For April 16

The New Immigration from Who built america

In the 1970s and 1980s, huge numbers of Asian and Latino immigrants flocked to U.S. shores to fill millions of new service, retail, clerical, and light manufacturing jobs. This new wave of immigrants rivaled in sheer numbers the great transatlantic flows a century earlier. In the 1960s, annual imniigration had totaled only a quarter-million; by the 1990s, the United States was admitting more than 800,000 legal immigrants a year, and perhaps half again as many illegal immigrants, mainly from Mexico. More than 40 percent of the newcomers were from Asia, especially the Philippines, China, South Korea, and Vietnam; about 35 percent came from Latin America and the Caribbean.

One of every three new immigrants entered the United States through California, making the nation's most populous state its unofficial Ellis Island as well. By the 1990s, one-third of the population of Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest City, was foreigm-born9 making the City of Angels the second-largest Spanish-speaking city on the North American continent. As hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans streamed into poor neighborhoods and communities in East Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley, tens of thousands of Koreans settled in an old working- class neighborhood just west of downtown Los Angeles. At the same time, equally large numbers of im- migrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Vietnam transformed the old Chinatown neighborhood near City Hall. Asians and Latinos would shortly make up more than half the work- force in southern California.

. NewYork's foreign-born population, like that of Los Angeles, also approached 35 percent of its total populace in the 1990s-a level the city had last reached in 19 1 0, at the height of southern and eastern European immigration. Long-established immigrant communities, including those composed of Puerto Ricans, Irish, and Poles, grew rapidly during the 1970s and 1980s, even as hundreds of thousands of Haitian, Dominican, Colombian, East Indian, Chinese, and Russian immigrants settled into the city's poorer neighborhoods. Nearly 200,000 Mexican immigrants arrived after the peso was devalued in 1986. Mostly undocumented, they had traveled thousands of miles by truck and car from some of the poorest rural regions in search of work. "We came because we are poor farmers and our parents did not have enough to send us to school:' explained a young food deliverer.

Miami, too, was transformed by the newcomers; by the 1980s it had the highest percentage of foreign-born residents of any U.S. city. First came an influx of nearly 600,000 Cubans, many of them well-to-do exiles from the Cuban Revolution of 195 9. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, tens of thousands of political and economic refugees arrived from Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. The huge number of Latino immigrants changed the face of the city: as Spanish became the language of foreign trade, Miami became the commercial "capital of Latin America " a politically stable, financially well-regulated marketplace hospitable to businesspersons from a dozen countries. Latin business flourished in the North as well. In old industrial cities such as Passaic, Paterson, and Union City, New Jersey, Latinos from Cuba, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Guatemala soon outnumbered both Anglos and African Americans. Latino-owned businesses, including restaurants, nightclubs, cigar shops, fruit stands, and clothing stores, transformed the look, sound, and smell of the main shopping areas in these municipalities. As one Union City res- ident noted, a few years earlier many shops 'used to [have] signs saying, 'We speak Spanish.' Now the signs say,'We speak English."'

The new immigration touched even small-town America. Late in the 1970s, church and civic leaders in Wausau, Wisconsin, a homogeneous city of 37,500, welcomed hundreds of Southeast Asian refugees. Many were from the nomadic Hmong Mountain tribes of Laos, who had been recruited by the CIA to fight against North Vietnam during the war in Indochina. Soon a pattern of 'chain migration" made Wausau the destination for other family members and friends, increasing the town's Asian population to nearly 5,000. By the mid 1990s, social tensions between the new immigrants and older residents had created in Wausau the same kind of conflict - at school, on the job, and in city government - last seen there a century before when an influx of working-class Germans had challenged the city's old yankee establishment.

In the United States, immigrants with skills, family connections, and an entrepreneurial outlook could do very well. In Los Angeles, NewYork, and other cities, many Korean families owned and managed fruit and vegetable markets. Vietnamese, Chinese, Thais, Mexicans, and Iranians opened tens of thousands of new restaurants, making the American dining experience far more cosmopolitan. Indian, Pakistani, and Chinese immigrants with English-language, engineering, and computer electronics

skills won a solid beachhead in Silicon Valley and other cyberworld enclaves. And a small number of wealthy individuals from Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, and Japan took advantage of the undervalued dollar to make substantial investments in commercial real estate, residential property, and stateside industry.

Most of the new immigrants were solidly working class, however. They came because even minimum wage work in the United States paid five or ten times more than they could earn in the cities, barrios, and villages of their homelands. Like the Italians and Irish who arrived in the nineteenth century, many hoped to return to their native countries to buy a farm or open a business. But like their predecessors, most did not succeed. In NewYork and Los Angeles, Latino and Asian immigrants labored in hundreds of sweatshops of the sort once condemned by progressive reformers. Likewise, in Nebraska, Colorado, and South Dakota, a new generation of immigrants labored in slaughterhouses, under conditions similar to those portrayed in Upton Sinclair's 1904 novel, The Jungle. 'We came with illusions of earning a little money, investing it, and doing something in Mexico," noted one undocumented immigrant in New York City. 'But those who get $180 for working seven days, what can they do? They return defeated to Mexico."

Even where the work was technology-based and legal, job hierarchies resembled those of the pre-New Deal era. Many of California's most successful new computer firms maintained a pyramidal job structure: a few optimistic professionals with an innovative concept at the top; English-speaking clerical, sales, and research and development workers in the front office; and in the back shop, scores of Asian and Latino women building chips, stuffing circuit boards, or moving inventory. Their work was as routine and insecure as that of a sweatshop garment worker a hundred years before. Seventy percent of all the electronics manufacturing jobs in northern California's Silicon Valley were held by women, half of whom were Latino and Asian immigrants.