Wednesday, August 15, 2007
In search of real Americans
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
When I was in college, these several decades ago, I attended a food festival hosted by some of the university's foreign exchange students -- international students, these days -- who offered their American classmates a chance to sample dishes from their native countries.
This was quite a delight for a culturally insulated girl from St. Louis. At that point in my life, I had never lived farther from home than my college campus, 125 miles away, had never even visited anyplace more exotic than Virginia, where my dad's people were, and are.
My experience of ethnic food was having spaghetti as a side with steak at a restaurant on the Hill -- da Hill, in the accent of native St. Louisans -- the city's Italian neighborhood.
So I was amazed and generally pleased with the unusual flavors of the festival, and fascinated by the foreign places the event's hosts described to me, though all of that is a blur, more a mental impression than a memory. Except one encounter.
"Where are you from?" I asked a young Asian woman among a group of Asian students from different countries.
She hesitated and looked at me in some confusion, and I knew I had committed some faux pas. Perhaps she didn't speak English well enough to know what I had said. I was about to turn to the group to ask for help when she smiled.
"Kansas City," she said in the flat, Midwestern accent we shared, "but I don't think that's what you're really asking."
I recall that meeting from time to time, usually when I am reading about the backlash against undocumented immigrants in Northern Virginia, where "foreigners" make up a much greater proportion of the population than they do here. And I ponder all over again what it is to be American, with an adjective or without -- Asian America, African American, Native American, Italian American. Just plain American, the way I think of myself.
It should be all the same in the end, in any way that is important to the national identity -- in the shared ideals that are supposed to guarantee our rights to live as free people, just so long as that freedom doesn't infringe on the rights of others to do the same.
Yet, in a nation of immigrants, it's impossible to know on sight who is American and who is not.
Despite cultural frictions and post-9/11 fears, I think, on balance, the mix is a good thing. There's no American quite so appreciative of the nation's founding principles and opportunities as new Americans, who arrive by choice rather than accident of birth.
I despair at the irrational attempts of local governments to root out illegal immigrants, a byproduct of Congress's failure to reform the shambles that is U.S. immigration policy. But I don't quibble with the goal of securing U.S. borders, which is basic to maintaining the nation's sovereignty. I'm glad to see some efforts seem to be slowing the waves of illegal migration, even as I doubt much lasting effect.
In the course of history, movements of people have been as unstoppable as any force of nature.
In the current turmoil, Americans cannot afford to be so fearful of the stranger that we lose sight of who we, in fact, are: a people who might be foreign-looking to each other, in the first generation or many generations after arriving, but who are joined by a common belief in the republic's founding principles.
The process of assimilating new arrivals is neither risk- nor friction-free. The country cannot let down its guard against declared enemies. But the more welcoming the nation is to those who come for a better life, as so many have before them -- the greater the stake well-meaning newcomers can have in the society -- the more secure America's way of life will be.
And that is true not just of naturalized citizens and foreign nationals who arrived here legally, but of those who slipped across the border without documentation to get a job.
Earlier, I mentioned the Hill in St. Louis. That is the sanitized name for the neighborhood still known widely when I was a kid as "Dago Hill," a pejorative reference to the tightly knit enclave of Italians -- Italian Americans -- who settled there.
What was once just a neighborhood with an ethnic identity is today touted for its restaurants and quaint stability, a treasure of St. Louis life. That's the American way.
Strother is on the editorial board of The Roanoke Times.
