Immigration, Incorporation and Transnationalism

Elliott Robert Barkan, Elliott Robert Barkan

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351513364
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Sciences sociales
• Categoria: Émigration et immigration

Immigration, Incorporation and Transition is an intriguing collection of articles and essays. It was developed to commemorate the twenty-fi fth anniversary of The Journal of American Ethnic History. Its purpose, like that of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, is to integrate interdisciplinary perspectives and exciting new scholarship on important themes and issues related to immigration and ethnic history.

Part I: Broad Perspectives

1
Then and Now or Then to Now: Immigration to New York in Contemporary and Historical Perspective

NANCY FONER

THE TITLE OF THIS ARTICLE—“Then and Now or Then to Now”— hinges on a conjunction and preposition: “and” and “to.” Two very simple words, but whether we use one word or the other makes a world of difference in how we understand and analyze immigration and the immigrant experience in the United States over time. In what follows I focus on what difference it makes and on the benefits and drawbacks of both the “and” and “to” approaches. Or to put it another way, I consider the relative merits of comparing immigration “then and now,” on the one hand—that is, a comparative approach—and, on the other hand, analyzing changes over time in a “then to now” manner, what one might call a historical “becoming” approach.

I come to this issue as what one might call a “then and now” person—as a social scientist who has focused, in my own work, on comparisons between today’s immigrants and those a hundred years ago. I became especially sensitive, however, to the limits of this kind of comparative approach in the course of running a series of interdisciplinary workshops on immigration, race, and ethnicity to the United States with the historian George Fredrickson.¹ It was our intention that the papers, and resulting volume, would compare the impact of the large-scale contemporary immigration with that of the great immigrant inflow of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed we initially subtitled the workshop, “then and now.” We ended up changing the subtitle. Not only was the periodization problematic when it came, for example, to the West Coast and Mexican migration but also many of the authors, especially the historians, told a story of immigration and its impact as it proceeded over time rather than comparing two different eras.

And this has led me to think more closely and critically about the implications of a comparative vs. “over-time” approach to immigration—and to reflect on what each approach has to offer. I am not, I want to make clear, arguing for the primacy of one over the other. Both approaches, I would argue, can—in different ways—help us to understand the impact of immigration in the contemporary era as well as in earlier periods.

In developing this argument, the spotlight here is on New York City, America’s classic immigrant destination. It is the city I have written about and where I have conducted research on present-day and earlier immigrants, and the place where I grew up and where I now live. As in my earlier work, the period under consideration is, roughly speaking, the last hundred years, from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first.

Then and Now Comparisons

First, consider systematic then-and-now comparisons. One of the reasons I wrote From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration—a then-and-now comparison if ever there was one!—was to set the record straight.² A series of popular myths and images has grown up about the massive immigration to New York City around the turn of the twentieth century, myths that deeply color how the newest arrivals are seen. In one sense, therefore, a “then-and-now” perspective is simply a response to popular discourse and popular comparisons, a way of showing what really happened then and what is happening today as against nostalgic memories of immigrant folk heroes and heroines of the past, which inevitably put the latest arrivals in an unflattering light.

But there are other reasons for a then-and-now comparison. It can deepen our understanding of migration by raising new questions and research problems and can help modify and evaluate theoretical perspectives and formulate explanations that could not be made on the basis of one case—or one time period—alone.

As the historian George Fredrickson has observed, a comparative approach undermines two contrary but equally damaging presuppositions— the illusion of total regularity and the illusion of absolute uniqueness.³ In other words, it enables us to see what is unique to a specific situation and what is more general to the migration experience. Of course, to some degree it is a matter of emphasis. Or of finding what you are looking for: if you look for similarity across time, you find it; if you look for differences across time, you also find them. And then there are disciplinary predilections. As Nancy Green notes, historians are more inclined to emphasize historical parallels in understanding today’s migration and settlement patterns than sociologists, who see contemporary detail with disciplinary eyes, that emphasize newness.⁴

In emphasizing what is distinctive today, social scientists studying immigration often give insufficient weight to similarities with the past. Frequently, there is only a brief nod to the past—usually to emphasize how different it is from the present—before proceeding to an analysis of the current era. For their part, historians, according to Gary Gerstle and John Mollenkopf, have not “risen to the challenge” of applying lessons from the past to the present immigration.⁵

Regardless of discipline, the great benefit of comparisons of immigration in different periods is that they bring out both the similarities and differences between past and present. What comparisons lead us to do is to try to explain the similarities and differences—a process which is useful “in enlarging our theoretical understandings of the kinds of institutions and processes being compared, thereby making a contribution to the development of social scientific theories and generalizations.”⁶

With regard to similarities, a comparison with the past can show whether, and in what ways, we have been there before—whether we are currently witnessing variations on long-standing themes that characterize the immigrant experience in the United States, or in particular cities like New York.

Clearly, there are a host of resemblances between immigrant New Yorkers then and now. Many immigrants, arriving with little or no English and few transferable skills, still endure terrible working conditions in jobs nobody else wants. The underlying processes of niche development— elaborated most notably by Roger Waldinger—also still operate to create ethnic job concentrations.⁷ As before, immigrants tend to flock into fields where settlers have established a solid foothold. Lacking information about the broader labor market and dependent on the support of their own kind, new arrivals typically learn about and get help finding jobs through personal networks in the immigrant community. For their part, employers often prefer applicants who are recommended by existing employees. Ethnic businesses are another perennial feature of the American immigrant scene, if only because they emerge to serve the special tastes and needs of the ethnic market.

