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TODAY Monday 7 July 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Monday 7 July 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Huddled Masses
Entertainment value may not be the best criterion for taking sides on a controversial issue, but if it were, I would be deliriously pro-immigration. I live in the world's most entertaining city, and most of the entertainment comes from spying and eavesdropping on its multi-ethnic residents going about their business.
You either find it fabulous to encounter people from every nation or you don't, I suppose, and it may not strike you as particularly amusing to hear Hungarian spoken by a man wearing a backwards baseball cap or Valley Girl English spoken by a second-generation Cantonese, but it does the trick for me. When the dogs of boredom bay, the fail-safe remedy is to hit the streets. There are few things better than a six-mile walk through Lower Manhattan on a cloudless day with temperatures in the low 80s. Chinatown, Little Italy, Loisaida; Dominicans, Ukrainians, Hassidim; fresh goods, stale goods, stolen goods.
Other than some pleasant shade trees along the side streets of Murray Hill, there's not a lot of nature to be had on such a walk. Dramatic varieties of brick and stone are available for inspection -- cursed be cement and sheet metal -- but flora and fauna are certainly limited. For those we went to Central Park the day before yesterday. Central Park is to natural ecosystems as Colonial Williamsburg is to 18th Century America -- an artful, misleading simulation -- but it's a great place on its own terms and an efficient means to satisfy a nature addiction without sacrificing the pleasures of mob life. Of particular attraction was the free outdoor concert of a Punjabi reggae/hip-hop band. Here you had it, the best possible argument for the cultural Cuisinart of the global economy: crazed youth of many lands, jumping up and down and clapping and yelling when the handsome Sikh singer told them to "give it up now."
That scene would not have been possible without a recent national policy of legal immigration at levels rivalling those of the great in-migrations of the first years of this century. Kennedy Airport is now Ellis Island and the huddled masses are likely to be educated upward-mobile types from every continent, but the flow is enormous. There is also a very sizeable illegal immigrant population, indispensable cooks, haulers, and caregivers. Seventy percent of Americans are still non-Hispanic, native-born white people, but you wouldn't know it by taking the elevator here at the office. I could be wrong about this (though I come with Tammany credentials), but I'd bet that I am the only man of North European Christian ancestry in this 16-storey building. As I say, I take this trend to be educational and diverting, entirely welcome. But the sheer numbers behind the trend may be worrisome environmentally.
Where an American environmentalist stands on the question of immigration depends a good deal on the lens through which he or she is looking. Someone concerned with the US environment is on logical ground to say that increases in US population spell increases in the depletion of US resources and in the demand for polluting domestic energy production. But someone similarly and equally concerned could say that environmental protection costs money, and anyone interested in protecting American nature should support high levels of well-educated, industrious immigrants who create much more wealth than they consume.
Someone less nationally-focused could argue that environmental problems respect no frontiers, and that from a global perspective it doesn't matter particularly if undensely-settled North America absorbs a few hundred million more humans. Another kind of internationalist -- decentralist and multiculturalist at the same time -- could argue that immigration controls (and controls on capital and communications, for that matter) are necessary safeguards of human diversity and local cultures. In the end, they say, nature will be preserved over generations when people learn to stay put and take care of the neighborhood.
Is it too much to hope that the agrarian rootedness of, say, Wendell Berry can co-exist with the multi-diaspora crowd at the Punjabi reggae/hip-hop concert? Can we have a strong devotion to place without sacrificing this exhilarating new sense of human community? Can we fashion a benevolent new federalism? Can we dream of a green cosmopolitanism?
TODAY ON THE SITE
A few weeks ago we were pleased to run an article by Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle in the Capitol Hill Spy section of our Newsroom. The gist of the article was that the testing procedures of the US Environmental Protection Agency were markedly flawed. James Willis of the United Nations Environment Program thought their criticisms overblown and generally unmerited. Read his response and a brief rejoinder from Fagin and Lavelle.
Recent "Today" columns:
7/03: Three-Dot Environmentalism...
7/02: Bothersome Science
7/01: Forest for the Trees
6/30: Investing in Pessimism
6/27: Good Speech (Keep it Quiet)
6/26: Bleeping Joan of Arc
6/25: The World at 42nd Street
6/24: Il Faut Que Get a Grip
6/23: The Emily Dickenson Parking Garage
6/19: Stormy Weather
6/18: Nostalgia
To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.
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