Immigrant experience reshapes the world, regardless of birthplace

[AlphaCentauri]

A call came one evening in August telling me my uncle was in a New Delhi hospital with heart failure, and the outlook wasn't good. An author and philanthropist, he was my mother's only sibling and best friend and one of my biggest influences growing up. But even moving as fast as airplane schedules would allow, it would be two days before I could get to his hospital bedside with my mother. We were unable to see him conscious before his death, a few days later.
A few years earlier, I watched a friend board a plane to begin the 20-hour journey to see her ailing mother, only to land and learn that she had already passed. Each of these scenarios drives home the complexities of being an American with one foot in another country across the globe.

We build our nests in one place but divide our emotional lives between two or more. With 34.2 million foreign-born people (12 percent of the U.S. population), and more than 1 million immigrants arriving legally every year, many are apt to face family emergencies calling us thousands of miles away. It's a by-product of the borderless world in which labor; capital and families are in constant back and forth motion.

Having to move quickly between nations -- taking sudden leave from work, getting visas, juggling connections and astonishingly high last-minute airfares -- is one of many complications of living a bifurcated life.

In the days of Ellis Island, new arrivals making the journey on ships had to quickly assimilate and forget their old roots. But thanks to expanded air travel and relaxed entry requirements, it's now easier to live in two worlds. Where it used to cost $3 per minute to call India, it can now be done for 3 cents on one of many services that have mushroomed up by and for expatriates -- or for free on Skype. Phone calls and foreign remittances to immigrants' families back home are up in the past seven years, according to a new report from the nonprofit organization Public Agenda.

Iowa's population still is overwhelmingly native-born. Yet when the state government can't find enough computer programmers, it imports them from India temporarily. When underserved areas need doctors, they look to foreign medical graduates. American families seeking children to adopt go to Korea, China or Russia. In various small towns, the only open restaurant might be Mexican-owned, the beauty parlor Asian.

Nine years ago, a bipartisan 2010 Strategic Planning Commission proposed an Immigration Enterprise Zone to address Iowa's growing work-force shortage. The idea was shelved for practical and political reasons, but the need it identified is real.

To some natives, the hyphenated-American concept and the split loyalties and incomes imply a lack of commitment to the United States. But for better or worse, this is globalization, and other countries lose some of their best and their brightest to us.

The Public Agenda survey finds 71 percent of foreign-born people are happy living in America, and within two years, half feel a part of the community. The vast majority say it's very unlikely their children will ever go back.

It's a long-term investment with challenges on both sides. I've interviewed many well-adjusted immigrants, such as the doctor who fled the Taliban in Afghanistan and was grateful to educate her two daughters here -- though it meant living apart from her husband and seeking work far below her training.

But there also was the 27-year-old Vietnamese refugee who had survived life on his own in the Philippines from age 12 but couldn't survive the loss of a $9.72-an-hour loading job at a printing plant. He ended his own life.

Writer Mary Pipher, observing the refugees in her native Nebraska, concluded it takes them one or two generations to move into mainstream middle-class life.

She wrote of four stages of adaptation, saying ideally in the fourth, they become bicultural and bilingual.

But failure to succeed, she wrote, drives refugee families into "reactive ethnicity," retreating into enclaves, which can doom their children to fail.

While immigrants bring many good things to America -- family values, strong work ethics -- some also bring religious intolerance or gender-biased practices, such as female genital mutilation or an acceptance of wife-beating as inherent in marriage. These are not intrinsic parts of any culture that deserve preserving, but intolerable human-rights violations that must be discarded.

And integrating has to be a two-way process. Immigrants need to reach out to their hosts and introduce them to their cultures. They also need to become civically and politically involved, not just within their own communities but for the broader good.

This bifurcated life wasn't one I chose. It was handed to me by Indian parents whose United Nations careers had them posted abroad their entire working lives. When I was on a career track and on my way to getting married, they retired and moved back to India.

Growing up, I expended energy trying to juggle two cultures and fit into both places. But in adulthood, it's separation from family that weighs heaviest: raising children away from their grandparents and being apart on critical life and death occasions. Since my father's death nearly two years ago, the distance from my mother eats away at me.

In recent years, I've helped arrange, sometimes alone, four funerals on two continents -- two Catholic, one Hindu and one Sikh. Most of the customs were foreign to me. I wondered what it would be like to have the comfort and certainty of a single set of cultural traditions.

I used to feel like an international misfit. But I feel lucky to have learned a cross-cultural fluency that lets me feel at home in most places.

Whatever our ethnic or national backgrounds, most of us belong to many communities at once: the young or the aged, vegetarian or hunter, urban or rural. In that way, like the seed corn grown in Iowa, it's not just the newcomers but most of us who are hybrids, ever evolving from cross-pollination.

http://www.zanesvilletimesrecorder.com/article/20090925/OPINION02/909250320/1014/OPINION

[Demeter]

1. We are citizens of the world

and someday we will all admit it. But meanwhile, a salute to those who live the international life: they show us the way to peace and goodwill and understanding and co-operation.