Immigrant Song

By Noy Thrupkaew, The American Prospect. Posted April 9, 2004.

The immigrants in the documentary "The New Americans" are indeed the tired and the poor to whom the Statue of Liberty extends her welcome. But faceless, huddled masses they are not, thanks to this series, which follows five immigrant stories over the course of four years. Debuting today, tomorrow, and Wednesday on PBS (check local listings), "The New Americans" begins in its subjects' homelands and traces both their wrenching goodbyes and their first years in the United States. Over the course of the seven-hour program, viewers become intimately acquainted with some of the human stories that underpin ever-fiercer debates over immigration in the United States.

One of the most recent additions to the fray is Samuel Huntington's essay "The Hispanic Challenge", which appeared in the latest issue of Foreign Policy. Excerpted from his upcoming book, "Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity," the essay is Huntington's notion of the "clash of civilizations," writ to fit the domestic realm. The "them" this time is the swell of Hispanic immigrants, particularly those from Mexico, who refuse to assimilate in rising numbers, splitting the unified "Anglo-Protestant" United States into a country of two peoples, two cultures, and two languages.

As Gregory Rodriguez noted in an incisive Los Angeles Times piece, Huntington's work is fueled by "cultural determinist" ideas, in which his notions of culturally mandated behaviors -- the Protestant work ethic versus "the mañana syndrome," for example -- are ossified into rigid categories and set against one another. The problem with Huntington's "Hispanic Challenge" thesis, Rodriguez writes, "is that it doesn't take into account the people whose actions it presumes to predict."

Those are people like Pedro Flores, who has spent the last 13 years working in a Kansas meatpacking factory, more than a thousand miles away from his beloved family. Flores' story is perhaps the most agonizing one in The New Americans. This unbelievably hardworking man sacrifices nearly everything in his attempts to bring his family to the United States, to give them educations and all the tools and opportunities to do what Huntington says the members of the Flores family, as Mexican immigrants, have no interest in doing: becoming full-fledged, contributing members of American society.

Pedro Flores' story is a refutation of Huntington's thesis on only an anecdotal level, it's true, but that should not be interpreted as immediate grounds for dismissal. Others, including David Glenn in the Chronicle for Higher Education, David Brooks in the New York Times, and Rodriguez have already laid waste to the rhetorical and statistical follies of "The Hispanic Challenge." Huntington's ideas about people have precious few people in them, so why not also rebut the macro with the micro? Like all the stories presented in The New Americans, Flores' story moves beyond the anecdotal in its rich telling; in its depiction of a loving, heroically struggling family, it does much to erode the fear of the alien other that gives fuel to Huntington's work.

Israel Ngozi, a former petrochemical engineer from Nigeria, is no stranger to struggle in the United States (nor are any of the individuals depicted in The New Americans). He is a refugee fleeing political persecution for his outspokenness against Shell Oil. Naima Saadeh Abudayyeh, a young Palestinian woman leaving the West Bank to marry a Palestinian American, negotiates a new language, her husband's consuming devotion to the Palestinian cause, and the wishes of her traditional mother. Jose Garcia and Ricardo Rodriguez, two aspiring baseball players from the Dominican Republic, cope with the crushing pressure to make good on their dreams, and a South Asian computer programmer, Anjan Bachu, seeks fortune in the dot-com boom.

Over the series' three episodes, we see the forces -- lack of opportunities, stifling poverty and squashed hopes, dreams of economic and political freedom -- that have brought these immigrants to the United States. We also see proud identities and close-knit families left behind. With the wryly loving humor she passed on to her son, Israel Ngozi's mother watches the video letter her son and daughter-in-law have sent her. "If you cry like this now," she says, gesturing at the image of her weeping daughter-in-law on the screen, "where will you get the tears when I die?"

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