Immigrants in New York City: Reaping the - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Immigrants in New York City: Reaping the
Bene½ts of Continuous Immigration

Mary C. Waters & Philip Kasinitz

Astratto: Using New York City as an example, this essay examines how American cities that have a long
and continuous history of absorbing immigrants develop welcoming institutions and policies for current
immigrants and their children. Cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and New York have been gateway
cities for many previous waves of immigrants and continue to absorb new immigrants today. The ethnic
conflicts and accommodations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continue to shape the context of
reception of today’s immigrants. In contrast to “new destinations,” which in recent years have often been
centers of anti-immigrant sentiment and nativist local social policies, New York has generally adopted
policies designed to include and accommodate new immigrants, as well as repurposing institutions that
served earlier European immigrants and native-born African Americans and Puerto Ricans. The con-
tinuing signi½cance of race in the city is counterbalanced in the lives of immigrants by a relative lack of
nativism and an openness to incorporating immigrants.

New York . . . is a city in which the dominant racial
group has been marked by ethnic variety and all ethnic
groups have experienced ethnic diversity. Any one eth-
nic group can count on seeing its position and power
wax and wane and none has become accustomed to
long term domination, though each may be influential
in a given area or domain. None can ½nd challenges
from new groups unexpected or outrageous. While this
has not necessarily produced a reservoir of good feeling
for groups different from one’s own, the evolving sys-
tem of inter-group relations permit accommodation,
change, and the rise of new groups.

–Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan,

Beyond the Melting Pot1

Immigration is a national issue, yet it is experienced
locally. What sociologists Alejandro Portes and
Rubén Rumbaut term the “context of reception”2
varies greatly by region of the United States, a fact
that has become more important in recent years as
stati, cities, and towns have undertaken constitu-

MARY C. WATERS, a Fellow of the
American Academy since 2006, È
the M. E. Zukerman Professor of
Sociology at Harvard University.
PHILIP KASINITZ is Professor of
Sociology in both the Graduate
Center and Hunter College at the
City University of New York.

(*See endnotes for complete contributor
biographies.)

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tionally dubious efforts to craft their own
immigration policies. Local contexts of
reception are framed by many factors:
demography, the local labor markets, E
the distribution of political power, just to
name the most obvious. They are also
shaped by history. Traditional gateways
greet newcomers with institutions, polit-
ical cultures, and social expectations about
the role of immigrants different than those
of new destinations. Nowhere is this more
obvious than in New York City, home to
the nation’s largest concentration of im-
migrants. Immigration in New York is a
palimpsest in which the life chances of
today’s newcomers are shaped by a his-
tory of which they are often only barely
aware. In this essay, we use New York City
to explore how ethnic conflicts and accom-
modations of the past shape the position
of immigrants today.

Demographer Audrey Singer has divided
America’s immigrant-receiving commu-
nities into four broad categories.3 There
are former gateways, such as Detroit, Phila-
delphia, Milwaukee, and Cleveland. These
cities, mostly in the Northeast and Mid-
west, all had large and diverse immigrant
populations at the peak of the mass Euro-
pean migration to United States at the turn
of the twentieth century. That diversity
shaped their politics and cultures, almeno
for a while. Today, Tuttavia, these cities
have mostly lost their allure for newcom-
ers and natives alike, as evidenced by their
declining populations. Some of the edu-
cational, social, and cultural institutions
that fostered the incorporation of earlier
immigrants and their children survive, Ma
most have fallen by the wayside.

There are also contemporary gateways–
cities such as Los Angeles, Miami, San
Diego, and Houston. Having now received
large numbers of immigrants for nearly a
half-century, such cities can no longer be
seen as new immigrant destinations. Yet

having become signi½cant immigrant
destinations only since the late 1960s, their
cultural and institutional infrastructure of
immigrant reception was largely created
in a post–civil rights context.4 Of course,
these communities do have an immigrant
past. Infatti, several of them were founded
as Mexican cities and faced their ½rst
immigration crisis when an influx of
English-speaking Anglo-Americans trans-
formed their culture and politics in the
nineteenth century. Some also received
an influx of Mexican immigrants during
the Mexican revolution, as well as some
European immigrants and their children
in the mid-twentieth century. Yet only after
the 1960s did these cities become major
gateways for a sizable portion of America’s
new immigrants. Local institutions had
little in the way of immigrant-receiving
traditions, and the white European-origin
populations were often generations re-
moved from their own immigrant roots.
Thus in Los Angeles, for instance, Quando
new immigrants took up styles of politics
created in part by struggles of the long-
standing Mexican American community,
issues were often articulated as Mexicans
versus Anglos; immigrant history was a
source of conflict, not a shared tradition
and common origin.

The third category is made up of what
are now being called new destinations.5
These are communities that received very
little immigration prior to the 1990s, Ma
where the immigrant population has
grown rapidly over the past two decades.
The new destinations are mostly suburbs
and small towns, often in the South and
the Midwest, although the term is also
sometimes applied to major cities, In-
cluding Nashville and Las Vegas. They are
home to a relatively small portion of the
nation’s immigrants, yet they are note-
worthy for the speed with which they
have been transformed into diverse com-
munities and the virulence of the politics

Mary C.
Waters
& Philip
Kasinitz

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142 (3) Estate 2013

Immigrants
In
New York
Città

that has often accompanied this transfor-
mazione.

Finalmente, there is the handful of major
cities that are continuous gateways. These
cities have been important immigrant des-
tinations for well over a century. Three
American cities were signi½cant immi-
grant gateways in 1900, 1990, E 2010:
New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.6
These cities managed to integrate immi-
grants of European origin and their de-
scendants throughout the twentieth cen-
tury, as well as attracting a much more
diverse immigrant flow during the past
½fty years. The origins of the immigrants
have changed, but these cities’ role as
points of entry into U.S. society has re-
mained constant. In such cities, the immi-
grant population is often highly diverse,
as migrants who entered at different times
were often from different regions.

