September 21, 2013.

A Nation Built for Immigrants

He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear that some accident----a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for instance----would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes.

In a single generation, between 1980 and 2007, more than 10 million people migrated, legally or illegally, from Mexico to the U.S. Today there are more than 12 million Mexican-born people in the U.S. and millions of American children who are their offspring----amounting to almost 10% of the nation's population. That is exponentially larger than in 1970, when there were less than one million Mexican-born people in the country, or 1980, when there were two million. The Mexican migration, and the similarly large migration of others from the rest of Latin America, has in just one generation reshaped the nation. Hispanics have replaced blacks as the largest officially recognized minority group.

That was ten----eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept that photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party's hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?

Needless to say, this transformation hasn't gone unnoticed in our politics, especially in the border states most affected by the influx. Groups like the "minutemen," self-appointed guardians of the U.S. border, may no longer hold the spotlight, but the issue remains tense, as suggested by the iffy prospects on Capitol Hill of the latest attempt at "comprehensive immigration reform." Many Americans still worry that, with the profound shift in the country's ethnic composition over the past several decades, the U.S. is well on its way to flying apart.

But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then there had been other changes----two, three, he could not remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:

None of this should come as a surprise to a student of American history. But for perspective, it is helpful to recollect that the conflicts produced by previous surges of migration resulted in much worse strains. More than that, in the process of dealing with these strains, Americans have developed a capacity and a habit of accommodating and uniting citizens with very serious and deep differences. Going back to the Founding Fathers----with their formula of limited government, civic equality and tolerance of religious and cultural diversity----each new surge of arrivals has been greeted as a crisis without precedent, only to disappear with unexpected speed as the nation faced new challenges.