whenever she feels she can do nothing about it. I like to think, from the evidence of her name that she had north country, English north country, forebears and lived by the bleak but sensible philosophy of Gertrude Morel in D. H. Lawrence's novel, 'If you can alter things, alter them! If you can't, put up with them!'

Well, she relieved the general despair about any prospect of peace in the Middle East by suddenly saying, 'Did you see that photograph in the paper of... ?' and she named a movie star, an actor whom I won't identify for reasons that will appear. It was a picture of him at some New York social party, the sort which excuses the vast amounts of money poured out on the food and the decorations and the women's fashions by donating a fraction of this expense to some worthy charity. 'He looks,' the lady said, 'as if he were playing a Chinese warlord.'

What she was saying was that he'd plainly had a facelift and the tying up of the muscles around the eyes had given him that slant-eyed look. I recalled an actor I knew, a very amiable fellow who disappeared once for about three weeks and at the end of it he came out looking like his brother, if he'd had a brother. For some reason that was never clear, the lady became very vehement about facelifts, maintaining that you can always tell when it's been done and that they're always bad, they always change the character of a face, at which point I remembered the comment of another lady not present.

'They are not all bad,' she said, 'you only notice the bad jobs' and this disposed of the argument with a simple flash of intelligence as obvious and memorable as that remark made by a Greek 2300 years ago. A play, he noticed, has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Nobody had noticed this before and it guaranteed Aristotle's immortality.

Well, we yearn for such a flash of insight into the problems of our domestic economy, in the Middle East, in the disarmament talks between the Americans and the Russians which are now going on in Geneva, which have been going on for years and which threaten to go on until the mounting pile of nuclear weapons explodes. I'm not deriding the men who sit there, men of great knowledge and expertise and, some of them, men of powerful intellect but intellect, you may have noticed, is no guarantee of intelligence which is no respecter of persons or classes or even of education. In fact, to use a useful word we seem to have lost, a highbrow is almost always a person educated above his intelligence.

Well, all this is by way of saying that we, all of us I think, fall victim to what is called 'the conventional wisdom' about politics, medicine, national character which goes on being the accepted truth long after the facts on which the wisdom was based have changed. Seventy years ago, the government of New York City was run on the assumption that the people of Anglo-Saxon origins and the Irish were mainstay of the city population and that they were the people who ought to run its politics.

It took not the political scientists, but a famous muck-raking journalist and a Danish photographer to go round the city and show how the city fathers had failed to take account of a wave of immigration from southern and central Europe that would soon turn into a flood. Between about 1902 and 1920, 13 million European immigrants poured into New York and several millions of them stayed. It took about another ten years for the politicians to discover that any slate of candidates for election to city office had to contain, as well as two Irishmen and two Anglos, at least one Italian and one Jew. Today, no party would think of running a team in the coming November election that didn't contain at least two Puerto Ricans.

The conventional wisdom has taken root in New York in the general belief that a successful political slate, today, is made up of two Irishmen, two Jews, two Hispanics. Anglos can apply but are no longer essential.

But we've just had a document put out by the immigration and naturalisation service which will shake the politicians to their marrow. If you'd asked me, even as late as a month ago, about the distribution, the number of people of foreign origin – I mean literally people born abroad of foreign parents – in this city, I would have guessed that maybe there were a hundred thousand. Enough, anyway, to still the fears of an old, a young, English television director of mine who, ten years ago, when we were doing a programme on the immigrants of New York, doubted if by now we'd be able to find and record enough people with, what he called, 'a broken accent', meaning non American. He needn't have worried. Down in and around the tenements and the clothing and food stalls of the Lower East Side, almost everybody over 60 talked American with a German accent or an Irish accent or a Russian accent or an Italian accent.

But I've noticed, in the past year or so, that when I take a taxi, as often as not the driver is not an aged Italian or German or Irishman, but a young Hungarian or Czech or Israeli or Jamaican or Indian or Korean or Vietnamese and, of course, there are scads of Puerto Ricans. They, in particular, were welcomed in the late 1940s by the mayor of New York who meant to make them feel good by pointing out that, as natives of an overseas American territory, they could enjoy the privileges of American citizenship. Well, this long-gone mayor told me once that he expected as many as 20,000 might take him up on his invitation. He never expected, nor did anybody else, that by 1970 there'd be three-quarters of a million of them, mostly staying in New York and packing into the stews of Harlem.

Well, I don't believe that any of us outside the people in the immigration service who've been working on this study would ever have guessed at its findings. It says that here, in a city of seven millions, there are now one and a half millions of Hispanic origin – first from Puerto Rico, then from Columbia, Haiti, Cuba and so on – just about equalling the total population of blacks. Many of these Hispanics, of course, were born here since the original Caribbean flood poured in over 30 years ago but the really staggering statistic is the one that tots up the presence of actual immigrants. It all began, we now hear, 17 years ago in 1965 with a loosening of the immigration laws.

The report says, 'The immigrants have come from virtually every nation and make up a volume not seen since the last great wave of immigration that ended in the 1920s.' In all there are now more than one million new immigrants living in this city. What is more stunning is the report that while the immigration laws may have been loosened, they have not been tight enough to catch illegals. There are over 650,000 legal immigrants but there are, the service estimate, over 750,000 illegal immigrants. They come mainly from Central and South America, from the Caribbean, from Italy, India, China, Korea and the Soviet Union.

Only a week or two ago, I had a cab driver, remarkably pleasant and courteous and forthcoming, I should guess about 30 years of age, who spoke good English. I asked him when he'd left the Soviet Union. 'Eighteen months ago,' he said. And the next week I was fascinated by a name on a registration card and by the accent of the driver. He was a young Romanian. I asked him how he was making out here and what he missed of life in Romania. He said, 'Nothing. I forget Romania. Life in New York noisy but free. You make argument, you call the government bad names, nobody mind much. Right?' 'Right!' I said.

The man who's job it is to analyse immigration statistics for the city's planning commission – not the most enviable job in city government – was asked to bottle the reason for this tidal wave. 'Well,' he said, 'the word has leaked out. You can make a living in this city and you might even make it big.' It's a remark that might have been made in the 1910s, a remark that would cushion the incoming millions against the heartbreak of the discovery that no single sidewalk of the far spreading slums was paved with anything like gold.

The unlikely model, or prototype, of these new immigrant communities is a newly transformed town in the borough of Queens called Elmhurst, population 30,000; 20,000 immigrants from 110 countries. In any given neighbourhood, the grocer is Korean, the baker is a Columbian, the butcher from Argentina. The restaurant and lunch counters are Indian, Greek, Chinese, Thai, Ecuadorian, Italian, Korean and Pakistani. A Greek runs a pizza parlour, the Dutch Reformed Church conducts services in Taiwanese. A desperate Nigerian woman who came here to learn English says that she and her children hear no English. 'I don't know', she says, 'whether I'm in Spain or China.'

The big difference from the 1910s is that the old immigrants retreated into compounds or quarters of their own kind. Today, they throw themselves into one pot and the astonishing fact is that, in a generation or so, the brew will melt.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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