Therefore, the immigrant/native divi-
sion does not easily map onto racial cleav-
ages. Because they are not overwhelmingly
recent arrivals, the portion of the immi-
grant population that is undocumented
tends to be lower in states with a contin-
uous gateway. In New York State, the un-
documented population is estimated at
Di 12 percent of all immigrants; in Cali-
fornia, it is around 26 per cento. By contrast,
nearly half of all immigrants in Arizona and
the majority of immigrants in such new
destination states as Georgia and North
Carolina are estimated to be unauthorized.7
Does the long history of immigrant inte-
gration make a difference in the lives of
current immigrants and their children in
these continuous destinations? Do legacies
of the past make a difference in current-
day lives? Considering the example of New
York–by far the largest and most diverse
of these cities–we think it does.

New York City today is an advanced out-

post of the demographic diversity that is
transforming the nation. “Non-Hispanic

whites” now make up less than one-third
of the city’s population. Thirty-six percent
of the city’s population is foreign born–
including 27 percent of whites, 32 per cento
of blacks, 41 percent of Hispanics, E 72
percent of Asians–and many of the “na-
tives” are in fact the young children of
immigrants. Whites are now a minority
in the city, and the numbers of the “tradi-
tional” native minority groups–African
Americans of native parentage and Puerto
Ricans–are also in decline. Immigrants
make up an even larger portion of the
city’s young adults, and most of the city’s
children have immigrant parents.

These young people grow up amidst
many institutions that were built for past
generations of immigrants and their de-
scendants. The exclusion and mistreatment
of immigrants in the past led to the cre-
ation of many of the city’s most immigrant-
friendly institutions. Catholics and Jews
created schools, università, hospitals, day
camps, sports leagues, and nursing homes
because they either did not feel comfort-
able in or were actively excluded from
established institutions. As the original
immigrants who needed those institutions
moved away or assimilated into the middle
class and the demography of the neighbor-
hoods around those institutions changed,
the institutions began to serve the new-
comers and their children. In a country
like the United States, which has no fed-
eral agency devoted to immigrant assimi-
lation (unlike many immigrant-receiving
countries), these local institutions and local
government actions are resources that fa-
cilitate immigrant integration and social
mobility.

Catholic elementary and high schools
are an example. Many Catholic immigrants
in the nineteenth century did not feel wel-
come in the Protestant-dominated public
schools. Over time, and especially during
the height of immigration at the turn of
the twentieth century, they founded a net-

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work of Catholic schools. By 1920, there
were 1.8 million students in Catholic
schools nationwide. New York City was
home to many of these Catholic schools,
which educated the children and grand-
children of Irish, Italian, and Polish im-
migrants. At their peak enrollment in the
1960S, the Catholic schools had already
begun to enroll the African American and
Puerto Rican children whose parents
came to the city seeking the same better
life. As the third-generation whites began
to leave the city or chose other forms of
formazione scolastica, the Catholic schools began to
attract the children of the new immi-
grants coming to New York from all over
the globe. Today, the Archdioceses of
New York and Brooklyn enroll more than
100,000 children, the majority nonwhite,
and at least a quarter of whom are not
Catholic, but whose parents scrape to-
gether the average $3,500 a year in tuition
for a better education than they believe
the local public schools can provide.

Most children of immigrants attend the
city’s public schools, which came into
being at the height of immigration and
have a long history of serving immigrant
children. One part of the mission of the
public schools has been to “create” Amer-
ican citizens. These schools currently
serve over a million children, with about
150,000 classi½ed as English-language
learners. The schools translate basic infor-
mazione, including report cards for parents,
into nine languages: Arabic, Bengali,
Chinese, French, Haitian-Creole, Korean,
Russian, Spanish, and Urdu. This covers
Di 95 percent of the city’s families, E
for the remainder there is a phone trans-
lation service that allows school personnel
to speak to parents in 109 languages,
including Malagasy, Khmer, Serbian,
Gujurati, and even Gaelic and Yiddish.

After graduation, many of these young
people enroll in the City University of
New York (cuny), which is not only the

largest urban university in the United
States but one of the largest concentrations
of ½rst- and second-generation immigrants
in any institution in the country. The ½rst
of its colleges, City College, is widely re-
membered for having provided a free
university education to many second-
generation Jewish immigrants who were
excluded from Ivy League institutions be-
cause of quotas and anti-Semitism. Today,
cuny enrolls 217,000 degree-credit stu-
dents who trace their ancestries to 205
countries and speak 189 languages; 43
percent of these students are themselves
immigrants, and the vast majority are either
½rst- or second-generation Americans.

The civil rights movement and the urban
riots of the 1960s also led to the develop-
ment of institutions speci½cally aimed at
non-whites: museums celebrating African
American history, public colleges designed
for and located in Puerto Rican and African
American communities, and youth pro-
grams to socialize young people away from
crime and toward a better life. As non-
bianchi, many of the city’s Latino, black,
and Asian newcomers can take advantage
of these institutions as well. Hostos Com-
munity College, founded in 1968 to meet
the demands of Puerto Rican activists for
an institution of higher education in the
South Bronx, now enrolls Dominicans as
its largest demographic group. Medgar
Evers College, founded in 1970 in the pre-
dominantly African American community
of Bedford Stuyvesant after pressure from
community organizations, including the
naacp, now enrolls students from all over
the world, and has thriving clubs for Afri-
can, Latin American, and Haitian students.
New York’s local government has also
generally taken a ½rm pro-immigrant stand
–a sharp contrast to many local govern-
ments elsewhere in the country. While
Arizona and Alabama have passed laws
designed to prevent undocumented peo-
ple from getting public services, and to

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142 (3) Estate 2013

Immigrants
In
New York
Città

identify, arrest, and deport them, the New
York City Mayor’s Of½ce of Immigrant
Affairs has given advice to undocumented
immigrants about the city services they
have a right to receive. The website of the
of½ce features the mayor’s Executive
Orders 34 E 31 guaranteeing “privacy”
to immigrants asking for city services and
ordering city workers to protect the con-
½dentiality of any immigration-status
information they learn about people.

