Malle’s lively cross-section of everyday American citizens who, like him, are recent immigrants to this country.

For a period of about three months, celebrated French director Louis Malle grabbed his camera and took a tour of immigrant communities and individual refugees across the United States. The results are fun to watch as they are peppered liberally with good humor. When Cambodian refugees come into America with bags of rice, the narration notes that "for the Cambodians, rice is survival, for the immigration officers, it is microbes." Several success stories are seen and in some ways the documentary is weighted in that direction. A West Ghanan makes good with a taxi company he started, a Korean applies to several top ten universities, and in a political flub of the worst kind, the mansion of exiled General Somoza from Nicaragua is shown with the comment that the infamous General is "becoming a regular suburbanite."