The New Immigrants: Still the Promised Land

We are not a narrow tribe of men ... No: our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation so much as a world.

--Herman Melville

It is hard. It is hard to turn the key and lock the door, hard to leave, probably forever, the little white stucco house in the Peloponnesian town of Argos. The little house was Niki Raffias' dowry when she married Theodosios twelve years ago, and the tears start to her eyes as she speaks of "the wonderful garden and the cage of canaries that sing all day. Now we must leave it all behind. But they tell me America is a nice place." Theodosios Kaffas is determined to make it so. A barber who had to go out of business, a restaurant cook who couldn't earn more than $300 a month, he has dreamed of going to America ever since he was a boy. Now he is 36. "Argos is a good place for those who own fields and orange groves," says Kaffas, "but the workers are better paid in America. I want a better life for my family. I want to educate my children."

Victor Valles Solan, too, feels passionately about his children. He has five of them, and in Cuba, where he once ran a small steel foundry, he began to feel that they were becoming hostages to the fortunes of the state. "We were allowed a ration of only one liter of fresh milk every other day," says Valles, 46, "but what is more important is that every day the children learned Communist doctrine in the schools, and going to church was never talked about. I realize that I am going to the United States with many illusions, but for me your country is the place on earth where democracy is purest."

Dr. Brian Pethica already knows the U.S. well, and he has no problems political or financial. Now 49, a research chemist at the Unilever Corp. in Port Sunlight, near Liverpool, Pethica has been crossing the Atlantic at least once a year since 1958, and he likes what he calls "the entrepreneurial attitude." But he wants to teach. Says he: "The university system in Britain seems somehow less open, more rigid, more hierarchical. In the U.S. there is a broad diversity of systems, which allows you to educate everyone as far as he can go. That opportunity to broaden the possibilities of life is more specifically an American value."

Last week, these voyagers all took off for America, just in time to celebrate their first July 4 holidays. The Kaffases, with their two children of 11 and 8, headed for Philadelphia, where Niki's brother hopes to find Theodosios work in a restaurant. Victor Valles Solan took his family to Melrose Park, 111., where he has a job making engine blocks. Dr. Pethica was bound for Potsdam, N.Y., where he will become dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Clarkson College of Technology.

Changing Styles. These are just a few of the new immigrants who today are changing the face of America. Though many people think of mass immigration as a closed chapter in the nation's history, more than 1,000 newcomers now arrive in the U.S. every day. Since American birth rates are declining, that influx from abroad represents about one-fifth of the nation's annual increase in population. The new immigrants are changing local styles, too. Miami's Eighth Street is now Calle Ocho, the main thoroughfare of bustling Little Havana (pop. 450,000), alive to the pachanga beat and the rich aroma of sofrito seasoning. San Francisco's Chinatown is rivaled by Los Angeles' Koreatown (pop. 65,000), the fastest-growing settlement in the city, where Korean dance studios and karate schools have sprouted along Olympic Boulevard.

All in all, the 400,000 new immigrants arriving every year represent, after decades of discriminatory national quotas, a comparatively enlightened policy that admits more people from poorer countries, particularly more Orientals. Though the new policy is more evenhanded toward foreign nations, it does explicitly favor professionals and the middle classes, not those huddled masses and wretched refuse once hymned by Emma Lazarus.

Some of the newcomers are poor, of course, but Ellis Island and Hester Street now survive only as fuel for nostalgic bestsellers. The new immigrants arriving by jet never even see the newly refurbished torch of the Statue of Liberty.

Their goals have changed somewhat over the years. Political conflict is still a major cause of immigration, as demonstrated by last year's sudden swirl of refugees from Viet Nam, but religious persecution, which once sprinkled the land with Shakers and Huguenots and Hutterian Brethren, is hardly an element any more. The new immigrants do occasionally talk of getting rich, but they know that this is no longer a land of gold rushes and oil strikes. Yet they do see on the distant shore line of America something that many Americans take for granted, or even forget they possess--freedom. That means not simply freedom from oppression and hunger but also from unbreakable caste systems and generations of inherited ignorance. Truisms really are true, as George Orwell once wrote, and America remains that cliche of cliches, the promised land, the land of opportunity. The newcomers find out soon enough that the U.S. is not without its share of poverty and prejudice, but to their eyes it nonetheless gleams with the light of Utopia.