È interessante notare, the other continuous gate-
ways have largely followed New York in
bucking the anti-immigrant trend among
American localities. In 2011, Chicago Mayor
Rahm Emanuel established an Of½ce of
New Americans, similar to the Immigrant
Affairs Of½ce in New York, and in 2012,
he unveiled the “Chicago New Americans
Plan,” a set of policy initiatives whose
goal is to make Chicago “the most immi-
grant friendly city in the nation.”8 San
Francesco, long known for its immigrant-
friendly policies, is also a “sanctuary city”
in which local authorities generally limit
their cooperation with federal immigra-
tion of½cials.

While thirty-one states have passed some
sort of law requiring that government busi-
ness be conducted in English, New York
is doing a great deal to accommodate the
one-half of New Yorkers who speak a lan-
guage other than English at home, anche
as the 1.8 million people who have limited
English pro½ciency. In 2008, the mayor
ordered every city agency that has direct
contact with New Yorkers to develop a pol-
icy to ensure communication with people
who do not speak English. All essential
public documents are now translated into
the most commonly spoken languages–
Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Italian,
and French Creole–and a phone transla-
tion service is available from the city for
these and other far less common languages.
In some cases, post-1965 immigrants have
also bene½ted from direct family or other

connections with earlier immigrant com-
munities. In New York City’s West Indian
and Chinese communities, Per esempio, IL
earliest post-1965 immigrants were some-
times connected to the smaller but sub-
stantial coethnic communities of pre-1924
immigrants.9 In other cases, the connec-
tions are institutional. While many of the
approximately 300,000 Jews from the
former Soviet Union who settled in New
York after 1980 were probably related to
the descendants of pre-1924 immigrants,
few were aware of speci½c connections.
Almost all, Tuttavia, bene½ted from reset-
tlement programs, English language and
job training programs, educational support,
as well as ½nancial assistance from com-
munity-based social service organizations
run by their co-religionists.10

The origins of this dense Jewish social
service infrastructure can be traced to
efforts by the more assimilated German
Jews to aid Eastern European newcomers
at the end of the nineteenth century. Over
time, these organizations were taken over
by the Eastern Europeans, who would later
turn their attention to aiding Holocaust-
era refugees and still later to the “new”
immigrants from the former Soviet
Union.11 While the Jewish social service
infrastructure in New York is particularly
dense, similar church and social service–
based organizations also made connections
between older and newer waves of Polish
and Greek immigrants.

Even new immigrant groups with no con-
nection to earlier communities may bene-
½t from the legacies of previous migrants.
Older groups may serve as “proximal
hosts” for newer ones.12 Dominican, Mexi-
can, and Ecuadoran migrants often initially
moved into Puerto Rican neighborhoods,
where they bene½ted from services avail-
able in Spanish. Puerto Rican civil rights,
social service, and cultural organizations
reached out to serve these immigrants and
over time often transformed themselves

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into pan-Latino organizations with a
broadly “Hispanic” agenda. Allo stesso modo, Afri-
can American civil rights and social service
groups often found themselves in the
“immigrant aid” business as the commu-
nities they served became home to growing
numbers of (usually black) immigrants.
Elected of½cials and labor union leaders
who had come to power representing one
group also frequently found themselves
reaching out to newcomers–a strategy
that in the New York context made more
sense than an anti-immigrant stance.13 We
doubt that organizations like the Henry
Street Settlement or the Educational Alli-
ance, established for earlier generations of
newcomers, drew Asian and Latino new-
comers to the Lower East Side. Yet the fact
that such local groups exist does bene½t
the children of immigrants with services
largely absent in “new” immigrant desti-
nazioni.

Ovviamente, relations between newer and
older groups rarely run smoothly in the
crowded, competitive city. Established
groups seldom simply put out the welcome
mat for newcomers. Ethnic succession
struggles have been fought in New York’s
neighborhoods, industries, labor unions,
churches, in local politics, and on the
streets since at least the 1840s. Sometimes
reasonable accommodations are reached;
other times things get ugly (remember
West Side Story). Newcomers often grow
impatient with their proximal hosts, E
old-timers can bitterly resent what they
see as a “take over” of “their” turf. When
the established groups are native African
Americans and Puerto Ricans, as has often
been the case in recent years, rivalries can
be particularly bitter, because they add to
the perception that the native minorities
are, once again, being surpassed by new
immigrants, albeit now generally black and
Latino ones.

You can hear these resentments in mut-
terings on cuny campuses such as Hostos

and Medgar Evers, or when East Harlem’s
Museo del Barrio shifts its focus from
speci½cally Puerto Rican to broadly Latin
American culture. You could see it clearly
In 2012, when veteran congressman Charles
Rangel, whose Harlem seat has been rep-
resented by an African American since 1945,
came within a few hundred votes of losing
his seat to a Dominican immigrant. Ancora,
if New York seems perennially beset by
small ethnic struggles, its diversity of
groups, its complex quilt of overlapping
interests and alliances, and the broad ac-
ceptance of the idea that ethnic succession,
if not always pleasant, is both legitimate
and inevitable have generally prevented
city-engul½ng racial or ethnic conflagra-
zioni.

