America's Immigrant Challenge

By THE EDITORS

Among the many promises a young upstart named Bill Clinton made to the voters as he campaigned for the presidency was that, if elected, he would produce an Administration that "looks like America." Whether or not he has succeeded in that aim -- he has recruited many minorities, though critics say still not enough -- his pledge was an acknowledgment of an important fact: the face of America has been dramatically altered in the final years of the 20th century. America's face is not just about physiognomy, or even color, although endless varieties of each can be seen throughout the land. It is about the very complexion of the country, the endless and fascinating profusion of peoples, cultures, languages and attitudes that make up the great national pool.

That pool, constantly fed by new streams of immigrants, has produced in the U.S. of 1993 what author Ben J. Wattenberg has labeled "the first universal nation," a truly multicultural society marked by unparalleled diversity. It has also brought fresh challenges for the U.S. -- and considerable doubts among Americans about the wisdom of continuing the country's traditional open- door policy toward new immigrants.

A nation of immigrants from the beginning, the U.S. has welcomed most newcomers, grateful for any new pairs of hands to tame its vast interior or help stoke its huge industrial engine. For more than a century, most of the new arrivals were from Europe. But in the 1960s the U.S. undertook a basic shift in national policy, from one stacked in favor of European immigrants toward one that favored the rest of the world, particularly Third World nations. The full effects of that policy have exploded only in recent years. The past decade has seen the greatest rise in immigration since the great wave of 1901-10. Immigrants are arriving at the rate of more than 1 million a year, mostly from Asia and the vast Hispanic world.

The impact of these new immigrants is literally remaking America. Today more than 20 million Americans were born in another country. Given that there are higher birthrates among the mostly young Third World arrivals, demographers are predicting that the U.S. before long will have to redefine just who its minorities are. In 1950, for example, 75% of all the minorities in the U.S. were African Americans. Hispanics now number about 24 million, and by 2010 -- little more than a dozen years from now -- they will have surpassed blacks in number.

Even more startling, sometime during the second half of the 21st century the descendants of white Europeans, the arbiters of the core national culture for most of its existence, are likely to slip into minority status. "Without fully realizing it," writes Martha Farnsworth Riche, director of policy studies at Washington's Population Reference Bureau, "we have left the time when the nonwhite, non-Western part of our population could be expected to assimilate to the dominant majority. In the future, the white, Western majority will have to do some assimilation of its own."

That prospect hardly pleases everyone. The new immigrants enter a country whose population of 258 million has comfortably filled the land and is worried about overpopulation and a threatened environment. Many are alarmed by a projection that if the immigrant tide continues, the U.S. population will rise to 392 million by the middle of the next century. The sluggish performance of the American economy, accompanied by persistent unemployment, makes aliens once again appear a threat to jobs. In particular, the growth of illegal immigration and the government's inability to stanch the flow are a constant irritant to Americans.

It is little wonder, then, that this latest wave of immigrants may become at least as controversial as any in U.S. history. Normally tolerant Americans succumb to complaints about the newcomers' contributions to crime and disease, about the burdens on schools and welfare rolls. The net cost of immigrants to the government could reach into the billions. In a poll conducted for Time by Yankelovich Partners Inc. this fall, three-quarters of those questioned felt that the nation's current policy has got out of hand and that the government should limit immigration more strictly.

Does this mean the end of the American pact with newcomers to its shores? Almost surely not. Despite difficulties, recent immigrants have brought to the U.S. a diversity, a vitality, a freshness unseen since the great immigration waves of the 19th century. Though different and perhaps more problematic than those who have come before, the latest immigrants are helping form a new society, a variation and intensification of the great American experiment. Too complicated and diffuse to be described as a melting pot, or even a goulash or a mosaic, that society today is really a collection of intertwining subcultures, each contributing its own character to the nation's life -- from food to fashion, from art to politics -- while retaining its distinctiveness.

Most of the newcomers share an enormously important trait with those who preceded them. They are self-selected self-starters, men and women who had the gumption to pick up and chase after their dreams. They are born optimists; otherwise, why come? Though some are poorer and have fewer job skills to offer than previous immigrants, an impressive number bring with them palpable contributions to American society. A great many new doctors today are foreign born. Immigrants rank high among the entrepreneurs who are making small businesses the core of recent economic growth. As the pictures on these pages demonstrate, the newcomers have also provided America with some startling images by replicating scenes from their own cultures across the country.

The biggest challenge the U.S. faces on the immigration front is to ensure that these welcome differences are accompanied by a dedication to, or at least a healthy acceptance of, what unites Americans of every color and ethnic background: the host of values many still consider vital to the American character. Those values are embodied in such seminal documents as the Federalist papers and the Constitution. They presume active participation in the democratic political process, praised by Alexis de Tocqueville as the great educator and unifier. They include a respect for the rule of law, for the rights of others to succeed -- or fail -- and a shared responsibility to protect those who cannot succeed. These values are conveyed, eventually, in the English language, among people who share a cultural idiom that ranges from Bugs Bunny to baseball's seventh-inning stretch.

Traditionalists, fearing the erosion of these values, decry the emergence of identity politics and the thought-control techniques popularly called "political correctness." Both of these intertwined movements create a tendency for minorities to place ethnicity above individuality and huddle under banners that label them as victims of, rather than participants in, the larger society. "The multiethnic dogma," writes historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., "belittles unum and glorifies pluribus."

But the process of assimilation, while perhaps a bit more hesitant and stressful than at times in the past, still marches on. It might skip a generation, revealing itself eventually, for instance, in the pure Valleyspeak ; of a young Chinese Californian. More often than ever before, though, assimilation in the 1990s arrives through the ultimate cultural immersion of interethnic marriage. In today's diverse America, such marriages are occurring at triple the rate of two decades ago.

The present popular discontent may produce some needed changes in immigration laws and practices. But there is no turning back: diversity breeds diversity. It is the fuel that runs today's America and, in a world being transformed daily by technologies that render distances meaningless, it puts America in the forefront of a new international order.

This issue of Time is devoted to American diversity, and thus by definition to the differences among Americans. Those differences gain their impact, however, from the bonds that unite them in one vast and variegated country. They are differences that should not divide or weaken America, but distinguish and strengthen it. They are the reason to keep the welcome mat, however worn and tattered at times, always ready at the door.