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"There are almost as many reasons as there are applications for visas," sighs a U.S. consular official in Naples. Well-todo Italian families live in fear of political murder, maimings and kidnapings for cash. Add to the negative side the concern of many Europeans that private enterprise and personal initiative will be socialized out of existence. On the positive side, most of the entrepreneurial immigrants have either tasted la vie americaine on tourist or business visits, or have been educated here, and sniff the opportunities on every corner. They see the U.S. (native Americans take note) as an unfettered land in which the newcomer can succeed by applying every Horatian and Algerian virtue from ardor to zeal. Then, too, the home countries appear to the traveled young European to be montages of daffodils and gorgonzola, wine cellars and chateaux and cozy pubs that seem totally irrelevant to real life in 1978. As Journalist Ted Morgan, né Conte Sanche de Gramont—he anagrammatized his surname and became an American citizen last year—wrote in On Becoming American: "One has to come to America to get a sense of life's possibilities ... The true American, in the existential sense of the man who makes himself, is the immigrant, for he is American by choice."
Many of the new Americans-by-choice are not, of course, Western Europeans. In the past two years there has been a great influx of entrepreneurial Iranians, Canadians, South Americans and
Jamaicans. But, almost invariably, it is the sense of life's possibilities that turns the compass to America. Helen Arjad, 25, a vivacious, casual-chic Iranian who studied fashion design in Switzerland and plans a career in real estate in Southern California, puts it as well as anyone: "If you have talent and knowledge and start a business here, 85% of the time you're successful. In other countries, you have to be 85% lucky to be successful."
Patrick Terrail, 35, only son of the family that has owned the famed three-star Tour d'Argent restaurant in Paris for generations, decided to found his own restaurant, the fashionable Ma Maison, in Los Angeles. Says he: "I realized French people couldn't accept youth, change and new ideas for their own sake. In America, if they like your idea, it doesn't matter how old you are."
Many talented European immigrants sound as if they were taping / Love New York commercials. Argentine-born Enrico Tucci, 40, who was a movie producer in Rome before he opened a Manhattan showroom devoted to contemporary Italian furniture, finds that "New York is becoming a European city. It has the best of America and the best of Europe." French-born Robert Pascal, a onetime bartender who owns two of Manhattan's most elegant restaurants, Chez Pascal and Le Premier, was able to open the latter with the help of $500,000 in personal loans from his faithful customers. "I didn't like America when I first arrived [in 1968]," he recalls. "I was disappointed in the way people ate and dressed. But my enthusiasm grew as I saw America grow. This country has grown 100 years in the past ten."