Listen to some of these new voices:

JOE MAROUN, 34, who came to the U.S. from Lebanon to attend a flight engineering school but now runs a large Arab bakery in Redwood City, Calif.:

"It didn't take me long to figure out that as an employee, there was no way to survive. If I earned $1,000 a month, I'd spend $ 1,000 a month. If I earned | $1,500, I'd spend $1,500. That's the way life works here. If I was going to achieve something, I'd really have to go for broke. And one thing I've developed here is an appreciation for what I can do. I could go back to Lebanon now and dig ditches if I had to. I couldn't have done that before. It would have been beneath my dignity. You could have put gold bricks on the bottom of those ditches, and I wouldn't have dug them out. But people here are not ashamed to do any work."

GAETANO POLICHETTI, 40, an Italian plasterer in Boston's North End, hopes some of his four children can go to college: "Even if it costs too much money for me. If they're intelligent, I'd like them to go. I'd like to see us have a profession in the family, like teacher or engineer." His wife Filomena shares his hope but also has ideals of her own. "If any young man wants to talk to my daughter, he has to talk to me first," she says. "When she wears thai white dress to the altar, she's going to be white all the way through."

BIT CHUEN WU, 23, who bought an interest in a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto and now works twelve hours a day to support his widowed mother and younger brother: "Since I am in America, I have time only for work, just go home and watch TV, then go to sleep. I am too tired to read newspaper. I have no time to meet girls. I do everything. I clean the floor, the windows. I do the kitchen work. I wait on tables. But it is O.K. In Hong Kong I never get a chance to save money and become my own boss. It is very good to be your own boss. You get the profits."

And Rose, who refused to give her last name or her address as she stood waiting in line outside the U.S. Consulate in Jamaica: "You foolish to ask silly questions about why we want to go to States. I go to New York to get good work, not just $20 a week. Foolish questions you ask."

For the first century of its existence, the U.S. had no immigration policy at all. Thomas Jefferson stated the prevailing view of the matter when he asked: "Shall we refuse to the unhappy fugitives from distress that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land?" No, we shall not, was the answer, and so there came the thousands of Irish starved by the potato famine of 1845, and thousands more of Germans oppressed after the uprisings of 1848, and still more thousands of Russian Jews afflicted by the czars' pogroms, and then in 1882 Congress passed the first immigration laws barring lunatics, convicts and Chinese laborers. The principle of "selectivity" had been born.

The tide of immigration, which built the railroads and cattle towns of the West, flowed on for another generation. Some 8.8 million arrived during the first decade of this century, and in 1907, the inspectors at Ellis Island processed an alltime daily record of some 6,500 Italian peasants and Greek fishermen and various other humble souls, many of them wide-eyed children clinging anxiously to the hands of their mothers.

But selectivity--meaning the native-born Americans' know-nothing inclination to exclude anyone unlike themselves--proved victorious. In 1921 a new immigration law introduced the principle of national quotas. They were based, somewhat inaccurately, on the different national groups in the U.S. in the 1890s. The figures were changed every few years, but the basic principle was clear in the quotas set for the British (about 34,000), Italians (3,800) and Chinese (105). Even in the Hitler era, when millions needed a sanctuary, the U.S. admitted only about 115,000 refugees from Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s.

