Word: alienated
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...which this account is indebted.) Another observer recorded the anxiety that rent the hordes in steerage as they were taken off the steamships, loaded into lighters, taken to the quay: " 'There is Ellis Island!' shouted an immigrant who had already been in the United States and knew of its alien laws. The name acted like magic. Faces grew taut, eyes narrowed. There, in those red buildings, fate awaited them. Were they ready to enter? Or were they to be sent back? 'Only God knows,' shouted an elderly man, his withered hand gripping the railing...
Communism has not taken hold in Cuba, he believes, and when Castro dies the island will move away from its alien ideology. At that moment, Padilla predicts, thousands of exiles will return home and start new businesses with the money they have made in the U.S. But they will not forsake their new home in Florida: they will shuttle between the two countries as easily as if they were going from New York to Washington. Cuba will become half American, and the great irony, Padilla concludes, is that Castro, who tried to expunge the American image from the island, will...
...ambivalent about the new arrivals. Ambivalence is what old Americans have always felt toward new Americans. At a remove of several generations from Ellis Island, some sentimentalize the immigrant experience. They project their nostalgia upon today's immigrants and wish them well. But the native-born also feels the alien vibration. Alien is a dank and sinister word -- the ominous otherness, not our kind. The alien stands across a gap through which a killer wind can blow. The U.S. is being overrun, says a flickering fear. Racism in new combinations jounces around. Traditional nativist whites find themselves in the same...
...almost any country can depend on finding transplanted countrymen in the city. But there is also something appealing, it seems, about joining the larger swarm of immigrants in New York, of being on a patch that is in turn part of a patchwork quilt. Where practically everyone is an alien, no one is alien. "There is a feeling of cordiality," says Anand Mohan, a Queens College politics professor from India, "and, for us, a satisfaction in knowing that as immigrants in this city, we are not alone...
Accents of menace alien...