Passages to America: Perspectives on the New Immigration

Abstract

'Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.' Ironically, those famous opening lines of Oscar Handlin's 'The Uprooted' ring truer today than they did when he penned them in 1950. As Handlin would add in a postscript to the second edition of his book two decades later, immigration was already 'a dimly remote memory, generations away, which had influenced the past but appeared unlikely to count for much in the present or future'; and ethnicity, not a common word in 1950, seemed then 'a fading phenomenon, a quaint part of the national heritage, but one likely to diminish steadily in practical importance.' After all, the passage of restrictive national-origins quota laws in the 1920s, the Great Depression and World War II had combined to reduce the flow of immigrants to America to its lowest point since the 1820s. But history is forever ambushed by the unexpected. Handlin might have been surprised, if not astonished, to find that in at least one sense the 'American Century' ended much as it began: the United States again became a nation of immigrants, and it is again being transformed in the process. Not since the peak years of immigration before World War I have so many millions of strangers sought to make their way in America. They make their passages legally and illegally, aboard jumbo jets and in the trunks of cars, by boat and on foot; incredibly, in 1990 a Cuban refugee came across the Straits of Florida riding a windsurfer. Never before has the United States received such diverse groups - immigrants who mirror in their motives and social class origins the forces that forged a new world order in the second half of the 20th century and who are, unevenly, engaged in the process of becoming the newest members of American society.