In a New Land

Front matter

NANCY FONER

In a New Land

A Comparative View of Immigration

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Migration in Comparative Perspective

Comparisons Across Time: Immigrants in

Index

About the Author

225 267 305 327

Acknowledgments

In the course of working on this book, I have acquired many debts. As the Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Professor of Equality and Justice in America at Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs during 2002—2004, I was given precious time to work on this project. I am grateful to the Engelman family for funding the professorship and to my colleagues at Baruch for providing an intellectually stimulating environment. Also at Baruch, many students helped me to better understand what it means to be an immigrant, or the child of an immigrant, in New York today.

As I was writing this book, I benefited from opportunities to present my work in progress at the Gotham Center Seminar in Post-War New York City History at the City University of New York; the University of Amsterdam; the workshop on Paths of Integration at the Institute of Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, University of Osnabrueck, Germany; and the Derek Gordon Research Seminar at the University of the West Indies. I want to thank Leo Lucassen for organizing a session on my work on immigration to New York, past and present, at the 2002 Social Science History Association meetings, and Caroline Brettell, Carmel Chiswick, Brian Gratton, as well as Leo Lucassen, for their comments at the session, which led me to rework and expand on some of my arguments.

A great many friends and colleagues in the immigration field have been a source of insights and ideas. It is not possible to name them all here, for there are so many and I would not want to leave anyone off the list. I do, however, want to acknowledge my debt to two organizations with which I’ve been involved. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC), specifically the Committee on International Migration and its program director, Josh DeWind, have supported a growing interdisciplinary field of immigration studies in the United States and sponsored numerous programs, conferences, and working groups that have vil vill | Acknowledgments enriched my own work. Most recently, I had the opportunity to collaborate with George Fredrickson on a SSRC working group on historical and contemporary perspectives on immigration, race, and ethnicity in the United States, and I learned a great deal from him as well as the other participants. I also owe a debt to the Russell Sage Foundation, where I began to work on the comparative-historical study of migration as a visiting scholar in the early 1990s, and to Eric Wanner, the foundation president, who has played a role in developing immigration research in the United States.

Ilene Kalish, editor at New York University Press, was an enthusiastic backer of the book project from the beginning, made valuable suggestions as I was working on it, and guided the manuscript through the publication process with great expertise and good humor. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with her. Thanks to Caroline Brettell and Steven Gold, who generously revealed their names as reviewers for New York University Press, for their comments on the manuscript.

Last but certainly not least, I want to thank members of my family, who, as usual, offered advice and encouragement at every step of the way. Once again, my mother, Anne Foner, read the manuscript with a keen critical eye and was a much-valued sounding board. My daughter, Alexis, now a professional writer in her own right, has made me sensitive to the need for clear and lively writing, although I am sure that I do not live up to her high standards. My husband, Peter Swerdloff, spent hours talking over ideas with me, provided critical insights, and, perhaps most important, was a constant source of support.

Introduction

Migration in Comparative Perspective

By now, it is almost a cliché to say that immigration is transforming the United States. At the time of the last census in 2000, more than ro percent of U.S. residents were foreign-born; together with their American-born children, this group constituted one-fifth of the nation’s population. Not surprisingly, the massive recent immigration has given rise to a growing scholarly literature as academics in different disciplines try to grapple with the complexity of the subject.

This book is based on the premise that a comparative perspective can yield new insights into the nature and impact of the new wave of immigration to the United States. A product of my own long-standing engagement with comparative research, in this book I look at migration in terms of multiple dimensions. I focus on three types of comparisons: comparisons of migrants across cities or regions within the United States, across nation-states, and across different periods of time.' The analysis centers on three main themes that are fundamental to understanding the migration process: race and ethnicity, gender, and transnational connections.

The constant, or base-line, in virtually all the comparisons is New York—America’s quintessential immigrant city, that in 2000 was home to 2.9 million immigrants or 9 percent of the nation’s foreign-born. This book compares today’s Latin American, Asian, and Caribbean newcomers in New York City with eastern and southern European immigrants a century ago, as well as with immigrants in other major U.S. receiving cities in the current period. Looking beyond the United States, it compares the experiences of a major group in New York City— West Indians—with their cousins in London. More generally, it views the dynamics of immigration in the United States, in the past as well as present, against those in western Europe.

To some degree, of course, virtually all migration research is comparative.* Any study that follows migrants from their country of origin to their new destination is, in effect, comparative in a “before-and-after” sense, even if the comparison is not made explicit.2 In anthropology, ethnographies of migrants from different cultures are also implicitly comparative in that they entail analyzing and representing activities and relations among people from one culture for audiences in another.* More explicit types of comparisons are also common. Sociologists, political scientists, and economists of migration routinely compare immigrants in large samples through quantitative techniques to gauge the effect of age, gender, race, country of birth, and other variables on a broad range of outcomes; historians and social scientists have employed what Nancy Green calls “convergent comparisons” that contrast different immigrant groups in one setting—Jews and Italians in New York City in the past or Dominicans and Jamaicans in the present, to mention just two possibilities.°

