"Fellow immigrants…"

The voice was that of immigrant President Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking to the immigrant Daughters of the American Revolution, most of whom cherished the anti-immigrant policies put in place by Congress in 1924.

As Paul Numrich reminds us in this issue of the Bulletin, Congress changed the law in 1965. Those of us old enough to remember that fateful year remember when "we" marched at Selma, passed the most progressive welfare and education measures yet, and committed troops to Vietnam. Even books that chronicle day-to-day life in America do not record that fateful day in 1965 when law changed and new newcomers could come.

And come they did, from everywhere. Upper Midwest smallish towns, with their churches in the vanguard, were hospitable to boat people and other Southeast Asians, although less hospitable to Hispanic migrant workers, but were nevertheless adaptable in the face of all the disruptions of old folkways associated with population homogeneity. These changes affected health care, as our features in this issue well illustrate.

A short story: some years ago I was speaking on "Pluralism in Medical Ethics," a newly relevant subject, in an east-central Iowa city. I spoke of once-homogenous DuPage County, still 104% Republican, Catholic-Mainline-Evangelical in make-up, but now home to more than fifty non-Judeo-Christian worshipping groups. "Well, that's Chicago, where you have all those Black Muslims," said someone. So we played a game. "Where is the oldest mosque, meaning the longest-term community-in-continuity that worships in America?" I asked. Answer: Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "What is down the road in Fairfield?" Transcendental Meditation's university. "Do you have gypsies in Chicago?" someone asked. They are old immigrants but constant migrants. Someone said, "You don't do anything gynecological among gypsies unless the 'queen' authorizes it." Do you have Amish? Not nearby, in the city, I surmised. "Well, we do, and you 'heal' them only in community."

Add to that mix, of course, recent Hispanic arrivals who have flowed into towns to take meat-packing jobs nobody else wanted. And everyone knows of a hyper-Orthodox Jewish group coming to dominance in an Iowa town. Before long Iowa seemed one more Ellis Island for old and new newcomers. We are not talking Flushing, New York. This is Iowa. The daughters of the Daughters of the American Revolution of Roosevelt's day would have no place to hide today.

Not that many would want to. New immigrants represent not only challenge but opportunity. As "we" and "they" intermarry, as we make our first forays into each others' worlds at "ethnic" restaurants, as our schools send out parental messages in many languages, so our health care institutions benefit from personnel of differing faiths and outlooks but skills comparable to those of our medics and nurses and counselors.

Not many years ago a West Suburban Chicago medical center advertised its openness by publishing a list of the physicians on its staff. Among the roughly one-hundred names I saw no Western-European ones.

At first the changes were felt in the arrival of alternative medicines, holistic approaches from the Himalayas, from the rice fields, from Africa. Now there are influences in mainstream medicine and in hospital practice as well. Of course, this new-immigrant based pluralism has its effect on medical ethics. Counseling has changed. While religious lines generally hold, the faiths do interact and learn from each other. Thus Asian, African, and oldest-immigrant Native American voices and techniques bear spiritual stamps that sometimes subtly, sometimes boldly, impact the wider healing community.

"There goes the neighborhood!" was the old cry. Now, here come new people to heal and be healed, to speak and to listen. In these pages and in our conferences we want to show that we listen intently and will give time and space to "the new immigrants."