E PLURIBUS UNUM. The Statue of Liberty still lifts her lamp beside the golden door.

TOMMY’S International Sports Café, Inc, a makeshift social club on 657 East 189th Street in New York’s Bronx, would repay a visit from those Europeans who see their continent’s Romanies (also known as Gypsies, see article) only as a lawless and hopeless underclass, in which success means at most building a gaudy, windowless mansion (see picture).

Only the Balkan dishes on the menu, and the hum of Romani spoken from the mainly male clientele as they play cards and pool, distinguish the café from anywhere else in the neighbourhood. Just like the Albanians, Italians and Hispanics who live nearby, its patrons are Americans. They take vacations, work hard as cops, teachers and in business, and send their children to college. Asked what he thinks of his neighbours, a man across the street scratches his head and asks “We have Gypsies here?”

For their part, the Bronx Romanies view the old continent with mixed sympathy and disdain. “Money we spend on candy, they save to get food…to [expletive] live” says Vefki Redzeposki, a teenager who works for an electrical contractor.

In Old Europe, things are not so good for the Romanies. (The article, and a related article, struggle with the right name to use for tribes formerly known as Gypsies. Is Zigeuner a pejorative?)

In the bracing climate of the Bronx, such problems seem distant. “Once you give us a chance to succeed, we’ll grab that opportunity. And we’ll run with it,” says Saniye Jasaroska, a 34-year-old medical biller. America gives its Romanies that chance. Europe has yet to do so.

To do well in the United States is to buy into the ideas of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. It has nothing to do with ethnicity or creed, and one of the unintended consequences of the civil rights reforms of the 1960s was that people all over the world saw those ideas offered more broadly and responded to the opportunity.