In a New Land

A Comparative View of Immigration

Nancy Foner

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780814727966
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title!

According to the 2000 census, more than 10% of U.S. residents were foreign born; together with their American-born children, this group constitutes one fifth of the nation's population. What does this mass immigration mean for America? Leading immigration studies scholar, Nancy Foner, answers this question in her study of comparative immigration. Drawing on the rich history of American immigrants and current statistical and ethnographic data, In a New Land compares today’s new immigrants with the past influxes of Europeans to the United States and across cities and regions within the United States. Foner looks at immigration across nation-states, and over different periods of time, offering a comprehensive assessment and analysis.

This original approach to the study of recent U.S. immigration focuses on race and ethnicity, gender, and transnational connections. Centering her analysis on the groups that have come through and significantly shaped New York City, Foner compares today’s Latin American, Asian, and Caribbean newcomers with eastern and southern European immigrants a century ago and with immigrants in other major U.S. cities. Looking beyond the United States, Foner compares West Indian immigrants in New York with those in London. And, more generally, the book views the process of immigrants' integration in New York against other recent immigrant destinations in Europe.

Drawing on a wealth of historical and contemporary research, and written in a clear and lively style, In a New Land provides fresh insights into the dynamics of immigration today and the implications for where we are headed in the future.

PART I
Comparisons Across Time
Immigrants in New York’s Two Great Waves

1
The Social Construction of Race in Two Immigrant Eras

The racial difference between today’s nonwhite immigrant New Yorkers and their white European predecessors seems like a basic—and obvious—fact. Yet much is not obvious about racial matters then and now. At the turn of the twentieth century, when nearly all New York City residents were of European descent, recently arrived Jewish and Italian immigrants were seen as racially distinct from and inferior to those of Anglo-Saxon or Nordic stock. Today, although immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean are often referred to as nonwhite or people of color, these blanket terms oversimplify the nature and impact of race among them.

The comparison of past and present brings out, in an especially dramatic way, how race has been socially constructed among immigrants in different eras. And it raises questions about the way conceptions of race have changed, and are likely to continue to change, as a result of immigration. The focus in this chapter, as in the three that follow, is on what I have called New York’s two great waves of immigration: between 1880 and 1920, close to a million and a half immigrants, mostly Jews and Italians, arrived and settled in the city and, since the late 1960s, more than two and a half million immigrants—mainly from Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America—have moved to New York City.

Race is a highly problematic—and highly charged—concept, partly because there are so many scholarly definitions of the term, partly because it has taken on particular meanings in popular discourse that differ from academic understandings, and partly because of a concern that using the term could be taken as an endorsement or legitimation of the very inequalities that it describes. Although there is no one agreed-upon definition of “race,” a definition recently offered by George Fredrickson would, I think, find broad acceptance: race refers to “the belief that socially significant differences between human groups or communities that differ in visible physical characteristics or putative ancestry are innate and unchangeable.”¹

Racial differences may seem permanent and immutable—as if they are natural and inevitable—but in fact race is a changeable perception. Indeed, the awesome power of race is related to its ability to pass as a feature of the natural landscape. Races are not fixed biological categories, and dividing human populations into “races,” as physical anthropologists have shown, has no basis in genetics. Regardless of its dubious roots in biology, however, race is “real because, to paraphrase W. I. Thomas, people act as though it is real and thus it has become real in its social consequences.”² Race, in short, is a social and cultural construction, and what is important is how physical characteristics and/or putative ancestry are interpreted within particular social contexts and are used to define categories of people as inferior or superior. Race, as Fredrickson notes, is commonly used as a criterion to justify a dominant and privileged position—“accompanied by the notion that ‘we’ are superior to ‘them’ and need to be protected from real or imagined threats to our privileged group position that might arise if ‘they’ were to gain in resources and rights. Here we have ‘racism’ in the full and unambiguous sense of the term.”³ As the historian Gary Okihiro puts it, race is a “conjuring,” but it “acquires a searing reality through the weight of history, through the nation’s laws and institutions, through popular culture and everyday practices.”⁴