Perhaps even more important than the
actual terrain of competition and cooper-
ation between groups is how immigration
is understood and talked about. In New
York, the discussion of immigrant incor-
poration often begins with reference to
earlier immigrants. Many New York whites
(and a sizable portion of the city’s African
Americans who are of Caribbean origin14)
see themselves as members of ethnic groups
and the descendants of immigrants. Questo
is not just because a larger portion of
local whites (and blacks) are descendants
of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century immigrants. It is also because New
York’s traditions, neighborhoods, and eth-
nically concentrated labor force15 encour-
age them to see themselves that way.
While cousins who crossed the Hudson
River may have begun to regard themselves
as “un-hyphenated” whites, those who
remained in New York often had reason
to continue to de½ne themselves in ethnic
terms–even three, four, or ½ve generations
past Ellis Island.

The importance of immigration in con-

temporary New York City is seen not only
in the lives of the immigrants themselves,

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142 (3) Estate 2013

Immigrants
In
New York
Città

but also in those of their American-born
children, the “second generation.” When
we ask what sort of New Yorkers the new-
comers will be–and what sort of New York
they are creating–we often must look to
this second generation for answers. By
2009, this American-born second genera-
tion constituted approximately 22 per cento
of the city’s population and 24 percent of
the young adult (aged 18 A 32) population.
Another 11 percent of this age group be-
longs to what Rubén Rumbaut has termed
the “1.5 generation”: those who were born
abroad but arrived as children and came
of age in the United States. Another 23 per-
cent migrated as young adults.16 Together,
these groups make up more than half of
all young adult New Yorkers, and they far
outnumber the children of white natives,
the group many Americans still think of
as the “mainstream.”

The growth of this population is made
all the more important by the aging of the
native population and the impending
retirement of the large baby boom cohort.
For better or worse, the children of immi-
grants will play an expanding role in the
city’s life in the coming decades. In an effort
to understand the second generation and
the challenges it faces, we (along with our
colleague John H. Mollenkopf ) undertook
a study of young adults whose parents are
immigrants from around the globe. IL
“Immigrant Second Generation in Met-
ropolitan New York” project surveyed
Di 2,000 young adults of Chinese,
Dominican, Russian-Jewish, South Amer-
ican (Colombian, Ecuadoran, and Peru-
vian), and West Indian immigrant par-
entage. For comparative purposes, we also
surveyed young adult New Yorkers of
native black and native white parentage
as well as mainland-born Puerto Ricans.
The survey was supplemented with life
history interviews with about 10 per cento
of the respondents and a series of linked
ethnographic projects.17

The study revealed that by most mea-
sures, these young people are rapidly
“assimilating” into American society.
Language assimilation is particularly dra-
matic, a ½nding that is consistent with
research in the rest of the country.18 Nor
is there much reason to worry about
divided loyalties. Few children of immi-
grants stay deeply connected to their par-
ents’ homelands. In general, the young
people we spoke to tended to see them-
selves as Americans and “New Yorkers,"
albeit ethnic ones. They are more likely
than other New York residents their age to
have grown up in the city (many “native”
young adult New Yorkers are, in fact,
newcomers from other parts of the United
States), and they often identify strongly
with the city’s culture and institutions.

Yet there are also reasons to be con-
cerned about the second generation’s
future. Racial differences among the
groups we studied are marked, if some-
what less so than among the children of
natives. By most measures of economic
and educational achievement, the black
and Latino children of immigrants, while
generally better off than black and Latino
natives, still lag well behind Asians and
bianchi. Many of the young people report
experiencing discrimination in daily life.
For dark-skinned children of immigrants,
negative encounters with the police are
common and a source of considerable frus-
tration and alienation.19 Perhaps because
of their youth, the second generation also
has yet to enter the city’s political leader-
ship proportionate to their numbers,
although the recent emergence of several
high-visibility second-generation politi-
cians–congresswoman Yvette Clarke,
city controller John Liu, and New York’s
½rst Asian American congressperson,
Grace Meng, prominent among them–
suggests that this may be changing.

Finalmente, it is worth noting that as New
York’s second generation sets the tone for

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the city’s urban culture, they demonstrated
a fluid and nuanced approach to the old-
est and most vexing of American social
divides: race. Much of today’s second gen-
eration does not ½t easily into American
racial boxes and categories. Racism con-
tinues to tragically circumscribe many
people’s life chances, but racial boundaries
are blurring as the categories become more
complicated. And young people–both the
second generation and those who grow
up with them–seem more comfortable
with that fact than their elders. In a world
where almost everyone’s family is from
somewhere else, ethnicity is a source of
everyday banter. One 18-year-old told us
about how often people tried to guess her
identity: “I have been asked if I am
Egyptian, Cuban, Greek, Pakistani. I say
NO, I am Peruvian, Spanish. I like my cul-
ture and I am proud to be Peruvian, IL
Incas and all that.” This is not a world of
balkanized groups huddled within their
own enclaves, but rather of hybrids and
fluid exchanges across group boundaries.
Most of our respondents took it for granted
that having friendships with people from
a variety of backgrounds is a good thing,
that it makes one a better, more fully
developed person.

