NYC's new immigrants - 3 August 1990

We had the painters in for the second week and as the man said, there’s only one thing worse than painting, it’s moving.

Luckily they are not painting the refrigerator, so an ice tray could be snatched from the kitchen, two glasses from a finished bathroom and the potcheen was there in my study in which, for the past two weeks, I have been bivouacked.

But then you have to eat. My wife and I snaked and tiptoed over the draped mound of our worldly goods in the hallway and went off into the neighbourhood for a bite.

Our neighbourhood consists of two blocks, and I hope I’m not being unnecessarily elementary when I remind you that a block in America is not a building but a street length, from 5th Avenue to Madison is a block, but the shops are all on Madison, so the two blocks that comprise our neighbourhood are from 97 Street to 96th and 96th to 95th.

It’s possible to get everything we need for our care and sustenance in those two blocks. If you need a book there’s a bookstore two further blocks down town. And in dire need, there’s a hospital one block north, on 98th Street.

We ducked into the corner restaurant on Madison and 96th to what we call the Greeks, since Greeks now run it. And there is, I think, only one waiter who doesn’t speak Greek.

After finishing the Athenian spinach pie, my wife said something obvious, so obvious that we’ve never brought it up. In the last ten years, she said, we’ve certainly become ethnic around here. Very true, as late as 15 years ago this restaurant was, you might say, all American. It still is, but with one or two Greek dishes.

The newsagent was an Irishman, the watchmaker an old Yankee. The liquor store run by Italians, the rest – hardware store, bakery, flower shop and so forth – all run by Americans of no conspicuous national origin.

You understand that when I say, an Irishman, an Italian, I’m talking about people who’ve been here for at least two generations. Today when I say the watch repair shop is owned by an Indian, I mean a man only a year or two away from Calcutta. And it’s the same with all the other shops except the oldest inhabitant, a Jewish family that runs the drug store, that’s to say the pharmacy.

As for the rest, the newsagent is a merry little Vietnamese, the fruiterer a Korean, the small supermarket was taken over by Arabs, there’s a small restaurant, no bigger than a lunch counter, that’s Hungarian. The bakery is – better called a patisserie – run by a French woman. Now that’s odd, of all the European nations the French are the ones who rarely emigrate here.

The hardware store is still owned by an old Viennese – a refugee from Hitler – and his strapping, very American sons. All this change has happened in a decade.

The two painters who for the past fortnight have been slapping away – that’s unfair, they stroke away with great care and precision – neither of them speaks a word of English. Or not quite so, they say "Good morning", and "We go now".

And where do they come from? It’s automatic by now for a New Yorker hearing Spanish to say, Puerto Rican, and one block north of us and all the way to Harlem is more than anything a Puerto Rican settlement.

But they started coming in here soon after the war, the Second World War and by now there must be a quarter of a million of them in the city. These two painters are obviously very new immigrants, they’re shy, gentle, very courteous and speak a form of Spanish as far away from the speech of Madrid as a Geordie is from a Cockney.

We stammer at each other, slap the sides of our heads and get mas verde, green, I hope. Well one of them is from Colombia and the other from the Dominican Republic. After one of our strenuous delicate morning sessions, ending always in much smiling and nodding heads, I recall a meeting 20 years ago, a first meeting with a young Englishman who was to direct an episode of my television history of America.

The episode was called, The Huddled Masses, and was to be a sketch history of the successive waves of immigration coming through this city, mainly from the Irish potato famine and the German revolution of 1848 'til 1970.

My new director didn’t know New York very well but, within a week he had ferreted his way through all the downtown neighbourhoods into which, at one time or another, there had poured the Poles, Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Russians.

Tell me, he said, with noticeable anxiety, shall we be able to find enough people down there with broken accents? No problem whatsoever, everybody in the old tenements in their stalls, fruit, clothes, hardware the lot had fruity, broken accents.

But everywhere it was English, American English, with a broken accent, only rarely did we run into the old, and the very old who retained their native tongue, or spoke no other.

