Time Essay: Guarding the Door

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Their journey repeats the classic American immigrant sagas. To escape the old country (the ration line, the future foreclosed, the totalitarian rant), they climb aboard overcrowded boats and go pitching out across the water to a different life. When they glimpse the new land, they throng to the rails; they peer toward the dock with that vulnerable immigrant look of yearning that everyone carries in memory, like a cracked photograph: the faces at Ellis Island, the Golden Door—or at least the servants' entrance—to the new world and all its redemptions.

The drama, now replayed by thousands of Cubans in their 110-mile trek across the Straits of Florida, can still raise a glow of patriotic nostalgia in Americans. It is "a nation of immigrants," after all, as John Kennedy wrote 100 years after his Irish great-grandfather left County Wexford to become a cooper in Boston. But today Americans are having trouble rising to the occasion. Drifting into a recession whose depths they cannot yet judge, skittish about plant closings and lost jobs, about oil prices and taxes that already seem too high for Government services that provide too little, Americans are less disposed to invite more strangers into the house. The beds are all taken, they say. The basement is jammed with illegal aliens—as many as 12 million, by some counts, with thousands more daily piling across the borders.

Ku Klux Klansmen have paraded around Florida lately, dispensing their old nativist bile and giving a bad name to an argument (AMERICA FOR AMERICANS, the picket signs say) that has more thoughtful and respectable proponents. The New Republic's columnist, TRB, a voice of intelligent liberalism, writes with some truculence: "Sooner or later, America must face reality. It is going to be painful ... The trouble is that huddled masses need jobs. The American frontier (worse luck) is gone." The American ideal of endless hospitality and refuge presupposed perpetually expanding resources. Now, says the argument, an emerging order of scarcity mandates self-interest, selectivity, limitation, exclusion. No more the profligate America with arms open in Whitmanesque embrace, ready to issue a shovel to anyone strong enough and willing to dig.

Actually, Congress posted very picky bouncers at the Golden Door in 1921, when it began the quota system. But official strictures on immigration have become a kind of charade. The flow of illegal immigrants persists, merely inconvenienced by the understaffed Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol. And the U.S. has often made massive exceptions to the law in order to admit refugees—36,000 from Hungary after the 1956 uprising, for example, and 872,000 from Cuba since the Castro revolution. Future upheavals will undoubtedly produce massive new exceptions. A new law, the Refugee Act of 1980, attempts to bring some order to immigration, but it is not much help in resolving the questions of fairness, humanity, precedent and priority that the new mass Cuban migration raises.