Even for those de½ned as “black,” race
is not the monolithic barrier it was in the
mid-twentieth century. Immigrants and
their children who are de½ned as black
often do face serious racial barriers. Infatti,
many of the victims in the city’s most well-
known incidents of racial violence–the
attacks in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst,
Per esempio, or the police shooting of street
vendor Amadou Diallo–were in fact
immigrants. Allo stesso tempo, members
of the second generation have bene½ted
from the institutions, political strategies,
and notions of rights developed as a legacy
of the civil rights movement. Ironically,
af½rmative action and other policies de-
signed to redress long-standing American

racial inequities often work better for
immigrants and their children than they
do for the native minorities for whom they
were designed.20 Thus, the fact that chil-
dren of immigrants have come to be cate-
gorized as members of native “minority
groups” does not mean their experience
has been the same as that of the native
minorities. They clearly do suffer much
of the same prejudice and discrimination,
but they do not inherit the scars and hand-
icaps of a long history of racial exclusion.
In post–civil rights America, the heri-
tage of the African American struggle for
racial justice has given young people new
strategies, vocabularies, and resources
for upward mobility.21 While the African
American experience of discrimination has
been harsher than that of other groups,
the African American civil rights struggle
has also provided a heroic model for
opposing discrimination. Today’s children
of immigrants are quick to take up this
modello. While their immigrant parents are
often willing to accept unfair treatment,
the second generation children are quick
to challenge discrimination whenever
they see it. In the post–civil rights era,
this is one of the ways in which they are
becoming American.

They also have the advantage of becom-
ing American in New York City, Dove
they can feel included even if they experi-
ence discrimination. In this hyper-diverse
mondo, assimilation (if that is the right
word) seems to happen faster and with
less angst than in the past. The children of
European immigrants who arrived at the
beginning of the twentieth century often
felt forced to choose between their parents’
ways and those of American society. Many
were embarrassed when their parents could
not speak English and even changed their
names to ½t in. As the Italian American
educator Leonard Covello later recalled,
“We were becoming American by learn-
ing how to be ashamed of our parents.”22

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142 (3) Estate 2013

Immigrants
In
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Città

By contrast, today’s second generation
is far more at ease with both their Ameri-
can and ethnic identities. One woman told
us that learning Russian from her parents
has been bene½cial for her because “there’s
a certain richness that comes along with
having another culture to fall back on.
People are always intrigued. They ask what
does it mean to be Russian and you feel a
little special to explain and it adds color
to you.” Far from being “torn between
two worlds,” the children of immigrants
increasingly make use of the second gen-
eration’s natural advantage: the ability to
combine the best of their parents’ culture
with the best that America has to offer.
Twenty-three-year-old Maria said that
being both American and Colombian was
“the best of two worlds. Like being able
to keep and appreciate those things in my
culture that I enjoy and that I think are
beautiful, E, at the same time, being
able to change those things which I think
are bad.”

The intergenerational progress and rapid

assimilation of these young people is often
missed in immigration debates that are
focused only on recent arrivals. A more
long-term view, one that takes into account
the progress of the second generation,
would do much to inform local and na-
tional conversations about immigration.
Yet, lest we draw too optimistic a portrait
about the incorporation of the new second-
generation New Yorkers, a few notes of
caution are in order.

The ½rst is economic. Our study was
conducted during very good economic
times–indeed, toward the end of what
era, for the city, a remarkable period of
economic growth. Although we do not
know how our respondents fared in the
great recession, it is worth noting that
many of the most successful were con-
centrated in industries that were partic-
ularly hard hit: high tech, construction,

and ½nance. Upwardly mobile members
of the second generation have fewer fa-
milial resources to fall back on than do
their native white counterparts. And what
of the very large cohort of second-gener-
ation New Yorkers who had the historical
misfortune to enter the labor force just
when the recession hit? Will second-
generation resilience help them reinvent
themselves in a changing economy? Or
will they ½nd themselves locked out of
opportunities by better-established groups,
now anxious to safeguard their own posi-
tion in leaner and meaner times?

Even after the present downturn passes,
the need to integrate such a large number
of young people from immigrant back-
grounds into a twenty-½rst-century labor
force presents profound challenges for the
city’s public educational systems. Nothing
could be more vital to the city’s future
than the successful incorporation of the
children of immigrants; così, investment
in education is crucial. Yet the question
of how to pay for this investment during
a time of austerity and increased popular
reluctance to pay for public goods repre-
sents a serious challenge.

There is also the question of emerging
differences among various second-gener-
ation groups, and between second gener-
ation and native minority groups, in the
degree to which they have been able to
successfully make use of the educational
system. Moves toward greater diversity
and increased choice in public education
at all levels have, on the one hand, guar-
anteed that some students from modest
backgrounds have access to an excellent
formazione scolastica. Yet they have also deepened
inequalities within the system.23

The children of Asian and former Soviet
immigrants have done extremely well–
better by most measures than the children
of native whites. About 12 percent of the
city’s population, Asians are now in the
majority at the city’s most competitive

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public high schools. The declining num-
bers of native black and Latino students
at these elite high schools and the more
highly regarded cuny campuses are alarm-
ing. Even among blacks and Latinos, real
cleavages are emerging–although the
use of racial terms like black and Latino
tends to obscure this fact. The children of
some Latino immigrant groups (notably
South Americans) are doing better than
others, and the children of all immigrant
groups, including blacks from Africa and
the West Indies, are doing better than na-
tive African Americans and Puerto Ricans.
We urgently need new research to under-
stand the different rates of educational
success. Inoltre, we should not let the
success of large parts of New York’s sec-
ond generation mask the continuing fail-
ure of the city’s institutions to address the
poverty and social isolation of parts of
the native minority population. One ironic
effect of an increasingly choice-based
school system is that African Americans
remain highly segregated in the city’s
schools even while some traditionally
black residential areas including Harlem
and Bedford Stuyvesant have been inte-
grated by gentri½cation. For all the talk of
diversity in the city’s best high schools,
racial integration has all but disappeared
from the school reform agenda. Many of
the city’s most celebrated charter schools
take their nearly all-black student bodies
for granted, even while the growing num-
ber of whites and Asians now living within
their catchment areas travel to schools in
other parts of the city.

