The survival of immigrants in America - 11 March 1994

Listen to this. The Bostonians, almost without exception, are derived from one country and a single stock. They're all descendants of Englishmen and, of course, are united by all the great bonds of society, language, religion, government. Manners and interests.

That was written by the President of Yale, then known as Yale College, in 1796. Quoting that sentence, in a federal guide book in 1936, the writer says, as for this legend of ethnic homogeneity, it is so much pernicious twaddle.

I lived across the river from Boston, just 60 years ago and it could be truly said, way back then, that five minutes' walk from the State House, will take the visitor to any one of several sections of the city where English was a foreign language. Every third person you met on the street was foreign-born and three out of four were of other than English descent. This guide book, again mind quoting the census figures of 1930, begins with another bit of demolition prose. The modern fable that Boston is now an Irish city, is no better founded than the English Puritan myth of Boston's quarter of a million foreign-born, the largest number come from Canada, 45,000, Ireland 43,000, Italy 36,000, Russia, mainly Jews, 31,000, from the UK 22,000. The rest come from Poland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Greece and Lithuania. I bring up that accounting of 60 years ago in order to add a note which Americans of English origin, no matter how distant, tend to believe is still true or ought to be, namely "the old New England stock still largely controls leading banks, business enterprises, museums, hospitals and universities, but numerically is insignificant".

Well, today, no minority, but a spread of minorities controls the banks and the businesses. When I was there the Irish, though powerful in local politics, had only just begun to challenge on the national political scene, the Cabots and the Saltonstalls and Lodges and Forbeses. Today, the three main federal, that's to say United States government buildings, employing 35,000, are called the Thomas O'Neill Federal Building, the J W McCormack Building, the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Building. There is, so far as I know, no James Michael Curley Building, an extraordinary oversight because more than any other man this century, Curley marked the political triumph of the immigrant Irish over the entrenched old Yankees. A tall, dapper Irishman with, for those days, longish grey locks and flashing eyes, a black Irishman if ever there was one, he spent over a quarter of a century in politics. Eight years in Congress, two as governor of Massachusetts, 16 as mayor of Boston, two spells in jail, during the second of which he was still mayor and ran the city competently from his cell.

The knowledge of all this, which dropped on me like a thunderbolt at the beginning of my year in Boston, was something that Bostonians, I mean the old Yankees, were almost proud of, to show you through the example of Curley and later the recently dead speaker of the House, O'Neill of the US House of Representatives, that Boston could still produce men of sap and mischief. The corollary is also true, that the Anglo-Saxon minority of Boston, no longer calling themselves the old Brahmins – Curley called them our Brahmin overlords – are pale, respectable shadows of the originals.

What sparked these thoughts about Boston and what we now call its ethnic composition, was an item reported the other day in a quiet nook of my newspaper, that in one state alone, California, there has been a sudden flurry of lawsuits from Hispanic children protesting that they are not receiving a bi-lingual education. Now 10 years ago there was something of a national debate on whether any school should teach in two languages. Now there's a move throughout all the southern border states – Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, California – to make it illegal not to have bilingual education, in two ways. Hispanic, or what we're now supposed to call Latino children, are suing to be taught their basic subjects in their native Spanish and English as a second language and other, English-speaking children are protesting that the basic education at their school is given in Spanish, which they don't understand, so they want basics in English and Spanish as a second language.

It used to be, before and after the Second World War, that immigrants from any country were, willing or not, tossed into the ocean of English speakers, the immersion method. They learned pretty soon that so long as they spoke only the language they'd arrived with, they would be doomed to swell the pool of cheap labour. Learn English and you're already on your way from what today is called your entry profession, meaning first humble job – janitor, dustman, trucker, messenger. What has happened throughout the second half of this century, is that the immigrants, especially the Spanish-speaking immigrants, have acquired a new self-respect as a special type of independent American. Many of them don't want to mix in, though I think these lawsuits will reflect a truth which, sooner than later, they will panic to discover, that the only way you can rise into the middle class, over most of the country, is by way of the English language.

I find it striking that so far anyway, we've not read or heard of this kind of lawsuit coming from the Asians. Very conspicuously, more than any other type, they come here, they flounder for a while with the new language, but whether or not their parents pick up any rudimentary English, the children are at the grindstone every minute of every school day and in a year or two are fluent and it's a byword by now, are markedly superior in learning, to other nationals. They bloom sooner than anybody into clerks, office workers, and then businessmen, doctors, lawyers, most notably they're scientists and medical researchers. They are, naturally, greatly resented for their palpable superiority and in some cities, New York is one, there has always been, in neighbourhoods where blacks and Asians live side by side, the prospect of boycotts of Asian merchants and, as you'd sadly guess, of riots.

My trip to Boston in the first place was not, however, meant to be mainly about immigrant tensions, it was about a remarkable model of a fish, up above the speaker's chair in the Massachusetts House known as the Hall of Representatives. There stands, or hangs, or gapes, against the wall, what is known as the sacred cod. It is the emblem of the item that saved the economy and hence the foundation of the state, the commonwealth of Massachusetts. Boston is still known to lisping children as the home of the bean and the cod. Well, last week the governor of Massachusetts put in a plea to Washington – help. A plea for emergency financial aid from the federal government for the industry that kept Massachusetts on the map.

This is only one chapter of a story that takes in the whole country from the far north-west, the state of Washington, across to New England and down all the east coast to the Gulf of Mexico. Quite simply, the fact is that, take New England first and its principal port, Boston, after 350 years, the oldest American fishing ground is almost barren of the fish it caught and sold and packaged and traded and lived by – haddock, cod, flounder.

Last week on Monday the fishermen in Boston Harbor tooted their boat horns. They want as much government help as they would get after an earthquake. Somebody said that the honking of the horns sounded like a funeral dirge. But then, down 300 miles to Chesapeake Bay, what the native son Mencken called the vast protein factory of Chesapeake Bay and on all the way down to New Orleans, there are very few groupers, these were staple fish, and no more red snapper, which was the main catch of the southern east coast. On the Pacific coast, where I started, the great port of Seattle reports that the decline of the famous Pacific salmon is "catastrophic", threatening to wipe out not only whole industries but also cultures and communities that depend on the catch.

The fishermen, both commercial and sporting, have been warned that unless there's a dramatic improvement from some unknown source, there may be a ban on all salmon fishing along the 1,500 miles of the American Pacific coast. Now, they tell us, after being silent for years – government officials. It says here, that most of the commercial fishing grounds outside Alaska are in trouble and that of the world's, not America's but the world's 17 principal fishing zones, 13 are in deep trouble.

This widespread shortage is not something the normal fish-eater has begin to notice, I think. Here in the east, we wish we saw more of the noble striped bass, since our finest eating fish, but I get splendid salmon. Of course I realise, on second thought, that it's Norwegian. Both Norway and several South American countries are making a killing here with imported farm fish, raised in pens, and a killing of course forces down the cost of the local article. It occurs to me that if New England is losing the thing that helped the first settlers survive, Virginia and the Carolinas are fighting to keep the thing that helped them survive, after a false start with glassmaking. And what was that? The tobacco leaf, that's another story, hilarious or tragic, according to your interest. Stay tuned, same time, same station.

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