In popular culture and within immigration discussions, a dichotomy between the “old immigrants” and the “new immigrants” is constantly in focus. To define my terms, old immigrants refers to the mainly Italian and Russian Jewish immigration wave just before and after 1900, and the new immigrants refers to newcomers in more recent history from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Presently, a main stream of immigration belief is that the old immigrants were hard-working, artisans, and fully legal immigrants, while today’s immigrants are illegal aliens, crossing borders in the cloak of night, and uneducated. However, this imagining of today’s immigrants is not an accurate portrayal of the true nature of the new immigrants.
New immigrants may be leaving poor home countries, but that does not necessarily mean that they themselves are uniformly destitute and lacking in education. Actually a lot of today’s immigrants are well-educated, with college degrees. Another false idea is that all of today’s illegal immigrants are unlawful because they crossed over the Mexican-United States border with the help of a coyote or smuggler. In fact, most illegal aliens are illegal because their travel visas have expired. Also, most immigrants today journey to the United States via a plane ride into the JFK International Airport. Additionally, the concept of illegal immigration did not exist around the 1900s as it does today, because “the nature of immigration restrictions and immigrant travel mean that very few newcomers lived in New York illegally” (Foner) so it is not fair to compare how many more illegal immigrants there are today than during the old wave of immigration.
How immigrants are portrayed in the media today is nothing like the vignette of them that the previous facts point to. Perhaps, the perception will change over time like it did with Jewish and Italian immigrants. In Mele’s chapter “Different and Inferior,” the Lower East Side, the home of Jewish and Italian immigrants, is described in terms of being grossly overcrowded with unsanitary tenements. Mele discusses that the upper and middle class people relied on the workers from the Lower East Side, but still looked down on them as inferior. That perception of the old immigrants is directly in contrast to how the old immigrants are portrayed now in movies and television shows; “Turn-of-the-century immigrants are often recalled as noble sufferers and heroes who weathered hardships in Europe and a traumatic ocean crossing to make it to America.”
In a few decades perhaps today’s immigrants will also be looked upon as the old immigrants are portrayed, but for now, immigration facts, not false media portrayals, are extremely important in forming our image of today’s immigrants.