Although it is rarely acknowledged, IL
Bloomberg administration’s school reform
efforts have pursued nearly opposite strate-
gies when it comes to educating different
groups. Among whites (now returning to
the system in signi½cant numbers), Asians,
and better-off Latino immigrants, IL
neighborhood school is becoming a thing
of the past. High school students are ex-

pected to take advantage of New York’s
extensive mass transit system to avail
themselves of the best opportunities the
huge city has to offer. African Americans
and poorer Latinos, Tuttavia, are still
largely educated in neighborhood schools
and local charter schools, which sidestep
competitive admissions processes and
discourage students from venturing out
into the big, multicultural city. The most
competitive of the city’s public schools,
usually ranked among the nation’s best,
celebrate the astounding diversity of
their talented students. Yet this “diversity”
obscures the virtual disappearance of native
African Americans from these schools.

Finalmente, we should note the effects of legal
status. While New York City has never had
as large a concentration of undocumented
immigrants as communities closer to the
southern border, many parents of our
respondents lacked legal status for part of
the time while their children were grow-
ing up. Infatti, it was not uncommon for
second-generation New Yorkers to grow
up in “mixed status” households, Quale
include undocumented immigrants, legal
permanent residents, naturalized citizens,
and birthright citizens. Up until the mid-
1990S, this diversity of legal status had lit-
tle impact on the children raised in such
households. Deportation was rare and
largely restricted to those with serious
criminal records. And while regularizing
legal status was never easy, opportunities
to do so did exist. Eventually most of those
who wanted to become “legal” were able
to do so.

Since the mid-1990s this has no longer
been the case. The United States has been
engaged in what sociologist Robert Court-
ney Smith calls a “cruel natural experi-
ment.”24 By restricting the opportunities
of long tolerated, if technically illegal,
immigrants to obtain legal status, we
have created a large population of semi-
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101

Immigrants
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Città

who are part of the city economically,
socially, and culturally but not legally or
politically. This is a profoundly troubling
situation for a democratic society. Despite
the strong pro-immigrant stance taken
by city government and the generally
pro-immigrant stance of the population,
the crisis of the undocumented makes clear
that the incorporation of immigrants–
and of the second generation–is a prob-
lem the city cannot solve on its own.

New York City’s attitude toward immi-

grants highlights a conceptual confusion
that marks much of the politics and
scholarship about immigration: namely,
the conflation of racism and nativism.
Racism and nativism are often interrelated,
of course. Attacks on immigrants in the
past and present are often made in racial
terms, and attacks on members of racial
minority groups sometimes emphasize
their alleged foreignness. Ancora, the history
of New York and the other continuing
gateways–which combine a relatively
warm welcome for immigrants with fre-
quent hostility toward African Americans
and other “racial” minorities–reminds
us that nativism and racism are funda-
mentally different ways of thinking even
when their victims are actually the same
people. New York’s proud history of in-
corporating immigrants stands in sharp
contrast to its history of relations with its
“racial” minorities. At various points in
American history, blacks have been sub-
ject to virulent racism, and European im-
migrants were subject to virulent nativism.
Asians and Hispanics were subject to both,
although the degree to which their exclu-
sion and suffering was due to one or the
other is a subject of debate.

Scholars sometimes try to understand
the immigrant experience in racial terms,
and vice versa. Among the New York in-
tellectuals of the 1950s and early 1960s it
was common to assert that while Southern

racism represented a unique and deeply
rooted caste-like form of inequality, mi-
gration to the Northern cities would allow
blacks to follow a “Northern model” of
immigrant-like upward mobility. IL
boldest statement of this position was
probably Irving Kristol’s 1966 New York
Times essay, “The Negro Today is Like the
Immigrant of Yesterday.”25 Nathan Glazer
and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s classic
Beyond the Melting Pot (1963) provides a
more nuanced example of the application,
with some caveats, of the “immigrant”
model to African Americans.26

Recentemente, observers have been more
likely to turn the analogy around. IL
growing literature on the construction of
“whiteness” among nineteenth-century
European immigrants reminds us of both
the intensity and the racial–that is to say,
pseudo-biological–basis of hostility to-
ward Celtic as well as Southern and Eastern
European immigrants. For these writers,
whiteness was a status achieved as the out-
come of social and political struggles.27
Allo stesso modo, other groups–Mexican Amer-
icans most prominent among them–are
increasingly seen as having been “racial-
ized”: considered over time to be a
“racial” minority analogous to African
Americans.28

Whatever their historical connections,
it probably makes more sense to see
racism and nativism as distinct forces in
contemporary life. As non-whites, today’s
immigrants experience some of the best
and the worst legacies of American history
and intergroup relations. In today’s con-
tinuing destination cities, and particularly
in New York City, nativism, while present,
is not particularly strong compared to
other parts of the country. The vitality of
the city as a global crossroads and the
diversity of its inhabitants are generally
understood as positive, and this ideology
affects the politics, policies, and discourse
about immigration in the city.29 Thus,

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nonwhite immigrants enter a city that is
relatively welcoming and hospitable to
immigrants qua immigrants, yet at the
same time not very welcoming to them
qua “non-whites.”

New York City does not provide immu-
nity to American racism. Its demography
and history have entrenched a great deal
of racial inequality that shapes the expe-
riences of both natives and new immi-
grants. Infatti, an overview of past and
present conditions points out how com-
pletely Irving Kristol got it wrong: IL
native black, and arguably the Puerto
Rican, experience has been profoundly
unlike that of immigrants. Today, nonostante
substantial post–civil rights era progress,
the African American and native Puerto
Rican communities in the city are highly
segregated from whites, with substandard
schools, high crime rates, aggressive po-
licing, and high rates of imprisonment,
unemployment, and health inequality.

