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Special Report
New Faces of America
Suketu Mehta 05.07.07


Immigrant networks are recasting the U.S. in unforeseen ways.
In 1871 Walt Whitman foresaw the way human beings would relate to each other in our era. As he put it in "Passage to India," a poem in the ever expanding Leaves of Grass, "Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first? The earth to be spann'd, connected by network."

Whitman's lines evoke for me how an immigrant can come to a big, expensive city like New York or San Francisco without papers, without money, without housing and make a new life. Or how other immigrants come in at the top of the scale and find jobs whose salaries start at several times the median income. The answer lies in the network: They go to their tribes, their villages in the city. Whether it is an association of software engineers, an alumni association or a church group, immigrants live and die, work and marry, pray and play within the network.

The difference between today's immigrants and those of the last century is this: Now many are in continual transit between their homelands and the U.S. Each new New Yorker brings his own world to the city and goes back and forth between the two.

The metaphor of the melting pot is outmoded. People come to the U.S. today, singly or in groups, and do not melt; they stay resolutely whole. Their flavors might mingle with each other, but they do not lose their general contours as separate ethnic enclaves. The Italian or Irish immigrant who arrived by ship to Ellis Island in the late 19th century dreamed someday of visiting the homeland once more before he or she died. Today's immigrants--at least the legal ones--can go home a few weeks after they step off the plane at jfk, thanks to the cheap fares. What is exile when a round trip home is $500?

As a result there isn't a great need to assimilate. There are neighborhoods in New York where you can spend your entire day working, eating, playing and dealing with the government without knowing a word of English; it is enough to be conversant in Spanish, Bengali or Russian. All you need is access to a network that speaks your language and can provide the goods and services of a decent life. New York City today has 300 magazines and newspapers in 42 languages other than English, catering to 60 ethnic groups. But it's not just New York. There are entire towns in Maine and Minneapolis that have been reenergized by Somalis, farming towns in Iowa that could be small villages in Mexico.

Many immigrant groups see no need to follow an imagined, idealized "American way." Because of the strength and regular reinforcement of their ties to the old country, they can live here much as they did in the land left behind. If on a frigid January morning you happen to be crossing the Manhattan Bridge, you may have to make way for several hundred Mexican youths running in sweatshirts adorned with a picture of Padre Jesús, the patron saint of the village of Ticuani, in Puebla. They are re-creating the Antorcha, a ritual pilgrimage run from Mexico City to Ticuani in honor of the saint. In this case they're running from a church in downtown Manhattan to one in Brooklyn, where they will pray to a life-size replica of the same Padre Jesús that resides in their home village. As documented in fascinating detail by Robert Courtney Smith in his book Mexican New York (he's changed the real name of the village to protect his sources), teenage Ticuanese girls in New York grow their hair to donate as wigs for statues of the saint back in Mexico. "Thus, a 150-year-old Mexican religious icon may be adorned with permed, bleached hair grown in Brooklyn."

Ticuanese living in New York often fly home to their village for the feast of Padre Jesús, then jet back and re-create it in Brooklyn. In this way their cultural identity is preserved in the new world and a continuity maintained between the rituals of the land left behind and their newly adopted home. Those who can afford to fly to Ticuani can live in a continuum of those two worlds; those who cannot, or lack the papers to do so, can prostrate themselves before the Padre Jesús in a Brooklyn church and feel part of the extended international family of their village.

The Ticuanese have been aware of the power of networks since before they came here. In poor countries you need to pull strings to do the simplest things: get a train reservation or a government document. You must know someone. There's very little you can do anonymously, as a member of the vast masses. A friend of mine who went from Mumbai to London told me she was horrified that she could spend an entire day--buy tickets on the tube, go to see a play, eat--without ever needing to make a personal connection, to use the network.