In what also seems like a timeless feature, many newcomers today, as in the past, cluster in ethnic neighborhoods with their compatriots, partly owing to economic constraints and prejudice from established New Yorkers, but also because they seek comfort and security among kinfolk and friends. Immigrant women still experience burdens and disabilities as members of the “second sex.” It is a sociological truism that conflicts between the generations stem, in large part, from the fact that parents are steeped in old-country traditions and values while their children have grown up in an American social and cultural world. And now, after several years of scholarship on transnationalism, it is widely recognized that living trans-nationally—having a foot in two societies, as social scientists often write— is not altogether new, and that many migrants in the past also maintained ties with, and participated in economic and political activities in, their communities of origin at the same time as they were involved in life in New York.⁸

But of course it is not just the same old story or a timeless immigrant saga, as everybody knows. There are different immigrant groups today with different characteristics—and New York City, to say nothing of the United States as a whole, is a dramatically different place than it was a hundred years ago. Comparisons with the past, as I have written elsewhere, can show what and how much is really new about the new immigration.⁹

Consider a few of the differences as a counterpart to the parallels I just mentioned. Because many immigrants arrive today with college degrees and speak fluent English, a higher proportion are able, right from the start, to get decent, often high-level, jobs in the mainstream economy. (In 2000, 23 percent of foreign-born New Yorkers, ages 25 and over, had a college degree or more; 26 percent of employed foreign-born men and 30 percent of employed foreign-born women in New York City were in managerial and professional occupations.)¹⁰ The latest arrivals are also more likely to begin life in New York outside the classic ethnic neighborhood, in many cases in polyethnic neighborhoods of extraordinary diversity and sometimes in bedroom suburbs amidst middle-class native-born whites. If contemporary immigrant women still suffer from gender inequalities, they benefit from dramatic improvements that have altered the lives of all women in American society over the last hundred years—among them, the right to vote, the expansion of educational and employment opportunities for women, liberalized legislation concerning divorce and gender discrimination, and social welfare programs that have made it easier for them to manage on their own. And, finally, much is new about transnationalism due to, among other things, new transportation and communication technologies, the new global economy and culture, and new laws and political arrangements. Migrants can now maintain more frequent and more intimate contact with their home societies than was possible, or even imaginable, a hundred years ago.¹¹

Looking at differences between then and now brings into sharper focus aspects of today’s immigration that might be overlooked or minimized— or simply taken for granted—in our own era. Indeed, certain contemporary patterns, like improvements in the position of married immigrant women (who now routinely go out to work and earn an independent wage whereas in the past they were more tied to the home) and the critical role of education in immigrant mobility (compared to the past when secondary and college education was less critical for getting ahead) stand out in sharper relief when set against patterns among earlier arrivals.

And it is not just a matter of identifying what is new and what is not. It is also a question of analyzing what accounts for the “newness” or the “sameness,” thereby shedding light on the factors that shape the immigrant experience and pushing forward our ability to make generalizations, or develop frameworks or theories, about broader processes associated with immigration, from the construction of racial and ethnic identities to the nature and impact of trans-national relations.

A historical comparison raises questions about whether models and concepts elaborated in light of today’s immigration only apply to the current period or whether they also pertain to the past. Moreover, applying theoretical perspectives developed in one era to immigration in another can lead to a rethinking, re-evaluation, and modification of these perspectives.

Historians, for example, are now going back to examine transnational ties in the last great immigration wave. To be sure, historians have long documented the existence of transnational ties in the past even if they did not use the term transnationalism—for example, they have written extensively about return migration. But historians are now revisiting the past in light of writings and theoretical conceptualizations about transnationalism among present-day immigrants.¹² So far historians’ emphasis has been on the first, or immigrant, generation, but given concerns about the fate of transnationalism among the current second generation, historical studies of second-generation transnationalism can help to identify what factors help to sustain—or, alternatively, undermine—it.¹³

Then there is segmented assimilation, a perspective that looms large in discussions about the contemporary second generation. Indeed, the segmented assimilation perspective was developed specifically to explain dynamics in the present-day period, when, among other things, many children of immigrants are growing up in inner cities in the midst of poor native-born minorities and where they are at risk—according to the segmented assimilation model—of being influenced by the oppositional counterculture said to be widespread among inner-city minority youth. Segmented assimilation, as developed and elaborated by Alejandro Portes and his colleagues, implies a diversity of outcomes among today’s second generation, with some moving rapidly upward due to their parents’ high human capital and favorable context of reception, others doing well because of their parents’ dense networks and cohesive ethnic communities, and still others, whose parents have fewer resources and who are exposed to the lifestyles and outlooks in inner-city schools and neighborhoods, experiencing downward assimilation.¹⁴

One question is how extensive an oppositional outlook or ethos really is among today’s native-born minority and immigrant youth. Assumptions about the pervasiveness of an oppositional ethos that devalues academic achievement have, to date, been based on only a few ethnographic studies. It also has been argued that the discussion of oppositional culture among the children of immigrants may confuse style for substance: listening to hip-hop music and affecting a “ghetto” presentation of self should not be taken as evidence of joining a subordinated “segment” of society that engages in self-defeating behavior.¹⁵

A comparison with the past reminds us, as Joel Perlmann and Roger Waldinger have noted, that an oppositional culture can emerge from the working-class experience without exposure to a “proximal host” of visible, stigmatized, native-born minorities.¹⁶ Nor are the consequences necessarily so dire. In the mid-twentieth century, an oppositional outlook flourished among the working-class sons of southern European immigrants that involved a cynicism about and hostility to school and teachers. This oppositional stance, however, did not spell economic disaster. Despite not doing well in school, Italian American working-class young men could enter the u...