Bookends to the 20th Century
HABERMAN, CLYDE
Bookends to the 20th Century From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration By Nancy Foner Yale/Russell Sage. 334 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Clyde Haberman New York...
...One hesitates to suggest the writer consciously avoided topics that might cast immigrants in a negative light...
...Their situation is fraught with complications, not the least being that many new immigrants quickly outpace African Americans on any economic or social scale...
...Except when it is very dilferent...
...Garment industry sweatshops still exist, same as 100 years ago, only the women laboring in them speak Chinese instead of Yiddish...
...Reviewed by Clyde Haberman New York "Times" columnist THE IMMIGRANT TIDE that has remade the face of New York City in the last few decades is very similar to an earlier wave that reached its peak a century ago...
...That seems hard to accept...
...She is less hopeful about blacks breaking through the many barriers in their path...
...What in life is ever neat...
...Though it may seem implausible to their great grandchildren, Jews and Italians landing on these shores 100 years ago were not thought of as whites...
...But many new arrivals come with special talents, with college degrees and—mirabile dictu—with fluent English...
...Work, work and more work—the classic immigrant story seems to be repeating itself as a new group of arrivals enters New York," Foner writes...
...We never learn in this book...
...Dominicans are able to sit in New York and vote in elections back home...
...Whether black, white, yellow, or brown, recent immigrants are far more likely than those of yesteryear to have close links to home...
...Foner sets out to examine how these newcomers stack up against those who came at the last turn of the century...
...The clear "ethnic niches" of a century ago—all those Italian barbers and shoemakers, or Jewish peddlers and pushcart vendors—have not disappeared either...
...What this means for the future of American civic consciousness is far from clear...
...But it sure looks that way...
...Dual citizenship is allowed by many countries...
...Immigrants come here to better themselves and their families, and if this means takingjobs that nobody else wants, they have generally been willing to do so...
...Except when they settle in leafy suburbs side by side with prosperous Americans...
...Jews had their gangsters...
...Other immigrants have landed "right in the middle of extremely affluent communities, not on the fringes...
...They, like earlier immigrants, are often poorly educated and must settle for low-paying, unskilled jobs...
...Yes, slums can be as awful as they were decades ago, withmenpacked 10 or 15 to a one-bedroom apartment in Chinatown...
...Italian immigrants from the Ellis Island era routinely dreamed of building a sizable nest egg to take back with them to Sicily or Calabria...
...Many did just that...
...We see the same types of figures now...
...Are we to believe they have had no impact on their transplanted countrymen...
...We know that in New York today there are Chinese gangs and Dominican drug merchants and a Russian mob...
...Two topics are particularly absorbing: the "sting of prejudice," as Foner calls it, and "transnationalism," a jawbreaker of a word for the phenomenon of an immigrant having one foot in the new country while keeping the other firmly planted in the old...
...Foner appears to think the pull of the new country will ultimately win out...
...They were commonly believed to belong to "inferior 'mongrel' races that were polluting the country's Anglo-Saxon or Nordic stock," Foner notes...
...But both waves of immigration share one critical feature that makes a comparative study interesting: Each transformed New York...
...But Foner chronicles interesting attitudinal shifts...
...Available jobs for newcomers tend to be less than soul-enriching...
...Given this reality, it is also no surprise that a fair number of newcomers head straight to New York's suburbs, without so much as a glance at overcrowded tenements...
...Life in the new world has rarely been a cakewalk for the last to enter...
...She virtually shrugs off illegal immigration...
...Some even come with fat bank accounts and investment portfolios...
...Breaks with the past of that sort provide some of the book's best reading...
...Once despised East Asians (remember the "yellow peril...
...If the city is not awash in illegal aliens, it is surely ankle deep...
...It is indeed a long way from Ellis Island to JFK...
...Of course, anti-immigrant bias is not new...
...They have come to be seen as quasi-whites...
...With jet travel, cell phones, faxes, and computers, however, shuttling between two worlds is easier than ever...
...The changes both in New York City and in the very nature of immigration have been vast over the last century...
...If all this strikes you as "on the one hand this, on the other that" temporizing, don't hold it against Nancy Foner...
...Missing, too, is the slightest mention of crime...
...In fact, they outperform whites in many spheres...
...There are plenty of additional examples from the phis-ça-change department...
...By now, stretches of the five boroughs would probably be as desolate as postwar Dresden had they not been repopulated, and reinvigorated, by arrivals from places as disparate as the Dominican Republic, the former Soviet Union, Mexico, China, Jamaica, South Korea, India and Poland, to name but a few countries of origin...
...Immigrant children are crammed into overburdened schools ill-equipped to deal with so many non-English speakers...
