Guarding the Door

By LANCE MORROW

Their journey repeats the classic American immigrant sagas. To escape the old country (the ration line, the future foreclosed, the totalitarian rant), they climb aboard overcrowded boats and go pitching out across the water to a different life. When they glimpse the new land, they throng to the rails; they peer toward the dock with that vulnerable immigrant look of yearning that everyone carries in memory, like a cracked photograph: the faces at Ellis Island, the Golden Door--or at least the servants' entrance--to the new world and all its redemptions.

The drama, now replayed by thousands of Cubans in their 110-mile trek across the Straits of Florida, can still raise a glow of patriotic nostalgia in Americans. It is "a nation of immigrants," after all, as John Kennedy wrote 100 years after his Irish great-grandfather left County Wexford to become a cooper in Boston. But today Americans are having trouble rising to the occasion. Drifting into a recession whose depths they cannot yet judge, skittish about plant closings and lost jobs, about oil prices and taxes that already seem too high for Government services that provide too little, Americans are less disposed to invite more strangers into the house. The beds are all taken, they say. The basement is jammed with illegal aliens--as many as 12 million, by some counts, with thousands more daily piling across the borders.

Ku Klux Klansmen have paraded around Florida lately, dispensing their old nativist bile and giving a bad name to an argument (AMERICA FOR AMERICANS, the picket signs say) that has more thoughtful and respectable proponents. The New Republic's columnist, TRB, a voice of intelligent liberalism, writes with some truculence: "Sooner or later, America must face reality. It is going to be painful ... The trouble is that huddled masses need jobs. The American frontier (worse luck) is gone." The American ideal of endless hospitality and refuge presupposed perpetually expanding resources. Now, says the argument, an emerging order of scarcity mandates self-interest, selectivity, limitation, exclusion. No more the profligate America with arms open in Whitmanesque embrace, ready to issue a shovel to anyone strong enough and willing to dig.

Actually, Congress posted very picky bouncers at the Golden Door in 1921, when it began the quota system. But official strictures on immigration have become a kind of charade. The flow of illegal immigrants persists, merely inconvenienced by the understaffed Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol. And the U.S. has often made massive exceptions to the law in order to admit refugees--36,000 from Hungary after the 1956 uprising, for example, and 872,000 from Cuba since the Castro revolution. Future upheavals will undoubtedly produce massive new exceptions. A new law, the Refugee Act of 1980, attempts to bring some order to immigration, but it is not much help in resolving the questions of fairness, humanity, precedent and priority that the new mass Cuban migration raises.

The most basic matter of American fairness, of who is entitled to what, was brought up with a theatrical appropriateness by the black riots in Miami, the capital of Cuban America. The heavy infusion of Spanish-speaking Latins into southern Florida has been one factor in making blacks there (citizens with deep and painful roots in the American past) feel even more intensely wronged than blacks elsewhere in the nation. Latins argue that the Cubans (450,000 in Dade County alone) have accelerated business development, brought fresh blood and vigor to the area, and thus more jobs. That is true. In fact, the entire logic of immigration rests upon the fact that immigrants are almost always an asset, a new presence, a little bit frightened and often left ingenious. But the Latin renaissance has left blacks in an unhappy third place in the community. Often they cannot get jobs if they do not speak Spanish; they feel, there fore, doubly estranged. Their question presents an almost un answerable grievance: Why does America welcome strangers and mistreat its own?

Whites as well object that newcomers overtax the housing (the vacancy rate in Dade County is less than 1%), the over burdened schools and other public services. Beyond the matter of fairness to American blacks and other minorities, the new Cuban infusion raises questions about what is fair to other refugees and immigrants. Millions of people around the world want to get into America; they pay the nation the compliment of a sometimes desperate yearning to settle here. There are now 9 million foreigners applying, and only a small percentage of them will get the chance to enter the U.S. legally.

Those who wish to pull up the gangplank should probably remember that arguments eerily similar to their own have been offered almost since the beginning of the nation. In 1797 a Congressman declared that while liberal immigration policies were fine for a country new and unsettled, the U.S. was now mature and fully populated and so the gates must close to newcomers. In the depression of 1873, workers rioted in some cities over the immigrants who were stealing their jobs from them. Americans, so idealistically generous and expansive in their official mythology, have generally greeted foreigners with fear and loathing. A New York newspaper editorial in the late 19th century commented on the Italian influx: "The bars are down. The dam is washed away. The sewer is choked. The scum of immigration is viscerating upon our shores." Franklin Roosevelt held rigidly to his immigrant quotas all through the '30s, when Europe's Jews were desperately seeking refuge from Hitler. The American failure to welcome Europe's Jews may have encouraged Hitler.

By comparison, the reception for the new Cubans has been fairly hospitable. The Carter Administration, after committing its customary sins of oversteering, veering in the process from one side of the issue to the other, is now trying to strike a workable, intelligent balance that will honor both the practical dilemma (the Cubans are here in the U.S., and it would be barbaric to try to ship them back) and the necessary precedents and principles (quota systems must be honored, American jobs must be protected, and the country cannot possibly take everyone who wants to come).

The U.S. cannot be sealed off like a medieval fortress at sun down. The Cubans who have come to the U.S. should be made welcome; but the U.S. must seek ways to discourage fur ther outpourings. The old promiscuous invitation of the land of the free must be muted somewhat. That is an idea that Americans as well as potential immigrants may find painful to accept: a nation that has always cherished a self-congratulatory illusion that it could be all things to all who appeared at the front door must now have the character to make the sort of serious choices that might leave America seeming as vulnerable and diminished and woefully crass as the rest of the world.

There are rational, realistic lines to be drawn -- and promises inside the house that need to be redeemed. --Lance Morrow

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