Every immigrant leads a double life. Every immigrant has a double identity and a double vision, being suspended between an old and a new home, an old and a new self.
The very notion of a new home, of course, is in a sense as impossible as the notion of new parents. Parents are who they are; home is what it is. Home is the wallpaper above the bed, the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the bruised shins of the playground, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute one's first universe. Home is one's birthplace, ratified by memory.
Yet home, like parentage, must be legitimized through love; otherwise, it is only a fact of geography or biology. Most immigrants to America found their love of their old homes betrayed. Whether Ireland starved them, or Nazi Germany persecuted them, or Viet Nam drove them into the sea, they did not really abandon their countries; their countries abandoned them. In America, they found the possibility of a new love, the chance to nurture new selves.
Not uniformly, not without exceptions. Every generation has its Know-Nothing movement, its fear -- often understandable -- and hatred of alien invasion. That is as true today as it always was. In spite of all this, the American attitude remains unique. Throughout history, exile has been a calamity; America turned it into a triumph and placed its immigrants in the center of a national epic. It is still symbolized by that old copper-plated cliche, the Statue of Liberty, notwithstanding the condescension and the awful poetry of the famous Emma Lazarus lines ("the wretched refuse of your teeming shore").
The epic is possible because America is an idea as much as it is a country. America has nothing to do with allegiance to a dynasty and very little to do with allegiance to a particular place, but everything to do with allegiance to a set of principles. To immigrants, those principles are especially real because so often they were absent or violated in their native lands. It was no accident in the '60s and '70s, when alienation was in flower, that it often seemed to be "native" Americans who felt alienated, while aliens or the children of aliens upheld the native values. The immigrant's double vision results in a special, somewhat skewed perspective on America that can mislead but that can also find revelation in the things that to native Americans are obvious. Psychiatrist Robert Coles speaks of those "who straddle worlds and make of that very experience a new world."
It is not easy. Successive waves of immigration differ, of course, and a refugee from wartime Europe does not have the same experiences as a refugee from postwar Viet Nam 40 years later. But all immigrants have certain things in common, and all know the classic, opposite impulses: to draw together in protective enclaves where through churches, clubs, cafes, newspapers, the old culture is fiercely maintained; and on the other hand to rush headlong into the American mainstream, seeking to adopt indiscriminately new manners, clothes, technology and sometimes names.