Recent research on residential segrega-
tion shows these conflicting trends. Look-
ing at the twenty most diverse metropol-
itan areas in the United States, sociologists
John Logan and Charles Zhang show that
two important trends characterize the
pattern of racial distribution across neigh-
borhoods. One trend is the stubbornly
persistent hyper-segregation of blacks from
whites in many cities. The other trend is the
new growth of stably integrated “global”
neighborhoods: census tracts where all
four major racial ethnic groups–blacks,
bianchi, Hispanics, and Asians–live side
by side. New York, paradoxically, is at the
forefront of both these trends.30 Indeed,
the level of black/white segregation in the
city has barely changed since 1980. Yet
about a third of whites (35 per cento) live in
these new global neighborhoods, along
con 32 percent of Asians, 22 percent of
blacks, E 28 percent of Hispanics.

On the one hand, Logan and Zhang con-
clude that these neighborhoods show that

stable integration is possible. Hispanics
and Asians have moved into previously
all-white neighborhoods without pro-
voking white flight, and they have been
followed by African Americans. On the
other hand, whites living in such “diverse”
neighborhoods can easily look around and
conclude that they live in a postracial,
cosmopolitan community; and to an ex-
tent, this is true. Yet it can also obscure
the isolation and segregation of a large
part of the poor and particularly the native
African American community, the majority
of whom continue to live in segregated
census tracts.

In light of these ongoing problems,
which affect immigrants of color as well
as many native African Americans, some
will no doubt see our insistence on the
distinction between nativism and racism
as a matter of semantics. Yet this distinc-
tion matters for the future integration of
nonwhite immigrants and their descen-
dants. Race, by de½nition, is immutable.
Exclusion based on race creates a perma-
nent (or at least very long-lasting) bound-
ary, giving rise to reactive ethnicity and
societal cleavages. Nativism could have
the same result, but it does not have to.
Even during peak periods of nativist sen-
timent, anti-immigrant attitudes in our
nation of immigrants are always more
ambivalent than racist ones.

The current upsurge of nativism under-
lines the degree to which the local context
of reception counts. In the new immi-
grant destinations, the combination of very
rapid in-migration and a concentration of
unskilled undocumented immigrants has
created a potent stew of anti-immigrant
feeling and behavior.31 Immigrants now
face restrictive local laws that sanction
landlords who rent to undocumented peo-
ple, target day laborers gathering in pub-
lic places, and authorize police to inquire
about legal status and share that informa-
tion with federal authorities. These laws

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103

Immigrants
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also restrict undocumented immigrants
from any local aid or services.32 In 2010,
state legislatures around the country con-
sidered 1,400 legislative bills targeting
immigration, passing 208 of them.33

In the continuous destinations, immi-
grants and their children are less affected
by these nativist developments, at least
so far. It is almost impossible to imagine
such negative legislation being enacted in
New York, or other contemporary and con-
tinuing gateway cities where the majority
of immigrants live (cities such as similarly
pro-immigrant San Francisco and Chica-
go). Whether the tolerance and accept-
ance that immigrants and their children

experience in New York City will spread
to the rest of the country, or the intoler-
ance and exclusion that characterizes
other parts of the country will spread to
places like New York, is an open question.
Yet as America comes to grips with the
increased diversity of its population, it is
important to pay attention to those places
where the tradition of managing diversity
runs deep. New York City’s history of suc-
cessful immigrant integration is a resource
for immigrants who settle there. Forse
it could also serve as a resource or model
for new destinations struggling with the
complexities of diversity.

endnotes
* Contributor Biographies: MARY C. WATERS, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2006, È
the M. E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Her publications include
Coming of Age in America: The Transition to Adulthood in the Twenty-First Century (edited with
Patrick J. Carr, Maria J. Kefalas, and Jennifer Holdaway, 2011), The Next Generation: Immigrant
Youth in a Comparative Perspective (edited with Richard Alba, 2011), and The New Americans:
A Guide to Immigration since 1965 (edited with Reed Ueda, 2007).
PHILIP KASINITZ is Professor of Sociology in both the Graduate Center and Hunter College
at the City University of New York. His publications include Inheriting the City: The Children
of Immigrants Come of Age (with Mary C. Waters, John H. Mollenkopf, and Jennifer Holdaway,
2008), Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation (edited with John H.
Mollenkopf and Mary C. Waters, 2004), and The Handbook of International Migration: IL
American Experience (edited with Charles Hirschman and Josh DeWind, 1999).

1 Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans,
Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963; Cambridge, Massa.: con la stampa, 1970), xiii.
2 Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Genera-

zione (Berkeley: Stampa dell'Università della California, 2001).

3 Audrey Singer, “Twenty-First Century Gateways: An Introduction,” in Twenty-First Century
Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America, ed. Audrey Singer, Susan W. Hardwick,
and Caroline B. Brettell (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 3–21.

4 Nancy Foner and Roger Waldinger, “New York and Los Angeles as Immigrant Destinations,
Contrasts and Convergence,” in New York and Los Angeles: The Uncertain Future, ed. David
Halle and Andrew A. Beveridge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

5 Douglas S. Massey, ed., New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigra-
zione (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010); Helen Marrow, New Destination Dreaming:
Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2011); Patrick J. Carr, Daniel T. Lichter, and Maria J. Kefalas, “Can Immigration
Save Small-Town America? Hispanic Boomtowns and the Uneasy Path to Renewal,” The
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 641 (2012): 38; and Daniel T.
Lichter, “Immigration and the New Racial Diversity in Rural America,” Rural Sociology 77 (1)
(2012): 3–35.

104

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6 Audrey Singer, “Twenty-First Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban Amer-
ica,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers,
April 18, 2007.

