How exceptional is New York?
Migration and multiculturalism in the
empire city
Nancy Foner
Abstract
This article builds on the ‘city as context’ framework in analysing the way
the unique features of particular cities help in understanding the effects of
immigration and resulting cultural diversity. The focus is on New York
City and on how recent immigration has transformed the social
construction of race and ethnicity and the nature of intergroup relations
there. New York’s remarkable ethnic and racial diversity, its immigrant
history, and institutions have combined to make it a receiving city, in
many ways, like no other in the United States. Multiculturalism, it is
argued, has evolved there in what might be called a particular New York
way.
Keywords: Race; ethnicity; immigration; urban; multiculturalism; New York.
‘There is no multiculturalism tout court,’ the editors of a volume on
multicultural questions observe, ‘there are only specific, contextdependent
multicultural problematiques’ (Joppke and Lukes 1999,
p. 16). To date, scholars have typically explored the context-dependent
nature of multiculturalism by taking the nation-state as the unit of
analysis Á a strategy some would argue reflects ‘methodological
nationalism’ in the social sciences, in which the nation-state is viewed
as the ‘‘natural’’ unit of analysis (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003).
Indeed, several definitions of multiculturalism Á and there are many Á
refer to policies, ideals, or realities within a nation-state’s borders.
There have been comparisons of nations which have adopted official
multicultural policies, such as Canada, and those which have not, like
the United States (e.g. Reitz and Breton 1994; Bloemraad 2003).
Another common comparison involves contrasting the meanings,
manifestations, and effects of multiculturalism in the United States
Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 30 No. 6 November 2007 pp. 999Á1023
# 2007 Taylor & Francis
ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online
DOI: 10.1080/01419870701599440
and Western European countries (see, for example, Glazer 1999 and
Joppke and Lukes 1999).
This article looks at a different context for understanding multiculturalism,
the city, with a particular focus on contemporary New
York City as it has been dramatically changed by the massive inflow of
immigrants in the past few decades. It builds on the ‘city as context’
framework elaborated in anthropology, which points to the unique
features of particular cities in understanding the effects of immigration
and resulting cultural diversity.
In a special issue of Urban Anthropology published several decades
ago, Jack Rollwagen criticized immigration studies that implicitly
assume that the life of an immigrant group will be exactly the same
regardless of the city in which the group lives Á what he called ‘the city
as constant argument’ (Rollwagen 1975). He argued, instead, for an
approach that is sensitive to the contrasts among immigrant groups
from the same cultural background in different American cities,
pointing to the size of the immigrant group and available opportunities
in particular cities. In further developing this approach, Caroline
Brettell (2003) has suggested other features to be considered in
exploring cities as contexts for immigrant incorporation, including
the city’s history as a receiving area for immigrants, the extent to which
it is dominated by a single immigrant population, and the character of
race and ethnic relations. My own work has highlighted specific
aspects of New York as an immigrant city (Foner 2001, 2005) and
added a temporal dimension by comparing the immigrant experience
in early- and late-twentieth century New York (Foner 2000, 2001,
2005, 2006). Sociologists of immigration have also been attentive to
the importance of urban context, perhaps most notably Roger
Waldinger (2001a), who analyses how US urban regions differ in the
way geographical and historical particularities have shaped immigrant
flows Á their skill composition, the diversity of the groups, and timing
of arrival Á and the effects of particular social, political, and economic
institutions and structures on the options available to arrivals from
abroad (also see, for example, Portes and Stepick 1992 and Stepick
et al. 2003 on immigrant Miami and Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996
on immigrant Los Angeles).
As recent immigration has transformed the social construction of
race and ethnicity and the nature of intergroup relations in the United
States, the issue here is how, and in what ways, New York is distinctive
in the American context. New York’s remarkable ethnic and racial
diversity, its immigration history, and its institutions have combined to
make it a receiving city, in many ways, like no other in the United
States. Multiculturalism Á and by this I simply mean the coexistence of
plural cultures or cultural diversity Á has evolved there in what one
might call a particular New York way.1
1000 Nancy Foner
Much of what follows stresses the particularities of the New York
context, yet I do not support an extreme regional or urban relativism
that sees only ways that each city or region is unique. National
developments, for example, have led to certain changes in conceptions
of race that New York shares with other parts of the United States.
