This piece provides an apt illustration of the phenomenon that one can find in nearly every culture, in every era, a group of people who firmly believe that their civilization once experienced a golden age in which social conditions were much better (if not perfect), and modern society is an increasingly worsening corruption of that arcadian past. The trend continues today, as we commonly see responses to social, political, or economic issues that attempt to contrast the present with earlier eras, to hearken back to times when such problems were significantly amerliorated or simply did not exist.
Generally such reactions don't ring true, referring not to the way things really used to be, but to idealized, mythical visions of the past couched in absolute terms. So it is with this letter, which attempts to contrast the "modern immigrant" with immigrants of a century ago, finding the former sadly lacking by comparison. As usual, it references a black-and-white past that never existed. Yes, many of the immigrants who streamed through Ellis Island into the United States around the turn of the century worked hard, obeyed the laws, did their best to learn English (and otherwise become assimiliated into American culture), raised children who willingly took up arms to defend their adoptive country in times of crisis, and made their way in the world (and perhaps even prospered) with little or no help from the government or anyone outside their immediate families and circles of acquaintances. However, plenty of immigrants in that same era did _not_ fit that mold, such as those who:
* Resorted to scams, petty theft, and all sorts of other crimes to get by, or simply resumed the same kinds of criminal activities they'd been perpetrating in their homelands, sometimes on large, organized scales (e.g., the Italian mafia, Chinese triads).
* Moved to enclaves or communities in which their original cultures and languages were preserved, obviating the need for them to ever assimiliate into the broader American culture or learn English. (If the immigrants of earlier eras "stirred the melting pot into one red, white and blue bowl," then who started all the ethnic enclaves, such as Little Germany and Chinatown , found in New York and many other American cities?) Their children (and future generations) were often left to learn English and assimilate as best they could on their own, driven by necessity rather than allegiance to American national ideals.
* Retained their original family names, or changed their names only reluctantly ? the latter not to "blend in with their new home," but to try to escape the prejudices, persecution, and violence typically visited upon members of various national, ethnic, and religious groups in the U.S. (e.g., Catholics, Jews, Irish, Italians).
* Declined to participate in fighting for the U.S. against their home countries in World War I (as did their children in World War II), or even left the U.S. to return home and fight for the other side. (And certainly many first-generation Americans of Japanese descent, who found themselves restricted to internment camps merely due to their ancestry, gave plenty of "thought about what country their parents had come from.")
* Disdained free lunches, welfare, and labor laws not because they were virtuous and prized self-sufficiency, but because those government programs did not yet exist, either for native-born American citizens or immigrants.
What this piece illustrates is not so much substantive differences between "old immigrants" and "new immigrants," but rather the truthfulness of the proverb "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."