In this book, the comparisons are explicit. And they are at the core of the enterprise. I look both “across time” and “across space,” with an emphasis on what happens in the place of destination after migration. Surprisingly few full-length works on U.S. immigration focus on these kinds of comparisons. None, as far as I know, brings together the three kinds of comparisons—of different historical eras, among different cities, and across national boundaries—that are examined here.®

The comparisons in the chapters that follow are qualitative comparisons rather than statistical analyses of large data sets. In the discussion of West Indian migrants, I draw on my own ethnographic research in New York and London. Much of the volume, however, is an interpretive synthesis that pulls together strands from the literature on immigration, including individual case studies of particular times, groups, and places as well as material from broader analyses and overviews. The sources I use are extremely varied. They range from historical accounts of immigration a hundred years ago to contemporary ethnographic studies and statistical material, from census reports to surveys collected by social science researchers and governmental bodies.’

Why Compare?

Whether across time or space, a comparative perspective has, I believe, much to offer to the study of the immigration experience. We now have a mass of information in the form of myriad monographs and studies on particular immigrant groups in particular periods or places. It is time to bring these materials together into a comparative framework. A comparative analysis can deepen our understanding of migration by raising new questions and research problems and help to evaluate, and in some cases modify, theoretical perspectives and formulate explanations that could not be made on the basis of one case—or one time period—alone.

Much of the scholarly material on immigration is fairly narrowly drawn, focusing on a specific group or groups of immigrants in one location and specific aspects of their experiences at one period of time. A comparative approach provides a broader view. Comparisons often bring fresh perspectives to old problems; they have the special quality of calling attention to—or bringing into sharper focus—dynamics that might have been missed or minimized if focusing on only one case. Also, by acquainting us with what has gone on before or in other places, a comparative approach can inspire a critical awareness of what is taken for granted in our own era, city, or society. The experiences of each group, whether it is West Indians in New York today or Russian Jews a hundred years ago, may be more fully understood in light of the experiences of others in different locations or different eras. As Reinhard Bendix put it in another context, comparative studies “increase the ‘visibility’ of one structure by contrasting it with another.”®

A comparative approach, as George Fredrickson has observed, can undermine two contrary but equally damaging presuppositions—the illusion of total regularity and the illusion of absolute uniqueness.” Or to put it another way, 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 similarities across time you find them, if you look for differences across time, you also find them. The same can be said about similarities and differences across space. And then there are disciplinary predilections. As Green notes, historians are more inclined to emphasize historical parallels in understanding today’s migrant and settlement patterns than sociologists who see contemporary detail with disciplinary eyes that emphasize newness.!? Indeed, in emphasizing what is distinctive today, social scientists 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. !!

Regardless of discipline, one of the great benefits of comparisons is that they bring out both the similarities and differences between past and present and between migrations to different cities and societies. What comparisons force us to do is to try to account for the similarities and differences—a process which is useful “in enlarging our theoretical understanding of the kinds of institutions and processes being compared, thereby making a contribution to the development of social scientific theories and generalizations.” '* Comparing present-day immigrant New Yorkers with their predecessors a century ago 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. Comparing West Indians in New York City with their counterparts in London broadens our understanding of the West Indian experience in both places and sheds light on both the structural constraints and cultural choices framing their migration experience. !°

A comparative perspective can push forward our ability to understand and theorize processes associated with immigration because it leads us to step back and examine what are often time-bound, culturebound, and even city-bound assumptions. If, as Alejandro Portes notes, theoretical advances arise out of the ability to reconstitute a perceptual field and to identify connections not previously seen, then comparisons across time and space may be productive in bringing new perspectives to bear on familiar issues and promoting the kind of “distance from reality” that Portes argues is important “in order to identify patterns lost at close range.”'* Comparisons across time raise questions about whether theoretical perspectives elaborated in light of today’s immigration, such as transnationalism, are unique to the current period or whether they also pertain to the past; comparisons across space allow us to see if models and concepts, such as segmented assimilation, designed with the United States in mind make sense to apply to other societies.

There is another benefit to comparisons across time and space: they bring together literatures that have often flowed in separate streams. Until recently, the literatures on past and present immigrations to the United States have been quite unconnected, with historians and sociologists often “discovering” what has been acknowledged and treated in the other’s discipline for some time. Insights from historical studies—for example, on the question of “whiteness” among earlier immigrants— can enrich our understanding of contemporary immigration. In much the same way, sociological research on such topics as transnationalism can shed light on the past. U.S. migration research has also often proceeded without much awareness of work on migration in Europe, and certainly the chapters on West Indians show that scholars on this side of the Atlantic can profit from a closer acquaintance with research on the Caribbean community in Britain.