There is also another dynamic. As a major cultural capital of America,
what happens in New York has the potential to affect the shape of
change elsewhere in the nation. This may be a good thing. It could be
argued that as America’s quintessential immigrant city, with a long
history of ethnic succession and immigrant inclusion, New York, in
many ways, offers an optimistic scenario about the future of
intergroup relations for the nation.
What makes New York unique?
A host of features make New York special as an immigrant city. New
York City served as the historic port of entry for southern and eastern
European immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries so that by 1920, Jewish and Italian immigrants and their
children made up over two-fifths of the population. In the newest wave
of immigration, since the late 1960s, the city has continued to attract a
significant share of the nation’s new arrivals (see Foner 2000, 2001).
Since 1900, about 10 per cent or more of the nation’s foreign-born
population has lived in New York City. For much of the twentieth
century, a fifth or more of New York City’s residents were foreignborn;
the figure reached 41 per cent in 1910 and by 2000 it was nearly
as high at 36 per cent (see Table 1). Adding to the ethnoracial mix, the
Table 1. Foreign-Born Population of New York City, 1900Á2000
Year
Percentage
Total
population
(in Thousands)
Foreign-Born
population (in
Thousands)
Percentage of
Foreign-Born in
New York City
Percentage of U.S.
Foreign-Born in
New York City
1900 3,437.2 1,270.1 37.0 12.2
1910 4,766.9 1,944.4 40.8 14.3
1920 5,620.0 2,028.2 36.1 14.5
1930 6,930.4 2,358.7 34.0 16.5
1940 7,455.0 2,138.7 28.7 18.3
1950 7,892.0 1,860.9 23.6 17.8
1960 7,783.3 1,558.7 20.0 16.0
1970 7,894.9 1,437.1 18.2 14.9
1980 7,071.6 1,670.2 23.6 11.9
1990 7,322.6 2,082.9 28.4 10.5
2000 8,008.3 2,871.0 35.9 9.2
Source: Foner 2000: 5; Singer 2004
How exceptional is New York? 1001
city experienced a massive inflow of African Americans from the
South between World War I and the 1960s as well as a huge migration
of Puerto Ricans after World War II.
The result of these inflows is that the vast majority of New Yorkers
have a close immigrant connection. If they are not immigrants
themselves, they have a parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent
who is. Many of the nearly one million Jewish New Yorkers have
grandparents or great-grandparents who arrived at the turn of
the twentieth century from eastern Europe; hundreds of thousands
have roots in Italy and Ireland; many black New Yorkers are
descended from immigrants who arrived a hundred years ago from
what was then the British Caribbean; and while island-born Puerto
Rican New Yorkers, who are US citizens by birth, are not considered
immigrants, they and their children and grandchildren are a significant
presence in the city (see Foner 2005).
The post-1965 immigration has replenished older groups and created
new ethnic mixes. At the time of the 2000 Census, more than a quarter
of the city’s 2 million non-Hispanic blacks were foreign-born, most of
them West Indians. A substantial proportion of the newest arrivals hail
from Europe. In 2000, the former Soviet Union ranked fourth among
the top sending countries to New York City, Poland was fifteenth, and
altogether, about one out of four of the city’s non-Hispanic whites was
foreign born (Mollenkopf, Olson, and Ross 2001; Beveridge 2002). Put
another way, only about half of New York City’s non-Hispanic whites
were native-born people with two native-born parents. New York City’s
white population is dominated by first-, second-, and third-generation
Catholics (Irish and Italian) and Jews, and white Protestants are
practically invisible, if still economically and socially powerful
(Mollenkopf 1999, p. 419).2
A striking feature of New York City’s immigrant population, which
stands at nearly three million, is its extraordinary diversity. No one or
two, or even three or four, nations dominate. Between 1990 and 1996
alone, as many as twenty countries sent more than 5,000 immigrants to
the city (Kraly and Miyares 2001). In 2000, the top three groups Á
Dominicans, Chinese, and Jamaicans Á were just under 30 per cent of
all the foreign-born. No other foreign country accounted for more
than five per cent, and there were substantial numbers of many West
Indian, Latin American, Asian, and European nationalities. There is,
moreover, a huge native minority population of African Americans
and Puerto Ricans; in the late 1990s, blacks and Hispanics of native
stock (native-born to native parents) made up about a quarter of the
city’s population.