It was perhaps the incalculable enrichment of America by those refugees--by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, Artur Schnabel and Paul Tillich--that started the process of change. By special legislation in 1948, the U.S. began admitting more than 400,000 "displaced persons." Then came 32,000 refugees from the Hungarian revolt of 1956 and some 650,000 from Fidel Castro's seizure of Cuba in 1959. But only under President John F. Kennedy, great-grandson of an immigrant farmer from Ireland's County Wexford, did overall reform begin. According to the Immigration Act of 1965, which finally took effect in 1968:

1) National quotas were abolished. A ceiling now limits immigration to 170,000 from the Eastern Hemisphere (and no more than 20,000 from any one country) and 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere, for an annual total of 290,000.

2) Parents, spouses and unmarried children of U.S. citizens are exempted from all quotas, thus increasing total annual immigration to about 400,000, as compared to about 250,000 per year during the 1950s. Some preference is also given to other kinds of relatives.

3) In the Eastern Hemisphere, preference is given to "members of the professions* and scientists and artists of exceptional ability" and then to "skilled and unskilled workers in occupations for which labor is in short supply in the U.S." (This does not always work out as planned. So many Filipino doctors and nurses have applied for visas that there is a six-year waiting list.) 4) In the Western Hemisphere, there is no system of preferences, and visas are issued on a first-come, first-served basis. "Officially defined as doctors, lawyers, architects, nurses, engineers and teachers.

But since Latin Americans were not part of the old quota system, the ceiling of 120,000 imposes a new restriction on them, and the waiting lists now average 2 1/2% years.

Despite all the attempts at reform, it remains extremely difficult for an immigrant to struggle through the paper work needed for a visa. Even a fully qualified applicant must stand in line for hours to acquire or submit the proper forms. The would-be immigrant must produce certificates of birth and marriage, of physical and mental health, of approval by his local police. Every foreign-language document must be translated into English by an officially certified translator, then notarized.

Even after reaching New York, an immigrant who seeks working papers is apt to be severely interrogated by an official of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "They keep trying to trick you into some mistake," says one Frenchwoman who recently underwent such questioning. "For example, the inspector asked me whether I'd ever been married before. I said I hadn't. Any children? I said no. Then he asked whether I had ever been a prostitute or a drug addict or a Communist or a fascist, and was I coming to America to overthrow the Government? Then, as if he'd forgotten, he said, 'What was your first husband's name?' " On the other hand, there are indeed rackets by which immigrants seek to circumvent the rules. One of the most melancholy is the marriage-for-money, which can cost up to $500. Says New York Immigration Service Director Maurice Kiley: "We've had women in here seven or eight times, each time with a new alien husband and a new assumed name."

Whatever the difficulties, the flow is unceasing. A few statistics document the recent changes. A decade ago, Canada was still providing the largest number of immigrants, 38,327. Today, Mexico provides the most, 62,205. Second and third come the Philippines (31,751) and Korea (28,362), whereas in 1965 the 4,057 immigrants from Taiwan were the only Asian group among the largest 15. The U.K. and Germany, which used to rank three and four, now rank eleven and 16. (Among the smallest contingents, Monaco, Chad and Pitcairn Island, one each.)

Russian Souls. The most painfully uprooted are the political refugees, and in recent times that has meant mainly refugees from Communism. They often had to make their break suddenly, and even some of the most celebrated are motivated by a simple sense of survival. Svetlana Alliluyeva, only daughter of Joseph Stalin, now living quietly in Princeton, N.J., says that the very idea of revisiting her homeland would be "ridiculous, to think that someone who got out of prison would want to go back to prison." Czech Tennis Star Martina Navratilova, now playing at Wimbledon but resident in Los Angeles, says scornfully that native-born Americans "don't know what they've got. Anybody that complains about life here should go to a Communist country. Then they would understand."

To some of the greatest Soviet artists, America is providing an almost miraculous sense of renewal. "Only here can I speak from the heart," says Mstislav Rostropovich, the master cellist who has blossomed into a first-rank conductor since moving to the U.S. in 1974. "Only here can I fulfill my life as an artist. Now I can work. That is why I am very, very happy here." But though Rostropovich has been appointed director of Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, and though he vows he will not return to Russia until artists there get more freedom, he still has no plans to become an American. Says he: "I still think of the dacha in Moscow as my home." Much the same feeling inspires the superb dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who lives in New York City but says: "No other country in the world will be my home but Russia. My soul will always be a Russian one."

