Illegal immigration

I was sitting in the Boston airport waiting, with a hundred or more other people, for the shuttle plane to New York and looking over the election news in the Boston evening papers – there've been municipal elections for mayors, city councils and such, all around the country – when I came on a photograph of a square-jawed, firm-featured, bright-eyed man over a caption, 'Dies at 87'.

The name took me back to some of the pleasure I'd had from him many years ago. His name was Salvatore Guaragna and, about the turn of the century, he was a choirboy in the Church of Our Lady of Loreto – a Catholic, obviously.

Well, briefly, he was the eleventh of 12 children born to an immigrant Italian family in Brooklyn and, since his devout parents were delighted that he'd been born on Christmas Eve, he was christened Salvatore. His father was a boot maker but his talents, the son's talents, lay elsewhere. Just as he was growing up, there was the beginning of the great flood of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe which was to bring 13 millions in before the First World War and in the pecking order of prejudice and job promotion, naturally, employers liked to hire people who'd been here some time. And there was, way back then, a particular prejudice in favour of people with WASPish, I mean Anglo-Saxon, names or something like them.

So, Salvatore's family did something quite a few immigrants did at the time, they went to court and changed their name from Guaragna to Warren and little Salvatore – Salvatore Warren doesn't sound quite right – became Harry, Harry Warren, who died last Tuesday and was known to millions of, shall we say, mature citizens here and abroad for scores of songs, two of which baled the motion picture company Warner Brothers out of near bankruptcy in the depth of the Great Depression. They were '42nd Street' and 'Shuffle Off to Buffalo' and others that you might dimly or brightly recall were 'Chattanooga Choo Choo', 'I Only Have Eyes for You', 'Would You Like to Take a Walk?', 'On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe', 'The More I See You', and on and on – more than 300 songs in all.

Well, so much for the excellent and venerable Harry Warren. By one of those funny and unexplained – unexplained by me – flashes of ESP (extrasensory perception, to the people who believe in it) I'd just got through the biography of old Salvatore when a man sitting nearby, a stranger, leaned over to me and wondered if I'd answer a question for him. It had to do with American history. I offered to oblige if I could. He was a blondish man going to grey, small, bony-featured, baby-blue eyes. He'd been on a first trip, rather late in life I should say, to Denver, Colorado and at his first sight of the Rockies, he thought of the people who'd come over from Europe and slogged it out there to open up the West more than a hundred years ago.

So, what was the question? Didn't I think that the spunk of people who would pull up their stakes in Europe and start again, to tame a wilderness had something to do with the energy and variety of Americans? I did. I didn't say that it isn't a stunningly original idea, in fact it's the standby rhetorical bit that flag wavers, politicians on 4 July and presidents on any date fall back on when they want to whip up listless audiences into a show of spunk, get up and go, or what we all now beg our peoples to develop – 'productivity'.

He was beginning to get a little boring about this so I felt obliged to throw in, very gently, the thought that immigrants came here for all sorts of reasons on all sorts of impulses. 'But the ones with character, they stayed. Right?' he said. 'That's true,' I said, 'but sometimes the ones with character went back.' I cited the case of a European barber, an honest soul who found the Lower East Side a jungle that he couldn't cope with. He returned to embrace his simpler, maybe more benighted values and his son stayed on and did very well indeed, became a first-class gangster. 'Is that so?' the man said. 'Well, of course, I think I notice,' he said, 'I think I notice the variety of build and looks more because I'm the great-grandson of a Norwegian immigrant and when you go back to Norway, everybody looks Norwegian.'

At this point, the man sitting on my right joined in. He was swarthy, smiley, had eyes like brown berries and, being younger than either of us and more chic, he had a sharp, encircling beard. He said to me, 'You're right about motives. My grandfather came to this country from Vienna in 1912 because he'd been caught with another man's wife and he scooped up his savings and beat it.'

Well, we two went on a bit about Vienna and I recalled a friend of mine, now in his late sixties, a novelist of some distinction, a first-generation American whose father, he once told me, was going about his little business doing no harm to anybody when he got the call to join the Austrian army. He was not the type and he, too, got away and settled in New York and was about to rear a family when the First War came on. Well, he reared that family pretty quickly and when America got into the war in 1917, he was delighted to be spared as a parent from the call-up but he was scared for a time. He was afraid he'd jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. For quite a while, his son told me, he dreaded Woodrow Wilson as much as he'd hated the Emperor Franz Joseph.

Well, that was the end of our history lesson but as I trudged off to the plane, I looked around and wondered about these 100, 130 or so people. How many of them could tell equally engaging stories? They were all Americans and there are confident people, Englishmen especially, who would say they all looked like Americans. For myself, I haven't the foggiest idea what an American looks like. Here I'd been sitting by a couple of them, one of them I'm sure, if you'd seen him in Norway, would have looked like a typical Norwegian and, certainly, the other in Vienna would have been taken for granted as a typical Austrian Jew.

It made me think of my closest friends here in the past 30, 40 years. If you give them the blood label of their parents or grandparents, they include an Irish married to a German girl, a Russian on both sides, a woman – a wife – New England on one side, New Orleans French Creole on the other, a woman half-Romanian, half-Hungarian, another Irishman, a relapsed Catholic and my closest friend who was brought to this country from Hungary at the age of two and is married to a Frenchwoman brought here at the age of 12.

They all speak impeccable American. You don't know about these origins unless you poke into them. Put 'em all together and you can certainly make mincemeat of any amateur sociologist who has a theory about his ability to spot national types.

Well, I know there are some listening friends who don't like the sort of letter that you'd write to a friend. They want to know how old man Reagan is doing and young man Regan – he's Secretary of the Treasury – and middle-aged man, General Haig. Well, no doubt, we'll get round to them in time but before I leave this immigrant meditation, I ought to say something about a wave of immigrants that is breaking on Washington and dousing the White House with a problem that seems just about insoluble.

It's the question of Mexican immigrants. Illegal immigrants, that is. It's something that most Americans gave little thought to for years and years, except fruit growers in the border states of California, Arizona and Texas and they tended to keep mum, or rather to welcome the so-called wetbacks who slipped across the Rio Grande by night because they provided a big pool of cheap, what's called 'stoop' labour. This scab labour became so precious in the Second World War when American men were going overseas in large numbers that the Mexican government was able to regularise the flow and see that their own people were paid a standard wage and housed in camps.

In the past dozen years or so, the ranchers of the south-west have needed labour, and not only stoop labour, more than ever and there's a system of work passes. They flood over by day and back by night but a bigger flood pours across the 3,000-mile-wide border which is theoretically patrolled by all of a dozen helicopters. By now the conservative estimate is that between six and seven million Mexicans are in this country illegally and when you equate this number with the nearly eight million unemployed Americans, you obviously have a formula for an explosion.

This is the most nagging problem that President Reagan and President Portillo go into during their frequent meetings to discuss 'other' matters.

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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