OUR TEEMING SHORE : When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Tell the Wretched Refuse to Go Home

You’ve heard it a million times: America is a nation of immigrants. It’s the kind of statement that gets a heartfelt reading at the occasional ceremony--the rededication of the Statue of Liberty or a mass swearing-in of new citizens--but most of the time, it’s uttered with sullen resentment. Since this country went into business, we’ve taken pride in being the world’s dumping ground, and we’ve also profoundly hated it.

When times are good, it’s easy to take the Lee Iacocca attitude. There are plenty of jobs to go around, and cheap new ethnic restaurants keep piquing our interest. When the economic thermometer heads for the freezing point, we’re more likely to think of the newcomers as welfare parasites, as the people who crowd our schools with children who speak even less English than the kids who were born here.

Anti-immigrationism has been good politics since the first tidal wave of newcomers lapped upon our welcoming shores. Besides the economic complaint against them, now being made respectable by Pete Wilson, there’s the cultural critique, currently voiced by David Duke but soon to issue from less marginal mouthpieces: Immigrants “mongrelize” our culture, they dilute our values, they don’t share our way of life. Ultimately, this argument boils down to the most basic of human complaints, the one that keeps energizing the Serbs and the Croats: They’re not us.

Even when this attitude is most popular, we can’t close the gates completely. That would require swearing in so many INS officers that they’d immediately become the nation’s largest voting bloc. But the government does respond to anti-immigrationism by devising clever hoops for would-be entrants to jump through. Haitians in imminent danger of being hunted down by a revenge-minded army, for example, clamber into fragile little boats to come here, but our uniformed employees haughtily reject them as “economic refugees,” unworthy for admission because they’re only seeking to escape poverty and hunger.

The particular trick of distinguishing that category from political refugees fleeing tyranny (who are, of course, always welcome) was invented by the Reagan Administration to justify letting in Nicaraguans fleeing their civil war (their government was “bad”), while rejecting Salvadorans fleeing their civil war (their government was “good”). Don’t tell Elliott Abrams, but most of us in this country are descendants of people who were only seeking to escape poverty and hunger.

Anti-immigrationism works political magic in this country. Like racism in the Old South, which pitted poor whites against poor blacks for the entertainment and the protection of the well-to-do, anti-immigrationism allows economic winners to make spurious common cause with poor Americans. In a shrinking economy, immigrants are after “our” jobs.

There’s nothing particularly American about all this. But there is that embarrassing statue with that silly offer carved into it--”give me your tired, your poor.” Most countries, never having made that grand gesture, have forthrightly guarded their homogeneity (France and Japan come to mind), while taking pokes at our mood swings on the subject.

No longer. Despite Hollywood’s insistence on looking for epic subjects in deep space, the epic of our times is that this is the century of the refugee. As never before, huge numbers of ordinary people have undertaken extraordinary journeys to new homelands. That’s probably because this has also been the century of amazingly brutal dictatorships and of vastly improved transportation. Also, empires have been collapsing, sending the most ambitious inhabitants of the former colonies scurrying to the former mother countries in search of that better way of life the colonizers once promised.

So now Britain has fine Indian and Pakistani restaurants, Paris boasts great Algerian and Tunisian food, and Amsterdam provides splendid Indonesian rijsttafels, for the same reason that Long Beach and Orange County have sprouted all those Southeast Asian eateries. And so, too, Britain and France and Germany are experiencing the rise of right-wing parties, demanding that the doors be closed and the interlopers sent packing--curry, couscous and all.

It’s a boom period for anti-immigrationism. It’s a lousy time to be huddled masses yearning to breathe free.