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America's Love-Hate Affair With Immigration
May 25, 2005

It's an anxiety that's as old as American history. From the sparkling beaches of Long Island to the narrow banks of the Rio Grande, our unease with illegal immigration never seems to die. Like the tides, it only seems to rise sharply and then quietly recede.

And sometimes it manages to do both things at once.

At the moment, Americans everywhere are distressed over undocumented immigrants - when they're not celebrating their presence.

A woman from Manorville not too long ago summed up the national angst in an e-mail to me this way: "Our hospitals are going bankrupt. [Our] schools are overcrowded." As for the immigrant day laborers who wait around for jobs on the streets of Long Island and Queens, she said, "I know I would not want them hanging out on my street corners. And what an insult for the people who try to come in legally."

Well, yeah. And she didn't even mention the scariest part - American borders that remain as porous as Swiss cheese well into the age of Osama.

And yet, while Washington addresses this agita with a silly plan to ban driver's licenses for the undocumented, something even more startling is in progress several hundred miles to the south.

A quiet and respectful ritual to mark the Mariel boatlift's 25th anniversary is unfolding.

In case you've forgotten, the boatlift was a helter-skelter mess that transported 125,000 Cubans on private craft from Mariel, Cuba, to Key West, Fla.

It was a political disaster.

At first, President Jimmy Carter seemed to welcome the refugees. Then the feds tried to stop the burgeoning freedom flotilla - particularly after it became clear that Fidel Castro had loaded up some boats with criminals and mental patients.

Tales were rampant of crime rates shooting up. Immigration officers were plainly unable to make sound judgments about which refugees were fleeing for political reasons and which refugees were dangerous folks whom Castro simply expelled.

Some established residents of Miami pulled up stakes and fled the city. For years, those of us who lived outside the region heard nothing but stories of costly mayhem - and most of them blamed Carter and the Mariel Cubans for the trouble.

This group was far worse than other groups, I heard over and over back then. They were younger than earlier waves of immigrants, many folks said, and they had never lived and worked outside a Communist system. Without knowledge of our system or language skills how could they ever make it?

Well, somehow they did.

"Today," writes Michael Browning, a reporter for Cox News Service, "it is clear that fewer than one in 100 of the Mariel refugees had a criminal background." While other accounts put that ratio considerably higher, nearly all the 25th anniversary reports focus on a settled population that has quickly taken its place as an American group moving up the economic ladder.

Their difficulties on the way to Key West are recounted in reverential tones today.

No wonder Washington has such problems making rational immigration laws - laws that would keep our borders orderly but all the while ensure a steady flow of legal immigrants.

The problem here is that when it comes to working out clear-eyed immigration policy, our basest fears are in constant conflict with our loftiest hopes.

There's not much middle ground. Like the Irish and the Italians before them, the Marielitos were considered lost causes - aliens unlike any other who arrived here poor and disoriented. And like the Irish and Italians, of course, they managed to make something of themselves.

Whatever the laws say, these are the facts: Americans love immigration and they hate it. They revere immigration as a force that has helped shaped this country's character for more than two centuries, and they curse it as a force that's eroding American values.

Sometimes they want to shut it down and sometimes they want to open the borders with abandon. And here we are - waiting for a rational policy.

Joseph Dolman is a columnist and member of Newsday's editorial board. His e-mail address is nycdolman@aol.com.

Email: nycdolman@aol.com