Puerto Rican immigration

I've been hunting around on my bookshelves for a quotation from Queen Victoria and I found myself caught, hooked, for half a day by the three volumes of her letters, but I didn't find the remark I was searching for. I now brace myself to receive a load of mail from around the world giving me the precise sentence and the place it was spoken.

My dim, befuddled memory has her, however, perhaps at her first Durbar, telling a huge brown audience –and, by extension, black audiences in Africa and the Caribbean – that they belonged to the British Empire, that they were all British subjects and that England was their true homeland. She never dreamed, and none of us until about 30 years ago, that great numbers of these native peoples would one day take her up on it, literally.

This, er... slumbering memory was aroused by a similar American remark made shortly after the Second War by the Mayor of New York, Robert Wagner. It was addressed directly to the Puerto Ricans who were beginning then to dribble into New York City after a spell of hard times in their native island. The American connection with Puerto Rico is interesting today if only because most Americans know little about it and, if they do, they don't care to face some rather rude challenges to the general belief that the United States has never been a colonial power.

Puerto Rico was one of the lesser Spanish conquests in the New World, discovered by Columbus in 1493 and though it began to produce profitable – profitable to the Spanish – crops of coffee, sugar and tobacco, it was harshly governed and remained so till the end of the nineteenth century. It was ceded to the United States after she beat the Spaniards in the Spanish-American war of 1898 and thereupon, by act of Congress, the president appointed the governor and an executive council of Americans plus five Puerto Ricans. This council constituted the upper house. The lower house was elected by the people and the Puerto Ricans were not given American citizenship until they baulked at their status and a new act of Congress gave them full citizenship, a bigger say in their own government and excused them from American income tax.

Now that was in 1917 and pretty soon the people of the island began to rally round three groups, one advocating admission to the American union, another working towards eventual independence and a third radical group that wanted independence at once. In 1952, Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States and today there are still three powerful parties, but the main two want Puerto Rico to become eventually the 51st State. Ninety per cent of the vote goes to them. The third party is obviously small but what it lacks in numbers it makes up in fervent evangelism and in actual terrorism, especially among its members who have crossed to the mainland. It was such people who made the attempt on the life of President Truman in 1950 and who, from time to time, take credit – if that's the word – for the bombing of banks and stores in the United States.

If you live in the United States and listen to these radicals and read their literature, it's quite easy to pick up the notion that Puerto Rico is a country ground under the American colonial heel whose people are, in the well-weathered words of the Statue of Liberty, 'yearning to breathe free'. The fact is that after every election, every referendum, about ninety per cent of the Puerto Ricans do not want to be independent. They don't want to lose their protected trade with the United States that now includes export of petrochemicals, electronics, clothing, rubber, aerospace products which amount to over three billion dollars worth a year. Neither do they want to lose their freedom to move, as overseas citizens, to the United States and there is the rub of their tough plight in this country; more than anywhere, in the upper reaches of Manhattan.

It was in the early 1950s, after Puerto Rico became a commonwealth and slumped into a depression that many of the people, crowded into the dense metropolitan areas of San Juan, Ponce and Mayaguez, decided to try out another life in New York and it was then that Mayor Wagner proclaimed his generous welcome. 'Come one, come all!' was the gist of it, 'You are American citizens and New York City greets you.' He guessed, at the time and so did we, that a few thousands would arrive in Manhattan, be absorbed here.

Well, they came in on regular airlines and chartered planes and in wobbly crates that put down on fields adjacent to LaGuardia Airport. They were the 'air people' as the Cubans pouring into Miami are the 'boat people'. They went, as dark-skinned people, into Upper Manhattan, into Harlem, where they were warily welcomed or resented not as Puerto Ricans, but as intruders on the housing and the facilities of what was already a stew and a crumbling ghetto.

Well, by now, there are over one and a half million Puerto Ricans in this country who accepted Mayor Wagner's generous welcome, as Indians, Pakistanis, Jamaicans and Grenadians came to accept Queen Victoria's rhetorical welcome.

