September 13, 2007
Our Changing Cities III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:25 PM EST Josh Zeitz blogged that he had recently been interviewed by the Times about “a recent report that showed New York City’s non-Hispanic white population growing after several decades of sharp decline; at the same time, the number of immigrants in New York City, both the foreign-born and their children, is approaching levels last seen at the start of the twentieth century.” Josh notes that other American cities—he mentions Washington, D.C., and Newark—are witnessing comparable changes. Fred Allen replied that his parents, just back from Europe, reported that the difference between New York and a lot of European cities is not the presence of immigrants—there are a lot of immigrants in many European cities—but the American immigrants’ pleasing sense of ownership of the streets they bestrode. On his parents’ account, European cities feel as if they are inhabited by people who “look like a ghettoized underclass, stuck in the outskirts of the city, segregated from mainstream life.” On the strength of a trip to Queens last December, this seems to me like a partial but trivial exaggeration. I was in search of good kielbasa, a form of Polish sausage. An older woman in my friend’s hometown from whom my friend’s mother had bought homemade kielbasa had stopped making the stuff, and my friend had heard that in Polish neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn you can find pretty good sausage. You can indeed, along with fine pirogi, babka, and smoked trout, etc., and in one part of Queens you can buy all of these things in a neighborhood where the ATMs have screens with instructions in Polish, the newsstands sell only Polish publications—scores of them—and there are a remarkable number of perfume shops, which seems to be a Polish as well as a French thing. There are good and amazingly cheap Polish restaurants, where only Polish was spoken other than to us, ditto butchers and grocers, in one of which the butcher returned change to my friend with one of the few Polish phrases I know, one that more or less means “thank you, noble Lady,” not a phrase one commonly hears in other New York City shops. So it is not true to say that in New York City immigrants are never segregated from mainstream life to any degree. This was partial segregation, but it was only partial—people clearly living there had jobs in Manhattan, because the place was much quieter on a workday than on a weekend—and it was cheerful. No one seemed irritated at us for entering Polish turf, which would not be the case with a number of immigrant neighborhoods in European cities (and for that matter in 1920s Chicago, when my father grew up there). What happens to people in neighborhoods like that one in Queens? One tiny piece of anecdotal evidence: Over the past decade and change I have known New Yorkers who have employed successive Polish cleaning ladies. The first one in the series was a young woman who curtsied and called some of her employers “noble sir.” After two years, she was gone. She had gotten a job as a draughtsman in a machine shop. My guess is that curtseying and calling her employers “noble sir” vanished soon thereafter, and old-world atavistic charm aside, I am not sorry for that. The successor she recruited cleaned apartments for a number of years and then became an engineer, and the third one also moved on. The current one in the series is still cleaning apartments, but my guess is not forever. As these women move on, their English improves, and other things change too. They become Americans. Somehow, we have helped make them so; there is clearly some sort of push-pull, but the eerie gift we have for doing our part of this is clear when you think about the competition. Americans, who pioneered the mass production of automobiles, are sometimes gloomy about how other people now do this very effectively, to our apparent hazard. The Japanese, for example, make fine cars, but they are not good at making Japanese people using anything other than the most traditional method—and they do not even care to try. The Germans are also dab hands at mass-producing cars—they could not do this very effectively when it was a question of mass-producing tanks, and a good thing too, but now they clearly have it licked. But they cannot make Germans very well, other than from existing stock. They are ambivalent about trying, and maybe when they try more wholeheartedly they’ll do better, but the smart money is not taking any bets on it. Americans, on the other hand, are very effective at making more Americans out of any and all material. Then the new Americans make other things. I today read that 40 percent of American scientists were born in the European Union, which seems high but not impossible, and I am certain that a fair amount of other American scientists were born in places like India and China and Korea. I do not know quite what they make, or will make, but my guess is that the People’s Republic of China is likely to be very unhappy if it ever decides to invade Taiwan, and one reason for that is the high probability that some of the things new Americans make are going to be doozies. I posted back in July about the P47, a very effective machine a couple of immigrants designed in the early 1940s. The strategic consequences of American receptivity to immigration is a longstanding theme in our history. We should not be surprised by the things new Americans invent, because they are, after all, people with practice: they began by remaking themselves. Somehow we let them do it. Why are most host countries so much less good at this? I’m not sure. During nativist panics we repeatedly forget that we are good at this, or insist that this time it is different, but so far we have always been wrong. Nowadays the anti-nativists also tell a different story: America is and has always been a salad bowl and not a melting pot, we have usually been cruelly unwelcoming, and so on. And much of that is true—at least until you look at the phenomenon in comparative perspective.
|
