CLA: Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration

Are Americans ever emigrants or immigrants? As part of my dissertation project, I have been reading about Americans who have opted to leave their home country and make their home abroad.

Phyllis Michaux, the author of The Unknown Ambassadors: A Saga of Citizenship (1996), married a Frenchman after World War II and has lived in France ever since. Michaux founded the Association of American Wives of Europeans (AAWE) in Paris in 1961 "to protect the citizenship rights of Americans married to Europeans and the children of these bicultural and bilingual families." Her book provides interesting glimpses into how Americans view those who leave the U.S., and how Americans who live abroad view themselves and their relationship to the U.S.

What is striking in both perspectives is that an American living abroad is expected to remain just that - an American living abroad. Common American expectations of immigrants moving to the U.S. - abandonment of native languages and assimilation into the "American way of life" - do not apply to Americans when they are immigrants in other countries. Michaux laments that American emigrants are often regarded with mistrust and suspected of disloyalty to their home country. "There is widespread suspicion that Americans who leave the U.S. will no longer think of themselves as Americans," she writes.

Facing suspicions that Americans living abroad are "tax avoiders, living it up in the sunny climes of the Mediterranean or the Caribbean," Michaux is determined to show how she and her country women in the AAWE are, first and foremost, loyal, tax-paying U.S. citizens who want to transmit their citizenship, language, and culture to their children. As Michael Adler, one of the members of the AAWE proclaims: "We or our children are neither immigrants nor refugees. We are Americans..."

The story of the U.S. is said to be that of a "nation of immigrants." Yet the story of Americans who have chosen to emigrate has little, if any, resemblance to this view.

Johanna Leinonen, IHRC Graduate Research Assistant and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History.

Posted by Johanna Leinonen at 3:14 PM | Permalink

For me, summer reading means escape, largely through fiction that is as unrelated as possible to my scholarly work. Imagine my surprise then when I opened two new novels pulled randomly from the shelves of the Minneapolis Public Library. Both featured main characters who were very much "on the move."

The Glimmer Palace (by Beatrice Colin) and The China Lover (by Ian Buruma) are both works of historical fiction. Both are about the early film industry. And both focus on the lives of movie stars. The Glimmer Palace explores the biography of a fictional film star, Lilly Nelly Aphrodite, in interwar Germany; The China Lover is instead based loosely on a real person--known variously as Ri Koran, Yoshiko Yamaguchi and Shirley Yamaguchi. Of the two, The China Lover is by far the more sophisticated of these two historical novels.

But there was to be no late-summer escapism for me. Film stars, too, I quickly learned, are labor migrants and refugees.

Lilly Nelly Aphrodite's lover, a refugee Russian named Ilya Yurasov, toils in the fictional editing room while Lilly responds to the siren call of Hollywood. (I'll not describe in any detail the improbable plot twists that has her returning again to work for Goebbels but escaping him at the last minute for a boat again sailing west across the Atlantic). The China Lover is actually narrated by several expatriated lovers of film who travel as she also does between Japan, Manchuria, China, Japan, and the United States. With all this moving about, the reader sometimes struggles to keep track of all the shifting identities of the film star and of the star-struck men who work around her in the film industry.

For an historian, reading historical fiction is a busman's holiday. We inevitably look for anachronisms and wonder which bits of historical fiction are actually fictional. For the specialist on migration, I've now concluded, there are no busmen's holidays. Perhaps that's because the lives of the migratory just more interesting than the lives of the sedentary?

Donna Gabaccia, Director, Immigration History Research Center.

Posted by Johanna Leinonen at 10:21 AM | Permalink