Immigrants Old and New

There is no more powerful reminder that something has value than to see another risk everything to embrace it. Brave immigrants have been marching this week through my memories, reminding me that the essence of human freedom is to stand and be counted.

My ancestors have been immigrants much longer than I know or can hope to learn. I have only heard the story two generations back. My maternal grandparents entered this country 90 years ago, carrying my mother in my grandmother’s womb; and my father came here as a young man in the 1930s.

All entered legally through Ellis Island, where they were given new names by clumsy or uncaring officials, leaving their old identities behind with their families. But my grandfather left Russia under cover of night, escaping induction into the czar’s army, a death sentence for impoverished Jews like himself. So for the first half of his journey, I suppose you could say he was an illegal emigrant. None of them saw a parent–nor most of their siblings–again.

I like to think of myself as a courageous person, but when I try to put myself in my grandparents’ place–to come to a strange country, not knowing the language or customs, penniless, no way home, no hope of seeing loved ones again–fear crawls up my spine. My grandmother had scarlet fever as a child, so her vision was poor. She could barely read in any language. She and my grandfather started out with a pushcart on New York’s Lower East Side and clawed their way into the lower middle class. Bob Dylan comes to mind:

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Often, the emotional price of dislocation is hypervigilance. You don’t know what to expect, only that danger abounds, so you have to sleep with one eye open. Grandma’s children paid too: she gripped them tight, never letting go, so their lives were shaped by the distortions that often come with being too closely watched. Shrinks would say they had “boundary problems.” As an inheritor of that generation, I’d call that an understatement, in the sense that one might say the Berlin Wall presented a boundary problem: I can honestly say I was never alone in a room with the door closed (save an occasional trip to the bathroom) until I moved out of my family’s house.

It seemed that having attained dry land in the U.S., my ancestors had used up their stock of bravery. We were warned against leaving the house without a sweater, talking to strangers, eating orange seeds for fear of sprouting a tree in our tummies, against dipping our feet into the “polio water” that ran in the gutters after neighbors watered their lawns and a thousand other lurking dangers.

You’d think people like that would be too scared to stand up for their rights, wouldn’t you? But my family voted proudly for Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist Party candidate (he ran in every presidential election from 1928-48), and for Adlai Stevenson during the McCarthy era (he was the Democratic nominee in 1952 and 1956, losing big to Eisenhower). The story was repeated many times, always with pride, how my father punched a man who insulted him with antisemitic epithets, and how the chief of police sided with my father when the man complained.

Even though I went to grade school in the fifties, at the height of the Red Scare when civil liberties took a leave of absence, I was inculcated at home with a deep love and respect for American ideals of freedom. Indeed, it seems obvious to me that the avidity of my sixties generation’s passion for liberation is rooted in pervasive post-World War II belief in those ideas and outrage at their betrayal. If you doubt this, I recommend imbibing the bracing tonic against cynicism of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, a founding document of Students for a Democratic Society.

But I forgot about all that until I tried to put myself in the place of countless janitors and restaurant workers, hospital workers and housecleaners who risked their own security and livelihood to assert the human right to earn a place in the nation that accepts their toil. Then I felt again the creeping fear of the immigrant. In standing up for my own beliefs, I have so much less risk to bear, yet often, I can’t be troubled to do it. I was reminded that with respect to citizenship as with so many things, if we neglect to use it, we effectively lose it.

This week, more than half a million marched in Los Angeles alone, millions if you add in demonstrations across the country. These undocumented workers reminded us of the true meaning and value of citizenship. They expose how many American citizens have emigrated far from the noble values of self-determination and social imagination that animated my generation’s youth, instead taking up residence in a land of greed and indifference. To these “immigrants,” I commend Mr. Dylan’s words of pity, written in 1968:

I pity the poor immigrant
Who wishes he would’ve stayed home,
Who uses all his power to do evil
But in the end is always left so alone.
That man whom with his fingers cheats
And who lies with ev’ry breath,
Who passionately hates his life
And likewise, fears his death.

I pity the poor immigrant
Whose strength is spent in vain,
Whose heaven is like Ironsides,
Whose tears are like rain,
Who eats but is not satisfied,
Who hears but does not see,
Who falls in love with wealth itself
And turns his back on me.

I pity the poor immigrant
Who tramples through the mud,
Who fills his mouth with laughing
And who builds his town with blood,
Whose visions in the final end
Must shatter like the glass.
I pity the poor immigrant
When his gladness comes to pass.