Content area
Full Text
Most immigrants to America concentrate on becoming Americans. But for Tamils and Sri Lankans, Eritreans and Ethiopians, and thousands of other strife-fleeing people, distant wars are still very close to home
IT IS Saturday afternoon and Amanuel Zerzghi, a member of the Eritrean Club of New York, is busy in the group's headquarters, a tatty hall in Harlem. About 50 people are with him, some who have driven for three hours to get there. Eagerly, they fill large cardboard boxes with donated clothes, food and medicine, and load them on to a waiting lorry. The Stars and Stripes hangs high at the back of the hall, beside the television used to show Eritrea's recent war with Ethiopia. Eritrean music plays. By the end of the day the lorry is packed tight and sent off with cheers to Washington, nc. "Maybe we are indirectly supporting the war," explains Mr Zerzghi, "but we must try to support our families."
There are roughly 50,000 Eritreans in the United States. The goods they collect are shipped, every few weeks, to relatives back home made destitute and homeless by the war. "The sense of solidarity is very, very high," says Mr Zerzghi, handing over his business card. On the back of it he has written telephone numbers for Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and the main switchboard of Congress. "Those were for our people to call and ask America to stop the fighting."
This flurry of hard work is not confined to Eritreans. Some 30,000 people migrated legally to America from conflict-ridden countries in 1998; more arrive illegally. In all, the foreign-born part of the country's population has risen from 9.7m (4.8% of all Americans) in 1970 to 25.8m in 1997 (9.7%), reckons the government's census bureau. Many of these want to help the people they left behind. Most send money, some buy war bonds sold in their old countries. They lobby the administration and Congress and promote their cause in the media, especially the Internet. Some send guns to the armies they support, or themselves go back to fight.
They follow a long tradition. Irish-Americans (nearly 5m Irish people came to America between 1820...