Through Dark Woods. On a less exalted level, the flight from Communist oppression is well exemplified by Julius Koco, 34, a muscular, sandy-haired machinist in Hamtramck, Mich. Koco was born and reared in the Czechoslovakian town of Nove Zamky, near the Hungarian border, and his earliest memories are of the Communist seizure of power, when "they began to take things away from people." Even when he was in school, "they used to close the school down and everybody would have to go out and dig sugar beets or potatoes. Later, when I had a job, I only made eight kronen [$1.12] per hour, and if you wanted a car, it cost 20,000 kronen. And you had to put the money on deposit for maybe three years, and then you might get a car --but a Russian car, like a Moskvich. It was their country."

For a time, under the Dubcek regime of 1968, things looked better in Nove Zamky, and Koco felt that "we could do what we wanted." But when the Soviets deposed Dubcek, Koco began planning an escape for himself, his wife Agnes and their two sons, then four and one. A series of devious moves, by way of Belgrade, finally brought them to the dark hills near the Austro-Yugoslav frontier. Leading his elder son by the hand while Agnes followed with the baby, Koco trudged through the night. "Once we heard voices and we hid in a ditch," Koco recalls. "We knew that the local people sometimes turned in refugees for the reward. We stumbled along for hours. Once we almost fell into a rock quarry. When we got near the border, Agnes couldn't carry Robbie any more, so I took him, and he started to cry. We thought they would hear us at the checkpoint, but a huge truck came rumbling through, so nobody heard us. We kept going through the woods until we made it across the border to Austria. I could have kissed the stones there."

A Catholic welfare agency sent the Kocos to New York, and another Slovak offered him a job in Detroit, sifting coal. "We arrived here without a winter coat," says Agnes. "We had nothing. Nothing." After several months of sifting coal, Koco got a job as a machinist, making gears at Massey-Ferguson. Then came a layoff. Koco turned to making boxes. He was a press operator. He worked part time as a school janitor (and studied English). He went back to Massey-Ferguson, was laid off three weeks ago. Now Agnes has found a job there, operating a grinding and shaving machine. "My trouble is not to find a job," says Koco. "My trouble is to find enough time to sleep with all the jobs I can get." The Kocos live in a house that they bought in rundown condition for $5,000 and are now fixing. Koco has installed new plumbing, paneling, siding and decorative brick. On one wall hangs a pair of Texas longhorns. They have also bought an old boat in which they go to catch smelts on Lake Saint Clair. They have just finished paying $10,000 for a suburban lot nearer to the Massey-Ferguson plant, and soon they hope to start building a new house there.

"Now I have no loans around my neck, my children have everything they need. We have a future. And if I had to do it again now--well--" Koco looks back and remembers that night in the woods, and then he laughs, "I might not make it."

The largest migration of refugees from Communism to the U.S. has not involved East Europeans but Cubans, first the rich with their bank accounts and crated furniture, finally barefoot fishermen in tiny dinghies. Even now, with no direct transportation between Cuba and the U.S., some 300 refugees, many of them old and sick, fly to Madrid every week. There, usually living on charity, they have to wait at least three months, often much longer, while five harassed U.S. officials try to process their papers. (Foundry Operator Victor Valles Solan, who took off last week, had waited two years for clearance.)

By and large, the Cuban refugees have worked diligently, helped one another, and achieved a booming economic success in the center of Miami. They now own or control an estimated 8,000 businesses and have a spending power of $1.5 billion. Many of them have been unable to re-create their old lives, however. Alfredo Perez, for example, went to law school in Havana, but after fleeing to Colombia, then to Puerto Rico, he arrived penniless and discouraged in Miami in 1967. The need for Cuban-trained lawyers in Miami being totally nonexistent, Perez finally got a job mowing lawns. He is the kind of man who likes to take an intellectual interest in his work. He enrolled in a course in agronomy at Broward Community College, even earned a degree. Now 59, callused and deeply tanned, he is assistant superintendent at the Riviera Golf Club in Coral Gables. He rides a tractor and sprays insecticides.