In discussing the way race is—and has been—constructed in New York, it may be helpful to think in terms of a series of questions raised by sociologists Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann in their attempt to clarify conceptual issues in the study of race, ethnicity, and immigration.⁵ Which groups, they ask, have the freedom to construct themselves? Which groups, and why, find themselves caught in inescapable categories constructed by others? Which groups, and why and how, are moving from one situation to another? How do both our definitions of groups and the groups themselves change when populations are moving to the United States—who gets combined together, who is seen as separate and distinct?

When Jews and Italians Were Inferior Races

It may have become a cliché in academic circles to speak of race as a social construction, but even when racial categories are acknowledged as social constructions that vary across time and place, they have often been used, as Victoria Hattam has recently put it, in transhistorical terms.⁶ Many accounts in the scholarly as well as popular literature speak of “nonwhite” immigrants today in contrast to “white” immigrants in the past as if the term white meant the same thing as it does now. It does not. Race today is basically a color word, but it was not that way in New York a hundred years ago. Then, Jewish and Italian immigrants in New York were seen as racially different from—and inferior to—people with origins in northern and western Europe. They were believed to have distinct biological features, mental abilities, and innate character traits. They looked different to most New Yorkers and were thought to have physical features that set them apart—facial features often noted, for example, in the case of Jews, and “swarthy” skin, in the case of Italians. These stereotypes were used to describe a significant proportion of New Yorkers at the time. Owing to the overwhelming predominance of Russian Jews and Italians in the immigrant flow, they defined what was then thought of as the new immigration. In 1910, Russian and Italian immigrants were almost a fifth of the city’s population; by 1920, with their children, Italian Americans numbered over 800,000 and the Jewish population had soared to over 1.6 million, or, together, about 43 percent of the city’s population.

Did this mean that Jews and Italians were not considered “white”? I had not realized I was getting into a historical minefield when I first wrote about this subject in From Ellis Island to JFK and grappled with the way to describe immigrants who, in many contexts, were seen as white, but, in other contexts, as an inferior kind of white or sometimes even distinguished from whites, who were defined as Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, or northern and western Europeans.⁷ Much of the recent literature on the racial status of early twentieth-century immigrants focuses on this “whiteness” question. Some scholars, like Karen Brodkin, argue that Jews a hundred years ago were not considered fully white; David Roediger and James Barrett suggest the term “inbetween people” as a way to describe Jews’ and Italians’ ambiguous racial status—seen as above African and Asian Americans yet below “white” people; Matthew Jacobson refers to “probationary whites”; and Michael Topp now adds “inconclusively white.”⁸ Others emphasize that southern and eastern European arrivals were, to use Thomas Guglielmo’s phrase, white on arrival—that they suffered from their racial undesirability but also, simultaneously, benefited from their privileged color status as whites. In line with this approach would be a decision to speak of inferior races of whites and hierarchic gradations of white people.⁹ As one historian puts it in his critique of whiteness studies, Americans have had many ways of looking down on people without questioning their whiteness.¹⁰ Clearly, we need fine-grained historical research that explores what terms were employed to describe racial differences among Jews and Italians in New York a century ago and the contexts in which they were used, what “white” actually meant then, and the role of considerations other than race—most significantly, religion—in stigmatizing Jews and Italians as inferior and legitimizing discrimination against them.¹¹

There may be debate about eastern and southern Europeans’ color status—whether, as Guglielmo puts it, they were racial outsiders and color insiders—but it is clear that race in early twentieth-century New York was not the kind of color-coded concept that it is today. And historians would agree that when it came to southern and eastern Europeans, characteristics other than color—believed to be innate and unchangeable—were involved in defining them as separate races. American scholarship, as Matthew Frye Jacobson, writes, “has generally conflated race and color, and so has transported a late twentieth century understanding of ‘difference’ into a period … [when] one might be both white and racially distinct from other whites.”¹²

