My school’s going to be doing West Side Story this year for its spring musical, and accordingly I revisited the film version last night (the Robert Wise version, naturally).

The story prompted some thoughts. The set up is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet among the street gangs of New York City, with the conflict being between the native-born Jets and the immigrant Sharks. Obviously, it’s a great film; one of the best musicals ever made, with some extremely thoughtful writing (the America number, for instance, shows both sides of the immigrant experience, while being a lyrically witty song in itself and a spectacular dance number). Thinking about it prompted some ideas on the subject of immigration.

The immigrant-native conflict in America is about as old as the country itself.

There is a current of American thought that conceives it as a nation-state of European or Anglo-Saxon basis. On this understanding, the Constitution was written for a specific people and was never intended to be understood as suitable for a different people. There is another current which conceives America as a confessional state whose ideals are universally applicable to all mankind (I’ve even seen some people say that it was the first state founded on universal ideals, which is a rather appalling sentiment: Thomas Jefferson is universally applicable, but Jesus Christ is not?). On this understanding, any and all peoples from anywhere in the world become American by accepting the American way of life.

The latter, obviously, is the more dominant and generally accepted, and has been from at least the time of the Civil War. The former is largely demonized as racism.

In thinking about the film, it occurred to me that it’s not that simple.

A given culture and community naturally wants to preserve itself. It wants to maintain things as they have been, not out of a mindless desire for the familiar, but because the familiar is predictable, and predictability means safety. It reduces the burden of life. It facilitates the raising of children (my own generation in particular – Gen Y – got to experience what happens when you get raised to inherit a world that no longer exists by the time you grow up). It allows for social cohesion and harmony, and with it a sense of security and communal trust. As much as our culture likes to look down on ‘social expectations,’ those expectations serve a social and psychological function by reducing the uncertainties of this very uncertain world and providing a framework on which to build a life (this is a topic in itself: such a framework isn’t for everyone, but for most people it is more of a benefit than it is a burden).

An influx of culturally and ethnically distinct people disrupts this communal cohesion, and those of the community naturally resist this. The harsh reality is that legitimate good is almost inevitably lost through an influx of immigration, just by the nature of the case. The fact that the reaction – often among working-class people, who are at once most dependent upon communal cohesion and least able to articulate the real issues at hand – frequently takes the form of blunt bigotry and aggressive hatred obscures the actual issue.

Do you honestly think any of the Jets would think twice about Puerto Ricans if they hadn’t moved into ‘their’ neighborhood? Do you think they have any kind of articulate ideas about Hispanics at all? Of course not; it’s all raw territoriality. The Puerto Ricans disrupt the familiar pattern of the community; the same would be true of any outsiders, just with the additional points of a linguistic and ethnic distinction to make the difference more noticeable.

On the other hand, those who immigrate can generally be assumed to be seeking a better life for themselves and their families, or to be fleeing worse conditions. Most have no idea of directly targeting or intentionally disrupting the communities they enter, they just want to carry on their way of life in circumstances that allow for a safer and more prosperous existence, something you can hardly blame them for.

Essentially, there’s no simple answer to this. The native-born are right to want to preserve their communities and ways of life, the immigrants are right to want to live in better conditions and to have better opportunities for their families. But inevitably, someone is going to lose out. The best case scenario is that the immigrants are close enough to the natives to settle into a new cultural cohesion, though this usually involves one side or the other losing something: religion, language, etc. (e.g. the Irish have been pretty thoroughly assimilated to American culture, but American Catholics have by and large become culturally and philosophically indistinguishable from the rest of the country).

Worst case, the community is destroyed and becomes a mishmash of unlike and unlike jostling together with no sense of social trust, cohesion, or expectation: no longer a community, just a bunch of people living in close proximity, as often as not erupting into periodic violence.

As I say, there is no clear solution to such a situation. Even at the end of the film, there’s really no sense of what’s going to happen next for the Jets and the Sharks (which is one way Romeo and Juliet‘s ending was actually a little more positive; the families are more able to abandon their feud than are competing ethnic groups in the same neighborhood. Of course, Juliet dies while Maria survives, so it’s sadder in that way. It’s not a happy ending either way, obviously). Best I can say is that we should probably be a lot more cautious about creating it in the first place.