Immigrants Like Those Who Came Before Them, the Newest Americans Bring a Spirit and an Energy That Preserve the Nation's Uniqueness

By LANCE MORROW

America is a country that endlessly reinvents itself, working the alchemy that turns "them" into "us." That is the American secret: motion, new combinations, absorption. The process is wasteful, dangerous, messy, sometimes tragic. It is also inspiring. The story, in its ideal, is one of earthly redemption.

The idea is reckless, taking in so many strangers, hurling all those contradictory genes and customs and temperaments into the same room. It goes against human nature. Strangers are not supposed to set up civilizations together. A nation must arise out of a tribe, out of affinities of blood. At one time, if some Pacific island tribesmen encountered a man they had not seen before, they simply killed -- and sometimes ate -- him. Tribal policy. But the U.S., with its great polyglot ingathering, went brilliantly to the other extreme.

The kinetic energy of new combinations is changing the U.S. today as profoundly as it did at the turn of the century, in the sepia-tinted days of Ellis Island. The faces are different now -- mostly brown and yellow. Twenty years ago, more than half of all immigrants came from Europe and Canada. Today, most are Mexicans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, Indians, Chinese, Dominicans, Jamaicans. They scramble up across the border near San Ysidro, Calif., in the middle of the night. They get off their jets and stream through Customs at Kennedy. They arrive in the trunks of cars or wash up in foundering boats on the Florida Keys.

Native-born Americans are ambivalent about the new arrivals. Ambivalence is what old Americans have always felt toward new Americans. At a remove of several generations from Ellis Island, some sentimentalize the immigrant experience. They project their nostalgia upon today's immigrants and wish them well. But the native-born also feels the alien vibration. Alien is a dank and sinister word -- the ominous otherness, not our kind. The alien stands across a gap through which a killer wind can blow. The U.S. is being overrun, says a flickering fear. Racism in new combinations jounces around. Traditional nativist whites find themselves in the same improbable club with native American blacks condemning the brown and yellow foreigners who are taking their jobs away.

The new immigrants are an insistent presence. A single cluster of 14 brown brick stores in New York City harbors a Korean beauty parlor, a Chinese hardware store, a South Asian spice shop, a Chinese watch store and a Korean barber. At a high school on Chicago's Far North Side, algebra classes are conducted not only in English but in Spanish, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Assyrian. Along Bolsa Avenue in Santa Ana, Calif., virtually every sign for more than a mile is in Vietnamese: Vietnamese supermarkets, bookstores, pharmacies that deal in rare herbs. Ten years ago, nothing was there but warehouses and strawberry fields.

Americans alternate between hospitality and paranoia about the newcomers, between a promiscuous inclusiveness and a nativist recoil. It was different, they say, when the whole continent lay before us and needed building. The job is done. How many more can we take now? How long before all those foreigners, who have not the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in their hereditary code, who have not democracy and its disciplines (debate, voting), begin to tear out the Republic's circuit boards and leave them rotting in the yard? How long before the Third World overwhelms the First World?

Those who wished to turn back earlier waves of immigration sometimes used the same language, or worse. In 1751 Benjamin Franklin asked, "Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and, by herding together, establish their language and manners, to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them?" Some 80 years later, Boston Mayor Theodore Lyman called the Irish "a race that will never be infused into our own, but on the contrary will always remain distinct and hostile." The Eastern European Jews who fled the pogroms were an embarrassment to the cultivated German Jewish establishment in the U.S. Some of today's immigrations stir hatreds, but if anything, the new Asians at least may be more welcome than most of the Italians in the generation of Lee Iaccoca's father. So many of the Asians come from the middle class, or aspire to the middle class, and are driven by a stern Confucian ethic.

In a sense, America long ago made a shrewd instinctive bargain with the world. It offered a prize -- its wealth, its freedom and promise -- and then, Darwinian, dared those strong enough and bold enough to make the leap. It was, and is, a hard journey. And, of course, the newcomers were too literal- minded about the prize. The sidewalks were not paved with gold.

It was America, really, that got the prize: the enormous energy unleashed by the immigrant dislocations. Being utterly at risk, moving into a new and dangerous land, makes the immigrant alert and quick to learn. It livens reflexes, pumps adrenaline. The immigrant, uprooted, cannot take traditional sustenance from the permanence of home, of place, from an arrangement that existed before he existed and would persist after he died. Everyone is an immigrant in time, voyaging into the future. The immigrant who travels in both time and geographical space achieves a neat existential alertness. The dimensions of time and space collaborate. America, a place, becomes a time: the future.

There is nothing deadened or smug about immigrants. They work long hours and live for their children. They are, in a sense, more serious about life than the settled can be, for they are in a dangerous passage. It makes them very much alive. It makes the American juices flow. In this special issue, TIME describes the newest Americans and addresses the myriad ways in which they are carrying on an honored tradition: contributing their bloodlines, their spirit and their energy to preserve the nation's vitality and uniqueness.