Roger Waldinger's Still the Promised City?
Kasinitz, Philip
STILL THE PROMISED CITY?: AFRICAN-AMERICANS AND NEW IMMIGRANTS IN POSTINDUSTRIAL NEW YORK, by Roger Waldinger. Harvard University Press: 1996. 374 pp. $35.00. Last January a report by New York's...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Immigrants— particularly black immigrants—have already begun to demand their share of a shrinking municipal pie...
...This despite the fact that many of the "lousy jobs" (as he candidly describes them) now held by immigrants pay below poverty level wages...
...Are there really jobs for all of them...
...Given the continuing reality of racism in the private sector, government jobs were attractive...
...Ironically, assimilation actually poses a danger to this strategy...
...Unlike most researchers who study the ethnic economy, Waldinger devotes considerable attention to the politics of municipal employment...
...As for the larger question: "Is immigration good or bad for American workers...
...is a first-rate overview of the recent ethnic and economic history of the city...
...African-Americans are not immigrants...
...Coming to share U.S...
...I told the reporter what I tell everyone who wants to understand New York: read Roger Waldinger's new book...
...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Employers, he argues, have preferences about whom they wish to hire based on perceptions of different ethnic groups' skills and work habits, "positive discrimination" in favor of certain groups, and outright racism against others...
...Will a "postindustrial" economy provide today's immigrants with similar opportunities...
...Chinese immigrant workers, for example, can expect substantially lower wages in heavily Chinese industries than their compatriots in the mainstream economy...
...But it is also much more...
...Earlier immigrants overcame this problem either by joining the mainstream labor force or by shifting into more lucrative niches—a kind of group upward mobility...
...Yet this fact rarely figures in economists' models of the labor force...
...As such, one hopes that Still the Promised City...
...West Indians came with a tradition of female labor force participation and fluency in the English language, a good match with the needs of the growing health care sector in the 1970s and 1980s...
...Yet this model does not really fit New York...
...Using an imaginative combination of quantitative data, interviews, and case studies, Waldinger grapples with a question many of us prefer to avoid: what does massive immigration at a time of declining real wages mean for American workers, particularly for black workers...
...Most analysts of urban labor markets look at broad trends...
...Most are making a place for themselves in the economy and the polity...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...For recent arrivals the picture is less rosy...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1.You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...This model is complicated by the creation of formal and informal areas of specialization that become, in effect, "ethnic niches...
...Today, in Archie Bunker's Queens, black household incomes surpass those of whites...
...That day a reporter from one of the television netFALL • 1997.121 Books works called me with some now familiar questions: how can New York, whose economy is far from booming, continue to absorb so many newcomers...
...During the 1980s, as New York's increasingly African-American civil service expanded, pubA LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...As new groups gain closure over economic niches, AfricanAmericans, at the very end of the hiring "queue," have been consistently frozen out...
...Yet this ethnic hiring "queue" is also shaped by the availability of workers in a group and the shifting number of jobs...
...For both of these groups the value of staying within the ethnic niche has increased over time...
...readers hoping for a simple "yes" or "no" may be disappointed...
...In so doing he reminds us that workers and employers are not just labor and capital...
...The growth of the black middle class was largely due to newly available niches in government employment, niches opened up by the expansion of social services, an exodus of white ethnics, and post-civil-rights-era black political mobilization...
...Still, Waldinger (in what is perhaps an uncharacteristically Pollyanna-ish moment) insists that niche employment has hidden advantages...
...q FALL • 1997 • 125...
...Yet this is not to imply that Waldinger's book will be of interest solely to New Yorkers...
...And while government employment has shielded native blacks from immigrant competition up until now, it won't do so forever...
...This may help to explain the glee with which the Giuliani and Pataki administrations have attacked public expenditures...
...Koreans generally arrived with some capital and high rates of education but little English...
...Yet this analysis applies to only a small part of the labor force (the public sector, for example, is nonexistent in this model) and never really explains what happened to native minority workers...