"I never talk about Cuba now," he says. "I'm tired of revolution and politics. I don't want problems. I work. I make good money. No complaints. My two kids like it here. My little boy who is eleven hardly speaks Spanish. This country is different from any country in the world. Everybody is nice to me."

Perez will proclaim his new allegiance this week in a Miami-style Bicentennial extravaganza. He will be one of between 6,000 and 8,000 aliens who will be corralled in the Miami Beach Convention Center on July 4 and sworn in as citizens. One immigration official, aware that 7,200 aliens were sworn in at New York's Polo Grounds in 1954, says, "We've been saving them for months, hoping for a new record."

Everything Lost. Not all refugees are escaping from Communism, of course, and not all can reconcile themselves to their refuge. Mohammed Farraj, 31, is an American citizen now, and both of his young sons (aged four and three) were born in this country. But the children speak very little English. Farraj insists that they learn his own language. "Free! Free!" he chants at them. "Palestine!" they chant back in Arabic. Both Farraj and his wife wear T shirts decorated with the Palestinian flag.

The youngest of ten children, Farraj grew up on a farm north of Jerusalem, migrated ten years ago to Dearborn, Mich. (The Arab community of about 85,000 in greater Detroit is the nation's largest.) "We had no freedoms under the Jordanians," says Farraj. "They never accepted the Palestinians, and we could get nothing but the most menial jobs. So I came looking for a better life, but I always intended to go back. My hope is to work, save money, and go back to a liberated Palestine."

Farraj found work as a press operator in a Ford plant, saved his money as planned, then sent back to still unliberated Palestine for a bride, Aziza, 17: "It was an arranged marriage," he says. "She came on the basis that if she liked me, we would be married. She had a ticket back home just in case she didn't." Farraj got a refund for the return ticket, but he also had to send Aziza $2,000 as an engagement present. This kind of gift is traditionally converted into gold and known as a mahr (bride price).

Farraj says his life in the U.S. has been "very, very hard." Detroit's Arabs encounter a certain amount of hostility. "Americans are very nice people, but some of them keep calling us foreigners. They ask, 'What the hell are you doing in our country?' And Southern whites just hate us. They don't like to even hear the mention of an Arab."

After three years at Ford, Farraj spent two years installing burglar alarms, then joined a relative in a plastic-bag business that failed, then got a job selling insurance for about $10,000 a year. Unfortunately, he let his own insurance policy lapse because he was planning to move. A month ago there was a fire that destroyed almost everything he owned (but not Aziza's mahr, which she had prudently stored in a safe-deposit box).

"I lost everything," Farraj says bitterly, gesturing around him. A small kitchen table and three chairs are the only furniture in the room. The tattered shades flap occasionally in the 90DEG heat. Farraj adds: "Palestinians have no luck."

For VIPs. While political conflicts may change over the years, the force that brings most immigrants to America is simply the yearning for a better life. This was particularly true of the early Chinese immigrants who fled the traditional cycles of flood and famine, but today the largest body of immigrants from the Asian mainland are the Koreans. One of them is Hi Duc Lee, 37. He has a degree in chemical engineering, but he could not find engineering work at home. He went to Germany and labored in a coal mine, then came to the U.S. in 1968. He had $50. He found a job as a welder, earned $5 an hour, and saved almost all of it.

