Mondays with Mike: Immigrant identity

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

So begins “The Adventures of Augie March,” the Saul Bellow novel. I listened to parts of it with Beth. But only smatterings—Beth listens as we fall asleep, but she also listens on her own, so I get bits and pieces.

This blog post at Court’s web site is a great read whether or not you’ve seen the play.

We saw the play based on the novel yesterday on its final performance at Court Theatre in Hyde Park at the University of Chicago. My, my. This NY Times review is solid and fair, but I came to the play not having read the entire book, and I think when judged in its own right, the play is brilliant.

The Playbill—and the Court’s blog on the production—provided historical background that is particularly poignant in these times. Saul Bellow came with his family to the United States from Canada. He only learned he had done so illegally many years later when he tried to enlist in the armed forces. He’d been born in Canada, but his parents came to Canada from St. Petersburg, Russia, to escape persecution of Jewish people. They didn’t come to the United States until immigration policy had been dramatically tightened.

From the blog:

The Bellow family arrived on American soil two short months after the U. S. Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, a drastic and sweeping revision of federal immigration policy. The new law slammed the door on a tide of humanity that had been flowing to America since the late 19th-century, ending the greatest era of mass migration to the United States in its history.

Nora Titone, Resident Dramaturg at The Court’s, did a great job of providing historical context on Bellow in the program. It’s a worthwhile read in its own right. Meantime, see if any of this passage sounds familiar:

His whole life, Bellow retained a vivid impression of the first day he spent in America: July 4, 1924. He recalled his nine-year-old self thinking the fireworks, flags, bunting and parades of Independence Day were for him, meant to hail the promise of his new life in America.

But the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act told a less welcoming story. The law was informed by the burgeoning eugenics movement, which maintained that peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa were genetically inferior to those from Northern and Western Europe. The 1924 Act accordingly slashed immigration rates from targeted nations by 98%, barring admission to Russian Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Turks, Armenians, Lithuanians and Africans, among many others. Conspicuously, the 1924 Act left the door open to migrants from Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Norway.

All this reminded me of a germ of a thought that had randomly occurred to me earlier: In America, our views are necessarily tinted by our proximity to our immigrant forbears. My identity has always been tied up with my maternal grandparents having immigrated from Italy, and my paternal grandparents having come from Serbia. (Neither pair would’ve been admitted after the 1924 legislation. Phew.)

My immigrant lineage always has been a source of pride. These people bravely came to a crazy new world, without the language. And they made it. And their kids made it—they fought in WWII, they became teachers and steel workers and engineers.

But it’s more than that. If I’m honest, in the back of my mind, immigrants didn’t just make it here—they more or less saved the country from its staid anglo inertia, and made it great. I confess, it’s kind of a reverse snobbery.

I think for people whose families have been here much longer —say, since before the Civil War—that kind of narrative, is, well, foreign. America is their narrative, and they were nice enough to write the rest of us in to bit roles.

In terms of the outsized political divide between rural and urban America today, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people in cities tend to have different views on immigration than non-urbanites. Again, from the Playbill:

From 1880 to 1924, waves of newcomers, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe. powered the rapid growth of Chicago. The city’s population quadrupled in thirty years’ time, growing from 500,000 residents in 1880 to over 2 million in 1910. By 1924, when Bellow took up residence with his family in the Russian Jewish enclave of Humboldt Park, 70% of Chicago residents were foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents.

I don’t believe in open borders—in a perfect world, that could work, but we have a little work to do first. Immigration needs to be regulated and enforced in a humane way. But the motivation for that regulation can’t be fear and xenophobia. It can’t be based on the fantasy that there has ever been a way it should be.

A better approach: We’re always trying to get to the way it should be. And we probably need some outside help to get there.