...While some groups are clearly doing better than others (low labor force participation among Dominicans, the city's largest immigrant group, is a particular cause for concern), on the whole 124 • DISSENT Books immigration has made for a more vibrant and more prosperous New York, with (at least thus far) little direct displacement of native AfricanAmericans or Puerto Ricans...
...The ethnic economy provides jobs and mobility opportunities for many— women with small children, non-English speakers— who do not have access to the mainstream economy...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...will find a wide audience among policy makers and trade unionists as well as scholars...
...Yet for these native minority groups, Waldinger worries that the future may be less bright than the recent past...
...The elite white-collar "masters of the universe" continue to be concentrated in "global cities" like New York, along with the underpaid new immigrants who serve their increasingly specialized needs...
...It relies on dense kin networks, on the immigrant's memory of how much worse things were in the "old country," and perhaps on the immigrant's faith that tomorrow will be brighter...
...Although during the 1980s new opportunities in the public sector more than compensated for the erosion, of many traditional African-American niches, New York's promise may now be dimming for native blacks and Latinos, to say nothing of the prospects of the children of today's black and brown immigrants who are, in effect, becoming native blacks and Latinos...
...Not only has he written a masterful study of one labor market, he has provided us with a useful and subtle way of thinking about ethnicity and labor market competition in an America still obsessed by race, yet rapidly moving beyond the binary categories of "black" and "white...
...As with any work this wide-ranging, one can take issue with aspects of Waldinger's approach: although his case studies of niche creation are nuanced and subtle, some will find the definition of niche employment in the book's statistical chapters overly broad...
...The picture Waldinger presents is mixed...
...Small retailing thus made sense...
...Where did the native blacks go...
...Perhaps most important, Waldinger, like many of the current welfare "reformers," has focused on access to employment rather than the elimination of poverty...
...In so doing he uncovers the economic interests that lie beneath much of New York's ethnic strife...
...Finally, if the public sector was a good place to be during the 1980s, Waldinger argues (and I agree) that the future of the African-American niche looks less bright...
...Marking the occasion with a ceremony on Ellis Island, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani made it clear that he considers this to be very good news, something it is hard to imagine a Republican mayor doing in any other city...
...Some point to de-industrialization, which left unskilled black workers "mismatched" to new job opportunities in the whitecollar economy...
...Others point to workforce polarization and the emergence of an "hourglass economy...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...African-Americans have inherited a welfare state in decline and an antigovernment political climate probably exacerbated by the fact that much government employment is seen as a "black" niche...
...is not a book of easy answers but rather one that reminds us how complex the questions really are...
...Blacks were never a major part of New York's industrial labor force, and despite the decline in manufacturing, hundreds of thousands of new immigrants have managed to find low-skilled jobs in the city...
...For most immigrants Waldinger's answer is a tentative "so far, so good...
...The winners and losers sort themselves out on a playing field shaped by a local history, local demographics, and a local political culture...
...Sweeping generalizations about globalization or deindustrialization are no substitute for fine-grained, locally specific analysis...
...Nor, at this late date, do they benefit much from the immigrantlike family and social networks that may have helped first-generation migrants from the South gain a foothold in the economy a half-century ago...
...Waldinger also points to a crucial and largely ignored source of intrablack tension...
...Although African-Americans have been among the most niche-concentrated of New Yorkers, Waldinger demonstrates that in many industries they have encountered unified white resistance far more intense than anything faced by newly arrived immigrants...
...122 • DISSENT Books Are ethnic niches good for the workers within them...
...This is, of course, the classic "immigrant" strategy...
...Looking at how workers negotiate their position as members of groups adds a much needed dose of reality...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...And if new immigrants, many unskilled, can manage to find work in postindustrial New York, why is it that so many native blacks and Puerto Ricans cannot...
...Thus new opportunities opened up for immigrants in garment manufacturing in the 1970s despite a declining number of jobs in the industry, because the number of Jewish and Italian workers was declining even faster...
...values about individualism, consumption, and personal freedom tends to undermine it...
...people with histories and prejudices...