About 700,000 of the Puerto Ricans live in New York City in a stretch of Upper Manhattan that was bursting at the seams before they got there. Need I say that the Harlem riots of the late Sixties and much of the street crime today erupt out of the stresses of the pitiful crowding, the inevitable unemployment and the forced conjunction of the native blacks and the Puerto Ricans. Hence, too, the billboards in Upper Manhattan and the underground trains that make the run there are plastered with advertisements for everything in Spanish.

To put it bluntly, New York had a bad enough time financing the care and feeding of its population before the arrival of three-quarters of a million Puerto Ricans but they are now part of New York's life and troubles and politics. It's not possible to imagine any political party drawing up a slate of candidates without three or four Puerto Ricans on it.

Well similarly, and bluntly too, it has to be said that the United States doesn't seem to do too well handling a population of 220 million but the tradition, the oldest tradition of the American nation, is its belief in itself as a haven for the poor and the oppressed and just now, at any rate, no American president or, for that matter, few senators or congressmen dare come out in public and say, 'Enough is enough!' These thoughts, though plainly directed at the Puerto Ricans whose eventual swamping of Upper Manhattan we never foresaw, are also oblique reflections on the eventual fate of the Cubans and the Haitians pouring into Florida.

I ought to add a word to what I said last time about the volcanic fall-out from the rebellious Mount St Helens in the far north-west in the state of Washington. I don't know how many of the pictures you've seen of trucks pounding through the ash storms as dense as the dust storms, the so-called 'black rollers' of the mid 1930s, of people spraying trees turned into feathery ghosts, of storekeepers a hundred miles away, shovelling the stuff from the sidewalks. Or, more recently, of children in schools and homes being fitted for face masks.

Apart from the agricultural damage and the threat to livestock, which appears to be far worse and more extensive over many thousand square miles than we'd anticipated, there is now a late and bleak word from the doctors. At first they examined people who complained of annoying or alarming symptoms, chest pain, breathing difficulties, so on. Usually they were people with a history of some respiratory ailment but the disturbing news is about people – numberless, millions possibly – who have no symptoms at all.

The microscopic particles of the ash contain silica or some equally lethal element and 'lethal' is the word. The chief medical examiner in the city in the neighbouring state of Oregon, where the ash had blown on a rare east wind said glumly that silicosis, though a fatal disease, develops very slowly and that we weren't likely to know for five years, 10, 20 years maybe, how many people in the wake of the fall-out would develop it. But there it is. And the most poignant shot on television was that of a small tot as cheerful as an elf enjoying the face-mask fitting and being told by a gentle mother, 'Now, you'll wear this outdoors all the time for the next six months, won't you? Do you understand?' A giggle from the elf.

Meanwhile, back at the polling booth, the so-called 'race' for the Democratic and Republican candidates was about as tense as last year's Derby. Mr Carter is, as I talk, only about 28 votes short of the 1666 he needs to win the Democratic nomination and Mr Reagan is already over the top of the 998 pledged delegates he needs. In fact, before I catch my breath and finish this talk, he'll be able to add most, if not all, of the 266 delegates pledged to Mr George Bush who, this week, scratched himself from the race.

The only possible upset I can foresee in the programme of the two mid-summer circuses, the Republicans in Detroit and the Democrats in New York, is the prospect, a very dim one just now, of a floor fight at the Democratic convention, some unprecedented uprising of troubled delegates responding to the governor of New York's appeal to forget their primary pledges and think all over again about who should be their nominee.

This is not allowed by the rules but if Mr Carter were, come August, running disastrously behind Mr Reagan in the polls, then it's possible that the Democrats might decide they'd rather have a new president than an old rule. This will be the first time that the nominations have been sewn up in May or, for that matter, before the conventions themselves.

The last time there was anything like a floor fight at a Republican convention was in 1964, at a Democratic convention in 1960, when Muhammad Ali was a beardless boy.

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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