Photo by Cynthia Larsen

A program—and issue—that got out of hand

By Ed Goldman

Unless you hail from that group of Native Americans who waved signs to greet the tourists arriving at Cape Cod on Mayflower Cruise Lines in 1620, you’re the descendant of immigrants.  

Immigration is the one topic voters actually thought they understood last November. Oh, sure, they deplored the price of eggs and the federal deficit and transitioning boys playing on women’s sports teams—but I think the average voter, and even the B+ voter, wasn’t as angry about those issues as about immigration. 

Immigration is the kind of issue you can sink your canines into and find support for revamping it no matter if you’re in a red, blue, purple or green state (the latter is where you’ll find yourself if you eat Dennison’s chili con carne after 11 p.m.)

It’s an issue that appears to be measurable—as in, “We’ve let in too many immigrants.” (Curiously, I’ve yet to hear someone complain that we don’t have enough immigrants.) We can convince ourselves that immigration is taking away our jobs but that only provides a cover for fear and bigotry. We might say, “It’s not that I don’t like Mexicans or Venezuelans or even Laotians.” Right. You just don’t like them taking the kind of jobs you’ve tried your whole life to avoid doing.

I mean, let’s face it. If you own a home, the very moment you can afford to you’ll probably hire yourself a gardener—and likely, a Mexican one. Same thing for house- and pool-cleaning. And while most nannies in the country are still white, 18 percent of them are Hispanic or Latino. That percentage is increasing, too.

The people who Martinize our business suits are often Vietnamese, Laotian or even Ukrainian. I wonder if any of them knows what “Martinize” means. At least they have an excuse not to. I say that because I don’t think it has an equivalent word in any of the aforementioned languages. (If I now have you wondering what it means, it’s simply a coinage for cleaning clothes without water—which you may also call…drum roll… dry-cleaning them.)

I’m only two generations away from being an immigrant. Each pair of my grandparents came to the U.S. from Russia and/or Ukraine in the early years of the last century. My dad was born here in 1916, my mom in 1917, both in New York City, as were my siblings and I. And when we moved from New York to California, we often felt like immigrants: the culture shock was real, a kind of psychological jet lag except that no amount of napping or hydrating cured it.  

Repatriation isn’t the answer in any generation’s case. Just as my grandparents wouldn’t have returned to the Soviet Union for all the gold and blinis there, my folks never seriously contemplated returning to New York City. Neither did my brothers. I still think about it, though—but I’ve lived on the Left Coast so long I wonder how long it would take me to re-accustom myself to the pace and noise of my hometown.

What I do like every time I go back there for a visit is the diversity, the sounds of dozens of languages and music and the aromas of mysterious cuisines wafting around me.

I sometimes think of my visits to New York as an exploratory “fam” (familiarization) tour, the kind that convention planners take to see what other cities may have to offer their group, in terms of beauty, culture, accessibility and safety if they were to book an annual conference there.