...In addition, Waldinger takes us beyond the increasingly misleading categories of "black," "white," and "Hispanic...
...people who are part of families, ethnic groups, and social networks...
...Thus what is true in New York or Washington may not be true in Los Angeles or Chicago...
...He pays little attention to the role of gender in the labor process, and while he notes that family ties affect the ethnic economy, he says little about how the entry of immigrant women into the labor force transforms those families...
...Ethnic "niches" come about in a variety of ways: immigrants arrive with certain skills, abilities, or disabilities...
...Still the Promised City...
...10017 (212) 595-3084...
...They are people...
...In contrast to these broad-brush approaches Waldinger examines the nitty-gritty process of who actually gets what jobs...
...different Latino groups occupy different places in the economy...
...So, is New York still the Promised City...
...and ethnic divisions among native whites persist four generations past Ellis Island...
...But government work has drawbacks from the point of view of group upward mobility...
...Black incomes improved dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s...
...Even if a black public-sector supervisor wants to aid her co-ethnics, she is constrained FALL • 1997 • 123 Books by educational requirements and civil service regulations...
...Obviously it is too early to say, but Waldinger is, by and large, optimistic...
...Last January a report by New York's Department of City Planning verified what most New Yorkers already knew: immigrants from an extraordinary variety of nations continue to pour into the city in numbers not seen since early in the century...
...Thus by the 1960s the African-American share of many service sector and manufacturing jobs fell as blacks (and Puerto Ricans) began to be replaced by new immigrants...
...The virtues of government work," Waldinger notes, "are also its vices: they are good jobs that attract competitive applicants, which leaves less-qualified black New Yorkers out in the cold...
...Thus New York's Jews moved from garment manufacturing and small retailing into big retailing and the civil service (often taking jobs below their skill levels: New York in the 1930s was blessed with many high school teachers with doctorates riding out the depression in a job with a pension) and then into the elite professions...
...Finally, those who argue that immigrants simply displaced African-Americans cannot really explain why the African-American exodus from many low-skilled jobs began before most immigrants arrived...
...Yet these are quibbles of the sort a provocative book always raises...
...Of course such networks, intentionally or not, make it harder for nongroup members to get "niche" jobs...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Yet the results of this shift were uneven...
...Far from being driven out, Waldinger shows, many moved enthusiastically into the public sector...
...can be seen for the pernicious nonsense that it is...
...And in the public sector, English-language ability, citizenship, and political connections gave native blacks advantages over immigrants...
...Contrary to the assumption that "assimilation" is the road to upward mobility, staying in the occupational "ghetto" can be an advantage...
...They were more secure than jobs in the volatile service sector, and growing black political clout could be called upon to dampen the effects of racial discrimination...
...By pooling wages among networks of kin and sharing household responsibilities, Chinese workers can sometimes achieve reasonably comfortable household incomes despite very low individual incomes...
...Of course we all know that members of certain ethnic groups cluster in certain occupations...
...For some long-established groups, notably Jews and African-Americans, wages in "ethnic" occupations are now higher than those of group members outside the niches...
...West Indian immigrants, now about one-third of New York's black labor force, have different employment patterns than native blacks...
...The struggles between blacks and Jews in education, efforts to open or close public hospitals, and controversies over affirmative action in the uniform services are all, at least in part, about jobs...
...Long-time New Yorkers, they can scarcely be expected to bring immigrant attitudes and expectations to the job market...
...One of Waldinger's most important lessons is that even in the era of the global economy, labor markets remain to a large degree local...
...But more important than the initial reasons for going into a specific job is the question of how a group comes to dominate an occupation by passing on vital information, formal and informal assistance, and apprenticeships, references, and capital through kin and ethnic networks...
...lic assistance payments and other expenditures for the poor declined...
...Public sector concentration," Waldinger notes, "pits the interests of the city's black middle class against the interests of the black poor...
...Still the Promised City...
...Viewed in this way, the question "Why can't African-Americans simply do what the Chinese do...
Vol. 44 • September 1997 • No. 4
