Ready or not, here they come. Clutching their Vuitton luggage and checking their Cartier Panthere wristwatches, wealthy foreigners are lining up with their less fortunate countrymen at U.S. Immigration desks. The new arrivals are not jet-setters here for a month-long shopping spree or speculators merely stopping off to tuck away foreign currency in U.S. investments. They are ambitious entrepreneurs and professionals ready to catch the go-go spirit, to buy homes and consider citizenship in the nation that, for the present at least, offers them attractive business opportunities and an amenable society. "Ten years ago, everything was based on England," says Sahir Erozan, 27, a Turkish immigrant who owns Cafe Med, a luxe nightclub in the tony Georgetown section of Washington. "Now America is the place to go, the thing to do."
They are coming because conditions at home may not be all that comfortable, especially if they have a considerable amount of money and would like to keep it. In a number of countries, unsympathetic regimes and currency devaluations are forcing the well-heeled to move on. In many places the threat of kidnaping, terrorism and harassment prevents the rich from flaunting their privilege.
As they have for a decade, the international wealthy favor New York City for its comparative safety and social sass. Opulent European boutiques like Celine for French fashions, $1 million-plus apartments like those in the new Museum Tower, and luxury hotels like the Plaza Athenee, which are run for, and often by, the newcomers, continue to blossom in Manhattan. Owners of New York's most fashionable restaurants say that the arrives are influencing American dining habits with their Continental nonchalance. They give a cursory glance at the bottom line on the bill, and seldom practice power lunching and power tripping. On a recent Wednesday, Manhattan's superswank Le Cirque played host to Richard Nixon, Publisher Malcolm Forbes and Chris-Craft Chief Herbert Siegel all at the same time. "They all looked at each other," recalls Italian Owner Sirio Maccioni. "Maybe they were thinking, 'Do I have the right table?' I could put Mr. (Giovanni) Agnelli (whose family controls Fiat) anywhere. Europeans might complain about the food, but not the table." Some sybaritic loungers, of course, treat the U.S. as just another dish on the international smorgasbord. Young, titled transients from Europe and South America are drawn to the action in New York City, where they are politely known to real estate agents and party hostesses as multinationals. Dimitri Karageorge, 27, Prince of Yugoslavia, an E.F. Hutton stockbroker by day, has mastered American directness and uses a different word: "Eurotrash. People say we are a little idle, a little too rich. I suppose it's true." After work or shopping, the teenage countesses and bejeaned barons gather at Club A, a jewel-box disco, to dance, gossip and compare invitations. "It's all a game to them," says a Columbia University business student, Jeffrey von der Schulenburg, 27, a German count by birth, "really just playacting, and in the end, they're Europeans again."