Historic Homage

They came from every part of the globe, speaking a babble of tongues and carrying little but hope as luggage. From 1840 on, they arrived in a wave that was perpetually at flood tide, furnishing the growing U.S. with the sinew and spirit to build its railroads and create its industries. Often they faced a grinding struggle for survival in the New World's harsh slums and wind-whipped prairies, but somehow the immigrants managed to take root. Out of their extraordinary exodus -- which John F. Kennedy called "the largest migration of people in all recorded history" --rose an extraordinary nation.

Last week, 400 years after the Spaniards arrived in Florida to establish the first settlement in the continental U.S., the nation's Congress paid historic hom age to the heterogeneous men who helped build the U.S. By a 76 to 18 vote, the Senate adopted a sweeping new immigration reform bill that strikes down the restrictive " national origins" quota system that has discriminated against Southern Europeans and Asians since 1924, when nearly 80% of white Americans traced their forebears to northern and western Europe. "After 40 years, we have returned to first principles," said Massachusetts' Senator Teddy Kennedy, the floor manager of the bill and himself the grandson of immigrants. "Immigration, more than anything else, has supplied America with the human strength that is the core of its greatness."

First Come, First Served. In accordance with the Senate bill, the national origins system will be scrapped entirely in July 1968, when all nations outside the West ern Hemisphere will be allotted a total of 170,000 immigrant visas on a first-come, first-served basis. The maximum for any one nation will be 20,000 -- a figure exceeded last year only by Germany's 22,628 and the United Kingdom's 28,653. Until then, the unused allotments of such high-quota na tions as Britain and Ireland will be transferred to such low-quota lands as Italy and India, where would-be immigrants now often have to wait a decade or more for their turn.

The Senate bill differs in one major respect from a bill that was approved by the House in a 318 to 95 vote in August. For the first time, a numerical restriction of 120,000 immigrants was imposed on the nations of the Western Hemisphere. Under Administration pressure, the House had retained the old bill's provision permitting unlimited immigration from Canada and Latin America, but the Senate rejected the provision as unfair to all the other nations of the world. When the bill goes to a Senate-House conference shortly, the restriction is expected to remain. In addition, an estimated 60,000 parents, children or spouses of U.S. citizens will be admitted each year regardless of nationality. Though the bill will increase annual immigration to 350,000 a year, some 60,000 above current levels, it inspired only halfhearted resistance; all 18 nays came from Southerners, mostly Democrats.

As early as 1782, it was already evident that the American experiment would produce something new in the history of human societies. "This is every man's country," wrote French-born Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur, "Here, individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world." Even as Crevecoeur wrote, the U.S. was a polyglot mix of English and Scotch, Irish and French, Dutch, German and Swedish.*

In the early years, the voluntary immigrants came in trickles, driven from Europe by poverty or persecution: the Puritans seeking a place to worship in New England, the bedeviled Quakers fleeing to Pennsylvania as a haven, the Huguenots escaping to South Carolina from France's intolerant Sun King. But it was not until 1840 that the tide really began to flow, and it did not ebb for nearly a century. A blight in Ireland and a pogrom in Russia, a famine in Scandinavia and civil strife in South China, starvation in Sicily and crop failures in Greece, a wave of political repression in the Austro-Hungarian Empire--all fed the tide. It crested in the decade 1905-14, when more than 10,100,000 men, women and children poured into the U.S., most of them through the grim portals of New York Harbor's Ellis Island.

Magnates & Musicians. The newcomers inestimably enriched the U.S., making it the mast incredibly diverse nation on earth. Even today, 34% of the Northeast is composed of "foreign stock," a Census Bureau classification that includes those born outside the U.S. and those who have at least one parent born outside the country. More than 20% of the population of California, New York, Illinois, Michigan and 15 other states are of foreign stock. The immigrants helped to build the great cities and shift the balance of American life away from the farm. Half of the people in New York, Boston and Detroit, two-fifths of those in Los Angeles, one-third of those in Chicago and Cleveland are of foreign stock.

The list of immigrants and their sons who helped to mold American art and industry, politics and science is endless. There were Steel Magnate Andrew Carnegie (Scotland), Fur Trader John Jacob Astor (Germany), Inventor Alexander Graham Bell (Scotland), the Du Fonts from France and Yeast Tycoon Charles L. Fleischmann from Hungary. German-born Albert Einstein, Hungarian-born Edward Teller and Italian-born Enrico Fermi helped the U.S. to unlock the atom's secrets. There have been more immigrant musicians than one can shake a baton at, from Irving Berlin (Russia) and Victor Herbert (Ireland) to Artur Rubinstein (Poland) and Dimitri Mitropoulos (Greece).

One had to go no farther than the chamber of the U.S. Senate as the new bill was passed last week to see how variegated the U.S. is. In the presiding officer's chair sat Hubert Humphrey, son of a Norwegian mother. Much in evidence were Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, whose parents hailed from counties Kilkenny and Limerick, and Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, son of Germans. In the semicircular rows that arced to the rear of the chamber sat New York's Jack Javits, son of an Austrian and a Palestinian; Hawaii's Hiram Fong, whose parents were born in China; Connecticut's Abe Ribicoff, son of Poles; Rhode Island's John Pastore, son of Italians.

First Preference. In the future, the 350,000 immigrants who come to the U.S. each year will more often be Ph.D.s and skilled craftsmen than "the wretched refuse" to which the Statue of Liberty still beckons. Those with special talents necessarily rate first preference among a rapidly growing populace. Even so, there are certain to be many who will be "not only the opulent and respectable stranger," as George Washington put it in 1783, "but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions." If the past is a guide, they, too, will add to the nation's strength.

* Negroes began arriving in 1619, when the first Negro immigrants, a group of 20 indentured servants, landed in Virginia aboard a Dutch manofwar. In the next two centuries hundreds of thousands more came to the U.S.--most of them shackled slaves aboard ships out of West Africa.

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