Yet home, like parentage, must be legitimized(合理) through love; otherwise, it is only a fact of geography or biology. Most immigrants to America found their love of their old homes betrayed: 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 understandable fear and hatred of alien invasion is as true today as it always was, but in spite of all this, the American attitude remains unique. Throughout history, exile has been a disaster; America turned it into a triumph and placed its immigrants in the center of a national epic.
The epic is possible because America is an idea as much as it is a country. America has nothing to do with loyalty to a dynasty and very little to do with loyalty to particular place, but everything to do with loyalty 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 ’60 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.”
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