The Myth of Open Borders: The American Tradition of Immigration Control.

IF" THERE WERE any question that ethnicity" and "ethnic" politics in America have become a case of the tail wagging the dog, it was dispelled by events surrounding the centennial celebration of the Statue of Liberty in 1986; an occasion distinguished by a combination of mass sentimentality and political cynicism and opportunism. This "Party of the Century," as Time magazine called it, was widely exploited by special-interest groups and interested politicians in general to promote the concept of the United States as not just a "melting pot" but a "mirror of the world," and to discredit any ideal to the contrary as unAmerican. In The Myth of Open Borders.- The American Tradition of Immigration Control (The American Immigration Control Foundation, Water Street, P.O. Box 525, Monterey, Va. 24465; $3), Wayne Lutton insists that "Amidst the references to what was called our 'traditional policy' of providing an asylum and haven of refuge for the poor and oppressed of every land, all sight was lost of what, in fact, is the American 'tradition' regarding immigration. Far from being a thing of the past or, alternatively, a recent development, American opposition to immigration dates back to early Colonial days." In a succinctly written summary of 47 pages, Mr. Lutton condenses the development of the anti-immigrationist argument over two centuries.

From the earliest days of colonial settlement, Lutton shows, "efforts were made to encourage the settlement only of those who were most likely to make a positive contribution to society." For the English Colonies, a major problem in respect of immigration was the mother country's tendency to regard America as a dumping ground for what an Act of Parliament in 1663 described as "rogues, vagrants, and sturdy beggars," whom the Act empowered English justices of the peace to ship across the Atlantic Ocean. Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, for example, passed laws in the Colonial period expelling foreign paupers, fining shipmasters who imported indigents and criminals, and laying duties on disembarked immigrants, whether or not they were either criminal or destitute. Over a period of nearly two hundred years, such stopgap policies seem to have produced at least something of the desired result: E. E. Proper, in his Colonial Immigration Laws, attributed the religious and political unity of the Colonies in 1776 partly to the restrictions enacted by the Colonial government prior to the Revolution.

During and after the War of Independence, many of the Colonies continued to pass similar laws pertaining to immigration, while the Continental Congress established a policy of employing only native-born citizens in the foreign service of the country. General Washington ordered: "No man shall be appointed a sentry who is not a native of this country." The Constitutional Convention agreed that the President and Vice President of the United States must be natural-born citizens; the Founding Fathers, in point of fact, were outspokenly opposed to further immigration to the new nation, as letters and published writings from Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton attest.

In the early part of the nineteenth century the United States was the object of numerous Maries-style boatlifts dispatched by European governments; these were greeted, not with the "open arms" with which the Carter Administration received the inmates of Fidel Castro's prisons, but by batteries of state laws against them. By mid century, the Native American Association was going strong, and the American Party was about to be formed; anti-immigrationist arguments were now turning less on the question of criminality and financial burdensomeness and more on questions of cultural incompatibility ("[Immigrants] bring with them a host of extravagant notions of freedom, or a plenty of crude, undigested theories which are utterly irreconcilable with obedience to laws of our own making and from a constitution of our own adopting. They come with their heads full of a division of property . . ."-The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 1850), as well of the extent to which foreigners were taking jobs from native-born Americans.

From the late 1800s to the present, the story of immigration control is well known. As the source of immigration shifted from Northern Europe to Southern and Eastern Europe, racial and cultural concerns increased to the point where policy regarding it was made a federal concern; the culmination of restrictionist feeling arrived with the Immigration Act of 1924. It is worth pointing out, however, that our current troubles stem largely from the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, which irresponsibly amended restrictionist policies. Theodore H. White -no enemy of Lyndon Johnson and most of his works-has this to say of the 1965 Immigration Act, in his book America in Search of itself (1982): "probably the most thoughtless of the many acts of the Great Society . . . could become a catastrophe-the tide of immigration, legal and illegal, pouring into this country." -quite convincing in itself-that, for artistic or magical purpose, could give at least nominal control over reality.

Experimental work has been done with so-called "lucid dreamers." In REM sleep these people are still "conscious" enough to influence, even dictate, dream subject matter and texture. While sleeping they also provide data (by eye blink or hand buzzer) that technicians can interpret. I reckon the fiction-writer is some kind of lucid dreamer. He can routinely call up a hypnagogic trance state that will allow him to draw on those wider associative resources that exist in his unconscious mind-whether he is aware of this process or not. Usually some device or habit pattern-ratber like post-hypnotic suggestion-releases the unconscious. With me it is the pencil itself. I begin to write nonsense, "Well, now, what do you think of this-," my eyeballs (I am told) roll up, and an unconscious faculty takes over. For another writer, music or his cigarette might serve. Occasional practitioners find writing elusive and difficult because they suppose that it has only a rational, "conscious" inner motion.

Here let me distinguish between what I would term the general and the particular creative unconscious. Plot and dialogue, which require linear connection and overall structure, are amenable to a broad reach of mindcorresponding with that hypnagogic trance described above. On the level of phrase or individual image, somewhat different faculties apply. These I associate with play (though unconscious creation, in every aspect, is playful). I have, for example, a magic island ruled by random dice throw. I write a one-paragraph draft. In it certain metaphorical problems have been set"his nose was shaped like"-which are not solvable, except in the dullest, most ordinary sense, by conscious thought. I then play for half a minute or so in my imaginary world. During that time, during this thirty-second play-dream, the unconscious is released. More often than not, when I return to my desk, progress has been made. I use myself as an instane here because-being master of the obviousI have regularized this mechanism rather more than most. But all writers play. The creative unconscious is a clown. No event or item can be absolutely eliminated from its field of reference. Everything, as Baudelaire thought, is a metaphor for everything else, through one attribute or another. Why are elephants like the Metropolitan Opera? I have no idea, but you can be sure there is some relationship. Storytelling, at every level, assumes joke form. Laughter is the response to an unexpected metaphorical juxtaposition. We prize a "sense of humor" not just for whatever bonhomie it may confer, but because it implies a strong associative capacity-and, therefore, the highest creative potential.

At age seventy or so Stephen Powelson has memorized 90 per cent of Homer's Iliad. Writing on his phenomenal (if Quixotic) achievement in Harvard Magazine, Ruth Mehrtens Galvin gave this as a Powelson mnemonic rule: "Paying attention is key. Whatever interferes with attention interferes with remembering." My own memory is like a steel mosquito net. I think I have that disease, what do you call it? I also think my inadhesive memory was formed, in some degree, by long practice as a fiction writer-because the key to creative imagining is controlled inattention. Words are read for resonance -and implication, for the dream they may start up, not just for their strict rational sense. Literature is part of a total environment. There are around 2,500 books in my office. I can recall little about any of them. But, almost without exception, I can remember just where I read each one. A passage that Powelson might memorize will be for me just one term in some metaphor suggested perhaps by my physical location. I read Homer on the back staircase of Schermerhorn Hall at Columbia. And Diomedes, he with his great war cry, is still there -not on a plain before Troy.

In dreams no image or correspondence will be disqualified finally from the associative process. Openness is all. I am, as many who write are, a chronic insomniac. For most people sleep signifies rest. For a writer, sleep (and dreaming) is exactly analogous to the creative process: it may be the creative process. All figures, all occurrences are potentially a first link in some metaphorical chain that might go on and on-maybe even as far as madness. Writers, I suspect, often fear sleep because they are never quite certain they will be able to return from it.