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Bright Light, Bright Country
| Article
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16393 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
1,366 Words |
| Author
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Herbert London
Herbert London is dean of the Gallatin Division of New
York University and Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute. |
They come to America. Bedraggled, sick, disillusioned, penniless immigrants gravitate to this beacon of liberty in the Western Hemisphere. This is not a description of Neil Diamond song or a nineteenth-century poem, it is a fact of our time. The United States is the last, best hope of mankind. Whether fleeing civil war, the yoke of totalitarianism, or bone-chilling poverty; whether seeking a chance to get ahead or to feel the electricity of the one place where opportunity is spelled out in bright lights for all to see, people from all over the world come here.
It is hard for many Americans to grasp this fact, since most of their ancestors came here in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For them, the story of immigration is found in the histories of Oscar Handlin and John Higham. One can read with amusement and satisfaction the poignant immigrant tales included in Mary Antin's documentaries of the turn of this century. What we as a people have lost is a sense that hardship, travail, grizzled weariness on reaching this land, and a struggle to scrape out a living are as much a part of this era as of any period in the past.
Al Santoli's book The New Americans: An Oral History is alive with such illustrations. I found myself in the strange position of not wanting this book to end. For what Santoli has so eloquently captured is the organic link from the present to the past, on which immigration depends. To his credit, Santoli lets the émigré voices speak. The human concerns come cascading from the soul.
If one can generalize from these voices--and I don't see why that can't be done--the search for liberty, the desire to be free of government constraints, is everywhere evident. Stories of Afghan rebels, Hmong tribesmen, Vietnamese boat people fighting against communist-inspired mass murderers, as well as of nature's vicissitudes, offer clear, unadorned evidence that the human spirit is not easily extinguished, even in the face of technological weapons in the service of totalitarian regimes.
These poignant tales reveal a Manichaean world quite different from the one described in the pages of political science texts. In the worldview disclosed by current immigration tales, there is no classification of nations as authoritarian, totalitarian, and free states; there is only the dark side of human nature, in which peril is lurking everywhere, and the light side--freedom. That portrait, of course, has its complexities. Freedom offers not only opportunity, but the latitude to fail. All do not prosper in a free society
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