From the start, Jews and Italians were recognized as whites in terms of legal and political rights. They were allowed to naturalize as U.S. citizens at a time when American naturalization laws only gave “free white persons” or “persons of African nativity or African descent” the right to naturalize, and when the courts repeatedly denied Asian immigrants access to American citizenship because they were not, in Ian Haney Lopez’s phrase, “white by law.”¹³ In fact, Guglielmo points out that, at the turn of the twentieth century, the naturalization application asked immigrants to provide both their race and color and expected different answers for each; Italians were often listed as southern or northern Italians—for race—and white for color.¹⁴ Jews and Italians were allowed to vote in states that restricted the suffrage to whites, and miscegenation laws were never enforced to prevent their marriages to other Europeans.¹⁵

Yet if Italians and Jews were white, at the same time they were also, as Jacobson aptly puts it, viewed as “racially distinct from other whites.” Whereas today, in Jacobson’s words, “we see only subtly varying shades of a mostly undifferentiated whiteness,” a hundred years ago, Americans saw “Celtic, Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon or Mediterranean physiognomies.” Jews and Italians, in Cornell and Hartmann’s formulation, were caught in categories constructed by others, although the emphasis needs to be put on the constraints owing to the way the categories were constructed by others. Most Jewish New Yorkers, after all, chose to identify as Jewish (and had done so in Europe as well); most Italian immigrants eventually came to see themselves as Italian in America, even if town and regional loyalties remained supreme.¹⁶ The problem was being racialized as Italians and Jews—seen as inherently inferior on account of their Italianness or Jewishness and caught in the negative images and connotations associated with these categories.

Far from being on the fringe, full-blown theories about the racial inferiority of eastern Europeans and southern Italians were well within the mainstream of the scientific community at the turn of the twentieth century. Openly propounded by respected scholars, such views were also propagated and given the stamp of approval by public intellectuals and opinion leaders and the press.

The most influential of the books proclaiming a scientific racism was The Passing of the Great Race, written by Madison Grant, a patrician New Yorker and founder of the New York Zoological Society. The book set forth the notion that people of inferior breeding from southern and eastern Europe were overrunning the country, intermarrying, and diminishing the quality of the nation’s superior Nordic stock—and sweeping America toward a “racial abyss.”¹⁷ This theme was picked up by figures of the stature of soon-to-be president Calvin Coolidge, who wrote in a popular magazine in 1921 that “America must be kept American. Biological laws show… that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”¹⁸

Edward A. Ross, one of the most race conscious of American social scientists, was also troubled that newcomers, with their inborn deficiencies, would dilute America’s sturdier Anglo-Saxon stock. He condemned Jews for their inborn love of money, and southern Italians for their volatility, instability, and unreliability. Steerage passengers from Naples “show a distressing frequency of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins, poor features, skew faces, small or knobby crania, and backless heads. Such people lack the power to take rational care of themselves.” Ross spoke of the “dusk of Saracenic or Berber ancestors” showing in the cheeks of Italian immigrant children. “One sees no reason,” he wrote, “why the Italian dusk should not in time quench what of the Celto-Teutonic flush lingers in the cheek of the native American.”¹⁹ Interestingly, in stressing the racial inferiority of southern (as opposed to northern) Italians, Ross, like other early twentieth-century writers, echoed arguments of Italian positivist anthropologists who, in the context of nation-building efforts in Italy and concerns about the destitute and disorganized South, wrote studies “proving” that northern Italians were descended from superior Aryan stock, while southerners were primarily of inferior African blood.²⁰

Articles in the press and popular magazines echoed racial views of this kind. Articles with titles like “Are the Jews an Inferior Race?” (1912) and “Will the Jews Ever Lose Their Racial Identity?” (1911) appeared in the most frequently read periodicals. The “marks of their race,” said Harper’s of Lower East Side Jews, “appear in the formation of the jaw and mouth and in the general facial aspect.”²¹ Jewish racial features, the New York Sun (1893) a...