7 Steven A. Camarota, “Immigrants in the United States: A Pro½le of America’s Foreign-Born
Population” (New York: Center for Migration Studies, agosto 2012). Note that these esti-
mates are based on the March 2011 Current Population Survey. This national survey does
not have a suf½cient sample size to make estimates by city.

8 “Mayor Emanuel Unveils First-Ever Chicago New Americans Plan,” City of Chicago Press
Release, Dicembre 4, 2012, http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/mayor/provdrs/
of½ce_of_new_americans/news/2012/dec/mayor_emanuel_unveils½rst-everchicago
newamericansplan.html.

9 See Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1992); Peter Kwong, Chinatown, N.Y.: Labor and Politics, 1930–1950,
rev. ed. (New York: The New Press, 2000).

10 Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida and Philip Kasinitz, “The Next Generation: Russian Jewish Young

Adults in Contemporary New York,” Contemporary Jewry 25 (2005): 193–225.

11 Many of these organizations also provide services for non-Jews, including immigrants from

other groups and members of native minority groups.

12 David Mittelberg and Mary C. Waters, “The Process of Ethnogenesis among Haitian and
Israeli Immigrants in the United States,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 15 (3) (1992): 412–435.
13 See Amy Foerster, “‘Isn’t Anybody Here from Alabama?’: Solidarity and Struggle in a
‘Mighty, Mighty Union,’” and Nicole P. Marwell, “Ethnic and Postethnic Politics in New
York City: The Dominican Second Generation,” both in Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies
of the New Second Generation, ed. Philip Kasinitz, John H. Mollenkopf, and Mary C. Waters
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004).

14 Kasinitz, Caribbean New York; and Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant
Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, Massa., and New York: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard
and Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).

15 See Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City?: African-Americans and New Immigrants in Post-
industrial New York (Cambridge, Massa.: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 1996); and Stanley Lieberson
and Mary C. Waters, From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988).

16 Rubén Rumbaut, “Ages, Life Stages, and Generational Cohorts: Decomposing the Immigrant
First and Second Generations in the United States,” International Migration Review 38 (3)
(2004): 1160–1205.

17 For details on the study, see Philip Kasinitz, John H. Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Jen-
nifer Holdaway, Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age (Cambridge, Massa.:
Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 2008).

18 Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies; and Van C. Tran, “English Gain vs. Spanish Loss? Language
Assimilation Among Second-Generation Latinos in Young Adulthood,” Social Forces 89 (1)
(2010): 257–284.

19 Mary C. Waters and Philip Kasinitz, “Discrimination, Race Relations, and the Second Gen-

eration,” Social Research 77 (1) (2010): 101–132.

20 See John David Skrentny, ed., Color Lines: Af½rmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Op-
tions for America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), in particular the essay by
Hugh Davis Graham, “Af½rmative Action for Immigrants?: The Unintended Consequences
of Reform.”

Mary C.
Waters
& Philip
Kasinitz

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142 (3) Estate 2013

105

Immigrants
In
New York
Città

21 Douglas S. Massey, Margarita Mooney, Kimberly C. Torres, and Camille Z. Charles, "Nero
Immigrants and Black Natives Attending Selective Colleges and Universities in the United
States,” American Journal of Education 113 (2007): 243–271.

22 Irvin L. Child, Italian or American? The Second Generation in Conflict (1943; New York: Russell

and Russell, 1970).

23 Sean P. Corcoran, “How New York Students Have Fared Under High School Choice: A Bird’s

Eye View,” unpublished paper, New York University, 2011.

24 Robert Courtney Smith, “Mexicans: Civic Engagement, Education, and Progress Achieved
and Inhibited,” in One Out of Three: Immigrant New York in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Nancy
Foner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

25 Irving Kristol, “The Negro Today is Like the Immigrant of Yesterday," Il New York Times

Magazine, settembre 11, 1966.

26 È interessante notare, by 1970, events had convinced Glazer and Moynihan that this analogy was in-
creasingly problematic, as the long essay that introduces their book’s second edition makes
clear.

27 See David R. Roedinger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Noel Igantief, How the Irish Became White (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1995); and Matthew Jacobson and Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: Euro-
pean Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Massa.: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 1998).
However insightful and provocative this literature has been, historians increasingly view its
central claims as overstated. While nineteenth-century eugenics and ideas about a hierarchy
of races no doubt played a role in reception of European immigrants, no one would argue
that the racism these immigrants experienced was remotely close to the virulent forms of
racism experienced by blacks. The best empirical investigation of this difference remains
Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants since 1880 (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1980). The whiteness literature may also be marred by a certain
literal-mindedness in its reading of nineteenth-century materials, which date from a time
when the word race was often used more broadly than it is today.

28 See George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano
Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Edward E. Telles
and Vilma Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race (Nuovo
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008).

29 Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration (Nuovo paradiso,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000); and Nancy Foner, “How Exceptional is New York?
Migration and Multiculturalism in the Empire City,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6) (Novem-
ber 2007): 999–1023.

30 John R. Logan and Charles Zhang, “Global Neighborhoods: New Pathways to Diversity and

Separation,” American Journal of Sociology 115 (4) (Gennaio 2010): 1069–1109.

31 Mary C. Waters and Tomás Jiménez, “Assessing Immigrant Assimilation: New Empirical

and Theoretical Challenges,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 105–125.

32 Daniel Hopkins, “Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local

Opposition,” American Political Science Review 104 (1): 40–60.

33 Brooke Meyer, Joy Segreto, April Carter, and Ann Morse, “2011 Immigration-Related Laws
and Resolutions in the States” (Denver and Washington, D.C.: National Conference of State
Legislatures, Dicembre 2011), http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/immig/state-immigration
-legislation-report-dec-2011.aspx.

106

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