How does an immigrant network spring up? An Asian engineer may be admitted for his skills and given an employment-based work visa, such as an H-1B. He works for several years, gets a green card and then brings his parents and sisters over. Thus, a skills-based network becomes a family network, which is stronger and more lasting. The concept of family can be very broad among immigrants: With Indians, it may include the entire caste group; with Latinos, an entire village. My own caste group of several hundred Indians in the New York metropolitan area holds regular picnics and dances; cricket is played, marriages arranged, leads on housing and jobs exchanged over Gujarati food in state parks in New Jersey and Italian wedding palaces in Queens.

Immigrant networks can be larger than a particular ethnic group. For a couple of years I used to meet a group of South Asian writers every Tuesday in a South African cafe in Brooklyn's Fort Greene. They were Indians such as Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai and Jhumpa Lahiri, Pakistanis such as Mohsin Hamid and the great poet Agha Shahid Ali, who identified himself as Kashmiri. Other South Asian writers who passed through town came and stopped by; we occasionally met at each other's houses or studios and ate our curries, drank and gossiped. Such a trans-South-Asian gathering would not be possible in South Asia; it would be too difficult to get a visa good in India for a fellow writer from Pakistan. So we met in Brooklyn, where ancient tribal hatreds were soused in good red wine. The normal writerly jealousies and rivalries of the subcontinent do not apply here, where we are small fish in a big pond. We read and comment on each other's work; exchange publishing tips and gossip; and blurb, publicize and celebrate one another's achievements. It is as much of a network as a bricklayer's union or a medieval guild; we come together for work and, incidentally, find companionship in what is an otherwise solitary endeavor.

Sometimes new associations form across ethnic networks--particularly when they face a common enemy. A young Gujarati man from Queens tells me about life in a street gang in Jackson Heights called the Punjabi Boys Network. Its members come from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh--countries that, at any given time, are at war with one or more of the others. But in Queens their commonalities override their differences. And sometimes they form shifting alliances with groups with whom they normally don't associate, teaming up, say, with African-Americans against Latino gangs.

In the new world immigrants connect with people they wouldn't give a second glance to in the old country. Over brunch recently a young Nigerian couple--an investment banker and a lawyer--told me about how they discovered their fellow Africans. They live much as others of their education (boarding school in England, business and law school in Boston) do: summer shares in the Hamptons, expensive meals on expense accounts. Then the wife got pregnant, and they bought a large apartment in a section of Harlem where they come into daily contact with African street vendors, people whom they would only have interacted with as servants in Nigeria, where both their families are tribal nobility. Banking and legal firms are supposed to be a meritocracy; anybody who can bring in money is supposedly welcome. But as each tried to make partner, they saw more and more evidence of the caste system of haute New York and found more in common with the street vendors than they'd ever have imagined. As they struggled to find a place in New York City, they ended up rediscovering Nigeria. Unlike other newcomers to the wasp world of banking and law firms back in the salad days of the last century, this Nigerian couple need not assume the culture and manner of elites--not in their personal lives, anyway.

The distinctness of immigrant networks has important social and economic consequences. Existing groups, like African-Americans, find themselves frozen out, or competing with the immigrants for jobs. American-born blacks are leaving New York in substantial numbers, to be replaced by Africans and Caribbeans. While the overall national unemployment rate now stands at 4.5%, in recent years between one-third and one-half of black male high school graduates have been unemployed. Among black males who have dropped out of high school and who are most likely to compete with unskilled immigrants, the unemployment rate has ranged from 59% to 72%.

Why should immigrants care? As they advance into the ranks of the established networks, they tend to reach out to their home countries to do good works. Indian tech employees have offered substantial help to the Indian government with such things as water projects and bringing Wi-Fi and the like to villages. But, like other immigrant groups, they fail to reach out to minorities in their adopted country.

There is precedent for such outreach. In the 1950s and 1960s Jews participated in the civil rights struggles and thereby built a bridge to the African-American community, one that has proved durable despite considerable strife between them since. Will successful Asians--and Africans and Europeans, for that matter--ever look around in their own backyards in the inner cities of the citadels of commerce they inhabit and lend a hand where the need is greatest? Only when one network assists another network and steps out of its tribe, out of its village, is a community--a nation--formed. Only then is the earth truly spann'd.

Suketu Mehta is the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.