The Haitian refugees enter America - 25 June 1993

There can hardly be an American, born in this country anyway, who cannot recite the five thundering lines inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. The hectoring command: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Generous words, almost arrogant in their bravery. Whether they constitute fine poetry or foul, they touched the hearts and minds of millions of Europeans, always the poor, often the persecuted, in many lands. They were spurred by those words to pack a few belongings, often no more than a blanket, a cooking pot, a prayer book, a corset, climb aboard boxcars deep inside Russia or Hungary or Lithuania or Germany, be carried to the great ports – Constantinople, Piraeus, Antwerp, Bremen – and there in enclosures outside the embarkation city, they were bathed, de-loused, fed, their baggage and clothes fumigated and then they were put aboard. That procedure is important in view of what happened to 125 political refugees at an American naval base last weekend.

Well, we're talking about the routine procedures employed on the fourteen and a half million immigrants who arrived here, here being mainly New York or Boston, in the first two decades of this century. If they'd memorised the lines of Emma Lazarus, that scholarly lady who begged the tired and poor to come and be clutched to the bosom of that colossal lady peering out towards Europe, they would very soon find out that the physical routine of getting into the United States was not quite what a poor foundling might expect of a new, compassionate mother.

First, coming across the Atlantic they were not so much allotted space as stowed aboard, as many as 900 in steerage. Sailing slowly up the Lower Bay of New York City, they would spot their first Americans, climbing aboard from a coastguard cutter. Two mean and a woman, immigration inspectors. And the first thing these inspectors did was to look over the ship's manifest and see if the captain had recorded cases of contagious disease. Considering the frequency and unpredictability at the time of ravaging epidemics across the continent of Europe, they looked out for signs of cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis certainly. Any sign of these fearsome diseases, you were at once taken off to quarantine on an island in the bay and got ready for early deportation.

Once the mass of newcomers had been herded into a large reception hall, they would be tagged with numbers and grouped according to their native tongue, which for the vast majority was the only one they spoke. They moved, shadowed by bawling interpreters, in lines past a doctor in a blue uniform, a man with a piece of chalk in his hand, an instant diagnostician. He was certainly a fast one and he had the confidence that comes from not knowing anything about CAT scans or MRIs or PSAs. He saw an ageing man with purple lips and he chalked on the man's back "H", possible heart disease, separate this man. Children in arms stood down to see if they betrayed the limp of rickets. "T" on the back was the expulsion sign of tuberculosis. Two other doctors dipped into a bowl of disinfectant and folded a suspect eyelid back with a buttonhook. Trachoma, very prevalent in southern and eastern Europe and a sure passport to blindness. You too were on your way back home.

We won't follow the release of most of the healthy rest to railroad agents, con men, honest employers and sweatshop owners looking for, and getting, in luscious numbers, an army of cheap labourers, but for most it was better than life in the homeland. The expectation among the mass of the settled population was that these strangers would settle in too. But with every wave of new immigrants, there was always a booming counter-wave of protest from the people who'd been here a long time, two, three, more generations, from what we now call the Anglos and their collateral Nordics – Swedes, Norwegians, Germans. They had run the country, its government, its institutions, for a hundred years or more, so every breaking wave of new immigrants made a rude sound to the residents and they protested, then they discriminated. Often Washington legislated, as it did in the 1920s and again in the 1950s, against what were called undesirable types, meaning southern, eastern Europeans.

To show you how this worked, let me say that by the time I first came here in the early '30s, there still lingered, pasted on old shop windows and employment agencies, stickers left over from early in our century – No Irish need apply. But now, new to me, in the late '30s, looking for an apartment, you'd see just outside the entrance to an apartment building, a block of flats, a sign, a wooden post surmounted by a rectangle, a sort of mahogany plaque, very handsome, a very meticulously printed sign, usually of gold lettering on a black surface, It said, apartments to let, three to six rooms, restricted.

That last word was not put in as an afterthought, it was not sneakily chalked in, it was printed in the same fine style as the rest of the announcement. Restricted, I discovered, was shorthand for no Jews need apply. That was standard practice here in New York, in Manhattan particularly. The other four boroughs getting most of their business and work from the legions of incoming Jews, could not afford to be so particular. That rather callous sign vanished, constituted in fact a criminal act by the late 1940s, when a Republican governor of New York, Thomas E Dewey – who had two failing shots at the presidency against Roosevelt – Dewey got though the state legislature, the first in this country, Fair Employment and Fair Housing Act. Of course the practice of exclusion was not totally abandoned. It continued unofficially, discreetly, on tiptoe, in the English manner.

Today there are no signs, except scurrilous ones painted by hooligans, but in the teeming boroughs, in Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, Brooklyn, blacks glare at the successful Korean fruiterers, the pious religious Jewish sects watch their step. People who once went to Chinatown for entertainment and exquisite cheap sandals now stay away after hearing of boatloads of smuggled Chinese brought in here to swell the active army of gangsters. It's news to most of us that there have been for some time, ruthless and very active Chinese gangs working profitably, what else, drugs.

But just now the victim, the scapegoat, everybody's feared interloper, is the Haitian. I think I mentioned a few months ago the drastically changed ethnic composition of New York taxi drivers. Where once, in what to me I fear is the familiar long ago, taxi drivers were first or second generation Irishmen, Italians, Germans, now they are Puerto Ricans, Haitians, Russians, Israelis. Why should the arrivals from Haiti be so feared? Well, since the Haitian military overthrew President Aristide, almost two years ago, about 40,000 Haitians have fled from what is quite plainly a particularly brutal tyranny.

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