At the end of two years, Lee had amassed $8,000. He went to a bank and, with some difficulty, borrowed another $8,000. With that, he bought the Olympic Market, a grocery store in the heart of Los Angeles' Koreatown. Two previous owners had failed in the store, but Lee got up every morning at 2 a.m. to go to market for his supplies, regularly worked an 18-hour day, began to make profits. He bought some adjoining property for a parking lot, made more profits, then bought a restaurant. It had been a dry-cleaning store, but Lee transformed it with Korean paintings, installed several ponds filled with goldfish and built a tiled pagoda roof on top. He called it The V.I.P. Palace. "Sometimes Korean VIPs come to Los Angeles and they go to eat at a Japanese or Chinese restaurant, so that is why I built this place," says Lee. His next project starts in September: a hotel.

"I dreamed that if I came to this country, I could make enough money to live on," says Lee, who now has a Korean wife and two children, "but I never dreamed of this much success. I expected little freedom for jobs or work in America, but that is not the way it is. We have freedom to work hard and do well here. If I work one hour, I get one hour's profit from it. It's not that way in other countries."

Not everyone is so successful, of course. Very often the poor remain poor. But there are differences nonetheless. On a small brass strip on a door in Brooklyn's sweltering Keap Street, the inscription says: Dios bendiga nuestro hogar (God Bless our Home). On each side of the inscription there is a tiny enameled flag, Dominican on the left, American on the right. Near by is a name plate that says: Familia Ortega. In the five rooms inside live Erasmo Ortega, 52, and his wife Eloina, 45, and seven of their eight children (a married daughter lives upstairs). Also a three-year-old orphaned nephew whom they are raising. Also about eight other children (it is hard to keep count) who don't quite live there but sort of romp around and squeal. Also a neighborhood cat. "I'm the only woman in the neighborhood who doesn't work full time, so I take care of everybody's children," says Dona Eloina. "People around here, they call this place the casa de locos, but they don't understand. Children, they are everything. People ask me when I ever get any peace. I find peace right here, right now, with these children. Not silence, maybe, but peace."

It was for the children, says Eloina, that they left the Dominican Republic. "The political situation at home was bad. The people were treated bad. We asked ourselves, 'How can we earn enough to feed ourselves? How can we raise our children?' " Erasmo was the first to emigrate, sponsored by a sister. He got a job washing dishes for $75 a week, paid his sister $10 for room and board, and saved the rest. In three years he had enough to send for Eloina, and she got a job as a sewing-machine operator. In another three years they sent for their four oldest children; the two others followed in 1970, and two others were born in New York.

At the height of their earning powers, Erasmo made $160 a week as a dishwasher, and Eloina $140 on the sewing machine ("We didn't save anything, but we got by"), and then Erasmo injured his back while carting pans around the restaurant. He underwent an operation three years ago but has never fully recovered. Today he works as a part-time handyman and gets $229 a month in welfare payments.

But the children are flourishing. Julio, 21, drives a taxi. Adelso, 19, operates a printing press. Diosa, 17, is a hairdresser. Zoila Maria, 15, is studying to be a nurse. The working children contribute part of their earnings to the household, and the household is buoyant. "We have had some problems here," Eloina concedes. "We know the Latin people are looked down on and discriminated against, but we get used to that, and it doesn't mean that we're unhappy here. We're very happy. Our children have a future that our country could never have given them."

The Ortegas are lucky indeed compared with Pancho, for he belongs to the largest group of immigrants--those whose illegal entry was cut short by U.S. officialdom. While accepting some 400,000 legal immigrants every year, the U.S. seizes and deports about 800,000 illegal immigrants, almost 90% of them Mexican. Yet the wetbacks keep returning, for there is no other border in the world that divides such great disparities in wealth.

"Look at us, look at what we have!" cries Pancho, 28, waving his arms as he speaks. One hand slams against the low-hung tar-paper roof of the dirt-floor shack he rents on the edge of a gravel pit in the hills above Mexico City. Sometimes he gets a day's work in the gravel pit for $6.40, but it is not regular work. His wife, Manuela, earns $45 a month as a maid. Their six-month-old son lies sleeping on the family bed.