Today in the Arab supermarket they talk to each other in Arabic, the Vietnamese and his wife in Vietnamese, the fruiterer and his daughters Korean, the waiters on the corner, Greek. We have come full circle, it’s the way it must have been here at the turn of the century, at the beginning of what we’ve always called the Great Tidal Wave of Central and Southern European immigration.

Well, those people at first spoke their own language, struggled with English, eventually went to night school to learn English so they could catch up with their children who spoke nothing else. Perhaps we hope the same process is under way now, but what is more obvious is the decline or abandonment of this process which is what makes some people fearful that the melting pot is a vanished ideal, that we are splitting up into a society of many languages.

It’s what makes a concerned body of Americans think of Quebec and try to get through the state legislatures resolutions or laws declaring English to be the official language of the United States. The first language anyway for public discourse, whatever you may care to speak at home.

Well, we’ve only lately come to realise that the European tidal wave that fell on the eastern ports of entry – New York and Boston mostly – almost a century ago is historically not the biggest immigrant wave but only the second biggest. The one which is now in full flood is larger. Briefly, this is the story of the successive tides.

Between 1840 and '60 the Germans and the Irish, between 1890 and 1914 Italians, Poles, Russians and Greeks. After the Second World War, the Puerto Ricans, and a great migration to the north of southern blacks. The fourth wave is breaking all around us and it’s almost wholly from the countries of Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa. In the wash of it is a smaller wave of Russians and Yugoslavs.

New York City, I was astonished to discover the other day, is receiving every year 100,000 immigrants and that now, over two and a half million – about a third of the city’s population – are foreign born. Now on the evidence of the turn-of-the-century tidal wave, we would assume – and many of us do – that the new immigrants would go into all the lowliest jobs, be pedlars, labourers, factory workers, builders, machine-shop workers and so on, and so many of them do.

To this assumption we’ve added another – that they enlarge the burden of government by swelling the welfare roles. In fact, remarkably few of them go on welfare. And they are taking a range of jobs far wider than anything we’ve known. Restaurant workers, of course, but as no other immigrant used to do, they become hospital attendants, housekeepers in hotels, day-care workers.

The Asians especially soon graduate to computer trainees and science and medical technicians. Some nationals start their own businesses, the Indians seem to have taken over the newsagents and the Korean fruit stands are everywhere.

A city official amazed himself the other day by saying that he thought the Asians had, in fact, saved the slumping New York City garment industry. And the visible revival of wasteland sections uptown in the Bronx, downtown in Brooklyn, is due to the labour and initiative of immigrants from South and Central America in rebuilding abandoned neighbourhoods and starting their own businesses.

This obviously is all to the good, the bad news is that the enterprise and diligence of these new immigrants who are willing to start at the bottom with no intention of ending there, has tended to press heavily on the blacks, on jobs they once filled exclusively.

The new racial tension everybody notices is not anything so simple as a stand-off between blacks and whites, it is a mounting tension between blacks and the immigrants moving in. It is in fact intra-racial.

The other noticeable element of the new immigration is the speed with which the fresh Hispanics and most of all the Asians move up into white-collar jobs, into business and into management. So much so that this week Mrs Dole, the secretary of labour, announced the remarkable figure that at the level of what they call middle management of the biggest corporations in the country, 30% are now black or Hispanic.

Only 1% rise to be chief executive which is what you, I, would expect, but Mrs Dole says it’s not enough and she expects to have worked out by the autumn a government policy to make it easier, as a matter of fairness and equity, for minorities and women to break through to the top.

Meanwhile over at the country club, a thunderbolt has shattered a tradition which has never been disturbed since country clubs were started 100 years ago – the unwritten, understood, tradition that membership was restricted to whites. The manager [of the course] at which the professional golfers will this coming week compete for their own national championship said one day, no blacks are members and we don’t mean to have any. At once, three big corporate sponsors of the tournament pulled out.

The President of Augusta National, which Bobby Jones started with a few rich friends nearly 60 years ago said on Wednesday, “More and more black people are rising to top positions in business and science and other aspects of American life, we pick people who provide leadership.”

He’s inviting such blacks to join the 300 all-white members of the venerable club in Georgia. “The world,” he said “is changing”. Yes indeed.

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