STRANGERS AMONG US:
How Latino Immigration Is Transforming America
By Roberto Suro
Knopf, 349 pages, $26.95
Congress recently passed yet another guest-worker reform bill that will allow non-U.S. citizens–in this case, mostly Mexicans–to come to this country to work temporary agricultural jobs. But the bill, though seemingly innovative in its promise of minimum wage and other benefits, is really nothing new. As Roberto Suro points out in “Strangers Among Us: How Latino Immigration Is Transforming America,” a sensitive, if sometimes problematic, analysis of Hispanic immigration to this country, there have been other bills before, designed to bring Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, even, in a way, Cubans, to American shores.
Though Latinos–native born, legal residents and undocumented workers–may appear to be choking American cities to such a degree that the country is experiencing one of its most xenophobic periods, it’s also true that, yet again, Latinos are providing the grease for the gears of our happy economy. How? Latinos–especially non-native residents and illegal immigrants who are ineligible for public assistance and other forms of government aid–are often the only ones willing to take the very worst, bottom-of-the-barrel jobs that no one else in America, no matter how poor or desperate, will go near.
As a result, argues Suro, Latinos are creating a dangerous underclass, not because they are lazy or reliant or uneducated, but because they are underemployed. Frustrations arise from weariness rather than boredom, from lack of support rather than dependency, and from a sense of historical dislocation from places–especially California and Texas–where Latinos were first. In this underclass of permanent poverty, work is arduous and constant, and it offers the kinds of rewards that, especially for second and subsequent generations, engender only humiliation and hopelessness. This condition will continue as long as there is a need for people to work and earn whatever they can, and as long as there are employers glad to contract them without regard for their dignity or the law.
Armed with statistics, with dramatic testimony from Latino immigrants and government and community experts, and with firsthand reporting that engages the mind and the senses, Suro–a former Chicago journalist who has worked for Time magazine, The New York Times and The Washington Post–offers a highly readable, complex portrait of Latino lives in the U.S. Using a prism that divides Latinos into separate yet interlocking communities–East Los Angeles, Miami, Washington Heights in New York, among others–he makes the case for why Latinos have experienced both inclusion and exclusion in American society.
The American-born son of a Puerto Rican father and an Ecuadorean mother, Suro is particularly good at detailing the different conditions that welcomed each group of Latinos to the U.S. and how that has affected their development and rates of assimilation.
He gives a fascinating account of how Mexican-Americans–who had for generations lived on and worked their land–learned to use U.S. civil rights laws (written almost exclusively with blacks and their particular history in mind) to become an officially designated minority group, and how that has worked against them almost as much as for them.
His analysis of the Puerto Rican and Dominican phenomena, which on the surface appear to have remarkable similarities, is exacting and poignant. Suro holds both groups at least partially responsible for poverty and crime in their lives: the Puerto Ricans for failing to create the kind of infrastructure needed to support a viable community; the Dominicans for tolerating a variety of criminal activity within their neighborhoods that only exacerbates American prejudice against them.
Suro also turns a cold eye to Miami’s Cuban enclave and its patina of success. He determines that the city’s insularity, which worked so well for the first generation of Cuban exiles, has the potential to strangle subsequent generations, who see themselves more as immigrants than exiles and are less inclined to look toward Havana for their sense of self.
As Suro readily admits, the biggest problem with Latino integration into the U.S. is that Hispanics, unlike almost everybody else who has ever landed on American shores, rarely come with the intention to stay. They end up doing so not because America is so alluring but because of increased economic pressures in their home countries (often with the U.S. to blame, a fact Suro doesn’t dwell on much), U.S. wages insufficient to finance a timely return home, and growing family ties in this country.
When Latinos stay, they often continue intimate contact with their home countries in wholly unprecedented ways. They vacation there, or spend whole seasons at home nurturing their sense of who they are as Latinos, not Americans. When they come back to school and work within U.S. borders, their notion of otherness is what’s underscored.
Besides failing to consider at any length the effects of events in home countries on immigration here, “Strangers Among Us” also suffers from an uncomfortable tension in discussing Latino relations with black Americans. Suro is unabashed in his discussions of how Latinos have used white prejudice against blacks to their own advantage, but he lets Hispanics off the hook most of the time. At one point, Suro actually absolves Latinos of any role in the historical development of racism here–never mentioning that Latinos have their own, virulent brand for which they are ultimately culpable.
Suro predicts that unless the U.S. takes drastic action, Latinos will soon replace blacks as the face of urban poverty and dejection, will serve as conduits to an ever-increasing drug trade routed from their home countries, and could become agents of hatred and hostility in the face of an international crisis, seriously destabilizing the hemisphere. He ends up arguing for increased border control in tandem with more economic opportunities, with the idea that a growing Latino middle class will facilitate assimilation and reduce white fears (with which he is, perhaps, overly concerned). But how successful economic parity may be in erasing or diminishing discrimination is highly debatable: One need only look at Jewish or Asian communities to see that it hasn’t been a panacea.
Suro’s other argument is for a national identity, one that somehow allows some recognition of Latino origins but yet folds into a greater, amorphous personality. He understands that for various historical reasons Latinos cannot follow the European ethnic model in America, yet he preaches an ultimate conclusion of Americanness. Apparently forgetting that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens at birth, he even suggests that Latinos, as evidenced by the surge of citizenship applications after the 1986 immigration accords, may find being American desirable–without taking into account that most Latinos who apply for U.S. citizenship are Mexicans, who rarely give up their Mexican citizenship and who see their American passport as simply a quicker, more efficient pass across the border.