"I went one day to the American embassy, but there were so many people waiting to go inside that I came back in the night and slept in the line until the next day. When I finally got to the inside of the embassy, they told me I needed a lot of papers and a passport, which cost 800 pesos ($72). Most of the other people there were city people who had papers and money. Now I know that the only way for a campesino like me to go to the United States is as a wetback.

"My oldest brother went to California as a wetback in 1966. Now he is married to a gringa, and he says they can't throw him back over the border, not now. He speaks English, he has a big house--well, bigger than anything in this village--and a car and a refrigerator, and his children go to a school where he doesn't have to pay.

"So I went to Tijuana. I had some money I had borrowed, which I would pay back when I got a job in California. In Tijuana, the coyotes [con men] approached me. They knew who was trying to cross the border and could see right through your pocket and tell how much money you had. They offered to get me to Chicago, but I had heard that these people can rob you as quick as a mosquito can bite you, so I said no. One night, a campesino from Zacatecas climbed under the fence with me, and we ran and walked and hid for three hours, with our hearts beating like drums. But we walked right into la migra [the border patrol], and the next day we were back in Mexico. But I am going to try again, soon, maybe next month. It is a risk worth taking, because I know from my brother that if you make it, it is a much better future."

From cases like that of Pancho, U.S. officials like to make projections and then estimate that there are now 6 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.--or 7 million or maybe 8 million. One official estimate by the Immigration and Naturalization Service even computed that illegal immigrants cost the nation $16 billion in unpaid taxes plus welfare and other costs. Such computations satisfy the stereotyped view of illegal immigrants loafing about and collecting benefits (they also support I & NS requests for more inspectors and a bigger budget). In fact, however, nobody has any real idea how many illegal immigrants there are, but they are generally driven by a fierce desire to get ahead. They live in fear of the authorities, and they are exploited. One survey in California showed that out of 842 illegal immigrants seized in the Los Angeles area during a three-week period, 60% were working for less than $2.50 an hour and 96% for less than $3 an hour. In contradiction to I & NS statistics, a recent Labor Department study indicated that more than 70% of illegal immigrants had their taxes withheld, while fewer than 1% received welfare.

There has been talk in Congress of extending to Latin America the Eastern Hemisphere ceiling of 20,000 immigrants from any one country. That would reduce the number of legal immigrants from Mexico by about two-thirds--but it might correspondingly increase the flow of illegal immigrants. There has also been talk (indeed there may soon be a law) of making it a crime to employ an illegal immigrant. That might--or might not--end the large-scale exploitation of Latin Americans. Officially, the laws governing today's immigrants proclaim that the U.S. needs only professional and highly skilled labor, but in fact, like all richly developed societies, the U.S. also has an unofficial need for someone to do its dirty work. Whether the new immigrant is a doctor or a dishwasher, what the U.S. needs most is an intangible quality of energy and hope that many of the newcomers bring with them. In their aspirations, particularly in their aspirations for their children, the new immigrants are not so different from the old.

Yet things do change. Ellis Island is a sort of museum now.

Closed in 1954, it was abandoned to the winds and vandals for more than two decades, then reopened in May as a national park. There have been no repairs. The paint is peeling from the walls. A stone wall shows a gaping wound where thieves smashed through to steal the copper piping. The grimy corridors echo the shuffling footsteps of today's slightly awed visitors passing through on the five-times-a-day guided tour.

"My grandfather came here as Sam Kamenetski and left as Sam Kamen," says Tom A. Friedmann, 26, an attorney from Wichita, Kans., "because the immigration inspectors couldn't spell or pronounce his full name. He was a carriage maker, and he had some friends who had settled out West, so he took the first train to Kansas City. He saved money and started a grocery store, and most of our family has gone into retailing. My sister and I were the first ones to go to college.

"This place is like walking through a time machine," says Friedmann. "I can almost see my grandparents walking through here. I can almost feel what they must have felt. This place is a monument to hope. I think the hopes have fared better than the monument."

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