Abstract

If race is, as it is often said, the “American Dilemma,” then immigration is surely the American ambivalence. As this review is being written, the city where I live (New York) has recently celebrated the centennial of the premier symbol of the nation's immigrant heritage, the statue of Liberty, with a gargantuan, made for television, spectacle. The most nativist president of the last fifty years lit the torch. A secular shrine is being built on Ellis Island by America's most popular capitalist, an immigrant's son who envisions nothing less than “an ethnic Williamsburg” (an interesting analogy: can Iaccoca give the rest of us an “ethnic” history that is as sanitized as Rockefeller's slaveless, oudiouseless, vision of early “WASP”-America?)