...are now held up as the "model minority"—diligent, upwardly mobile, high-achieving...
...Why, Ellis Island isn't even part of New York anymore...
...Nor, in general, are present arrivals the burdens that the Pat Buchanans among us would suggest...
...If you are a Buchananite, don't waste your time reading any further...
...Sure, you have poor people from Mexico and the Dominican Republic who are forced to take menial jobs...
...Foner, who began her research while a scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, clearly believes that the United States has benefited from immigration and that New York may have been rescued by it...
...Immigration patterns are more complicated now...
...To what effect...
...Except when attitudes on race turn out to be quite flexible, with skin color and eye shapes ignored...
...in 1998, the Census Bureau estimated that immigrants constituted 37 per cent of the city's population...
...There is no way for her to avoid varying, even conflicting, conclusions in From Ellis Island to JFK, her statistic-laden, anecdote-enriched study of two giant waves of immigration that served as bookends to the 20th century...
...now Mexicans wash dishes...
...New Jersey towns along the Hudson River, for instance, have become Korean enclaves...
...Before we get into details, a warning seems fair...
...Common sense is on her side...
...Other similarities abound...
...Forgive us, but that seems like an awful lot of people...
...A hundred years ago, when "multiculturalism" and "diversity" were hardly part of the everyday language, immigrants in New York essentially came in two types: Italians and Russian Jews...
...At the least, it has gone underground...
...Their point of entry after days of sea voyage was Ellis Island, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty...
...Italians once dug ditches and tunnels...
...Good affordable housing is usually in short supply...
...Not that prejudice has miraculously disappeared...
...For instance, Chinese and Koreans dominate elite, test-based public high schools like Bronx Science and Stuyvesant...
...A couple of years ago, the United States Supreme Court gave it to New Jersey...
...In this regard, race is probably less important than ethnicity...
...Recent arrivals, like their forerunners, cluster in ethnic colonies, often in ramshackle housing in the city's poorer precincts...
...Today's immigrants arrive from all over, landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport within hours of leaving home...
...You do not have to speak a word of Hindi or read a single Hangul character to recognize abustling, revitalized neighborhood when you see one...
...And with a high rate of intermarriage between young whites and ethnic Asians born in the United States, Foner wouldnotbe surprised if "the very category white will cease to be salient, and the current whitenonwhite division will give way to a new black-nonblack dichotomy...
...It's no surprise that a much higher proportion of today's immigrants find employment easily in decent, often high-level jobs in the mainstream economy," Foner says...
...Yet at the same time, she cites government figures showing that New York State had about 540,000 undocumented aliens in 1996, with 80 per cent of them, or 432,000, living in New York City...
...Absolutely, racial and religious prejudice against immigrants has not miraculously disappeared...
...Today's Pakistani cabdrivers and Korean greengrocers prove that economic strongholds for this or that group are very much with us...
...Italians had the Mafia...
...Ties to the homeland seldom disappear," she says, "but they often become fewer and thinner over time.' If there is a disappointment with this book, it is the short shrift given to themes that seem to be quite important...
...Still, despite such lapses (throw in the absence of a single word about a compelling category of immigrants, political refugees), there is more than enough in Foner's study to reflect on rewardingly...
...Except when they have special talents and do better than many native-bom Americans...
...At any one time, the undocumented are a fairly small proportion of New York's foreignborn...
...And now you get the book's title...
...You are going to hate this book...
...No less a figure than the celebrated social reformer Jacob Riis resorted to racial stereotypes that would make modern Americans blush, from "the swarthy Italian," hot-headed and quick with a knife, to the denizens of "Jewtown," where "life itself is of little value compared with even the leanest bank account...
...To those who get dewy-eyed over the good old days on Orchard and Mulberry Streets, Foner cautions that the newcomers of a century ago were not the instant successes their descendants often like to believe...
...Such "transnational ties" are not new...
...They suffer from religious and racial prejudice, just like immigrants of previous generations...
...That kind of rank bigotry is not so common these days...
...On the surface, they would seem so vastly different as to make one wonder why she even bothers...
...So why should the process of coming to America be any different, especially with an immigrant flow as diverse and complex as the one today...
...By 1910, Foner reports, the foreign-born made up 41 per cent of the city's population (with Russian Jews and Italians accounting for nearly one-fifth the total...
...Contrary to conventional wisdom, New York is not awash in a sea of illegal immigrants," she states...
...It is not uncommon, Foner notes, for West Indians in New York to "try to distance themselves from—and avoid the stigma associated with—African Americans...
...In today's New York, it is exceedingly bad form to be so openly hostile to immigrants...
Vol. 83 • November 2000 • No. 5