Overview

The plan of the book is as follows. The four chapters in Part I focus on a comparison across time, or immigration to New York City, then and now. The “then” in this case is the period between 1880-1920 at the time of the last great immigration to New York; the “now” is the past few decades when several million immigrants have arrived in the city. I begin the past-present comparison in chapter 1 with the subject of race. Among the central questions are how immigrants were seen, in racial and ethnic terms, in the two immigration eras and the relevance of understanding how Jews and Italians were transformed into racial insiders for analyzing changing ethnoracial dynamics in the twenty-first century. In this sense, chapter I is not just a “then and now” comparison but also examines processes that have taken place over time.!°

A comparative lens can also bring into sharper focus the complex connections between immigrants and African Americans in New York City. These connections are the subject of chapter 2, where I explore the consequences for today’s immigrants of living in a city with a large African American population compared to a century ago when there were only a tiny number of black New Yorkers. In general, migrant inflows in one period change the context that greets the next wave, and the analysis makes clear that the huge African American influx from around the First World War to 1960 created a new racial order that had an enormous effect on the immigrants who arrived in the post-1965 era.!®

In chapter 3, the then-now comparison focuses on transnationalism: whether, and in what ways, the transnational ties of today’s firstand second-generation immigrant New Yorkers are a new development —and the consequences for them and their communities. Immigrant women are on center stage in chapter 4, which considers how changes in their work roles have affected their experiences today as compared to the past.

Part II of the book puts the spotlight on one group, West Indians, and in one era, the post-World War II period. The comparisons of West Indians in New York and London are what Green has labeled “divergent comparisons” in that they contrast the experiences of a particular immigrant group in different destinations.” What they show, in a dramatic fashion, is the important role of the racial context in shaping the West Indian migrant experience—the central theme in chapter 5. Why does being black mean something different on the two sides of the Atlantic? How does this affect the lives of migrants and their children in terms of identity construction as well as actual social relations? The dynamics of race in Britain and the United States have influenced the very questions posed and explored by scholars about the fate of the West Indian second generation. Why, for example, does the literature on West Indians in New York (and indeed the United States more generally) focus so heavily on segmented assimilation, while no comparable concept has emerged or been adopted in Britain?

Chapter 6 pushes the comparative discussion further by looking at other ways that place makes a difference for West Indian migrants in New York as compared to London. In addition to the character of race and ethnic relations, other contextual features matter, from the structure of the urban labor market to the nature of the welfare state. So do characteristics of the migration stream as well as the timing of the migration, the legal context in which it occurs, and distance from the home society. The analysis also branches in yet another direction as it compares West Indians in New York and those who have settled in other American cities, thereby bringing a cross-city as well as cross-national perspective to the analysis of the West Indian migrant experience.

In chapter 7, I take up questions pertaining to Jamaican migrant women in New York and London, with special emphasis on their work and family lives. It is a case, in many ways, of parallels on both sides of the Atlantic in terms of the benefits and burdens of work in the context of economic opportunities, gender divisions in the labor market, gender roles in the household, and the stresses of transnational motherhood. Yet there are also differences, and among the questions the chapter explores are why Jamaican women in New York were more likely to be pioneers in the move abroad and to work in private homes than their cousins in London.

Part III offers yet another set of comparisons across space. Moving beyond the particular case of West Indians, chapter 8 looks more generally at the issue of New York exceptionalism: How special is New York as an immigrant destination compared to other American gateway cities? Race and ethnicity are at the center of the discussion. How have New York City’s peculiar features—its history, institutions, and immigrant flows—affected perceptions of race and ethnicity and the dynamics of intergroup relations? What makes the city unique as a place for immigrants today? And what features does it share with other immigrant destinations in the nation?

The book concludes, in chapter 9, with comparisons across space and across time. The taking-off point is the United States rather than New York and the comparisons are, very broadly, with western Europe. One theme is popular myths about immigrants in the past that color contemporary discussions of immigrants on both sides of the Atlantic. Another has to do with race. Comparing the United States and western Europe underscores the particular impact of the American racial structure—and the legacy of slavery and segregation—in shaping responses to immigration, the experiences of immigrants, and the way scholars themselves analyze the new arrivals.

In their introduction to a volume on migration theory, Caroline Brettell and James Hollifield note that comparisons have resulted in some of the most innovative scholarship in the migration field—most of the work they cite involving cross-national comparisons within Europe.!® This book takes the comparative approach a step forward through a series of essays that view the recent immigration to the United States in a multiplicity of dimensions: making comparisons across time periods, cities and regions, and nations, and focusing on issues pertaining to race, gender, and transnationalism. Comparisons of course are impossible without detailed studies of particular groups, places, and time periods. But as we seek to make sense of how the huge recent immigration is changing American society and the lives of the immigrants who have moved there we need to go beyond these individual case studies. Comparisons of immigration that look back in time, to different cities, and to different societies can, as this book suggests, help us to see not only whether we have come to a genuinely new place—but also to better understand the complex 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

The Social Construction of Race in Iwo 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

II that differ in visible physical characteristics or putative ancestry are innate and unchangeable.” !

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, bi 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.”? 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. ”’ 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.”*

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.” 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. 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.’ 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.”*® 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.’ 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.!° 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.!!

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 Jan Haney Lopez’s phrase, “white by law.”!° 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.'* 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. !°

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.'® 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.