The remarkable diversity of New York’s immigrants is matched by
the heterogeneity of their skills. New York’s mixture of nationalities
has ensured a mix of class and occupational origins, with high-skilled
1002 Nancy Foner
and low-skilled immigrants roughly equal in number in the New York
urban region (Waldinger and Lee 2001, pp. 50, 52, 63).
Then there is the long list of ‘place-specific conditions’ that mark off
New York City as an immigrant destination, including many of
relevance to the analysis here.3
By US standards, New York City’s
government provides a wide range of social, health, and educational
services, including the City University of New York [CUNY], which is
the largest urban public university system in the nation. In the autumn
of 2005, it had more than 190,000 undergraduate students enrolled;
40 per cent of CUNY’s first time freshmen were born outside the US
mainland. Partly a legacy from earlier immigrant waves, the city is
home to many non-governmental institutions, like settlement houses
and Catholic schools, that have helped recent arrivals; it is a strong
union town, with many labour unions (as well as colleges and political
groups) in the post-civil rights years providing leadership positions for
African Americans and Puerto Ricans who, it is argued, are ‘trying to
manage ethnic succession’ involving new immigrant groups ‘while still
seeing themselves as fundamentally outsiders to the larger power
structures’ (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, and Waters 2004a, p. 15).
New York City’s political culture bears the stamp of earlier
European immigration and is used to accommodating newcomers
from abroad. Ethnic politics are the lifeblood of New York City
politics; no group ‘finds challenge unexpected or outrageous’ (Glazer
and Moynihan 1970, p. xxx) and ethnic politics has long been
practised as a shorthand method of coalition-building (Marwell
2004, p. 243). In the 1930s, Fiorello LaGuardia Á who some consider
the city’s greatest mayor Á sprinkled his speeches with Italian and
Yiddish, and in the postwar years, aspiring leaders visited the three ‘I’s
Á Israel, Italy, and Ireland Á the touchstones of so many Jewish and
Catholic voters (Wakin 2003). By 2003, after two years in office,
Mayor Michael Bloomberg had already visited the Dominican
Republic three times; in May 2005, he rolled out the first of his
television campaign spots in Spanish.
Politics in the city ‘presents newcomers with a segmented political
system, organized for mobilization along ethnic group lines, and a
political culture that sanctions, indeed encourages, newcomers to
engage in ethnic politics’ (Waldinger 1996b, p. 1084). A large number
of political prizes are up for grabs, many within reach of the newest
groups. The New York City Council has fifty-one members; the city
sends sixty-five representatives to New York’s State Assembly and
twenty-five to the State Senate; and fifty-nine community boards in
the city have up to fifty members each (Waldinger 1996b; Mollenkopf
1999). Despite the importance of party support in sustaining native
white or minority incumbents in immigrant districts, Logan and
Mollenkopf (2003) argue that New York City’s primaries have proved
How exceptional is New York? 1003
to be an effective path for immigrant political mobility when one
group becomes predominant in a district, as happened in the 1990s
among West Indians and Dominicans, and, more recently, the Chinese
in city council elections.
Given New York’s remarkable diversity, and long history of
welcoming and absorbing immigrants, it is not surprising that the
city’s official commitment to cultural pluralism and cultural diversity
stands out. Officials and social service agencies actively promote
events to foster ethnic pride and glorify the city’s multi-ethnic
character and multi-ethnic history. Practically every group has its
own festival or parade, the largest being the West Indian American
Day parade on Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, which attracts between
one and two million people every Labor Day Á and is now a
mandatory campaign stop for politicians seeking citywide office.
Even something as mundane as parking rules reflect a public
recognition of ethnic diversity; alternate side parking regulations
were suspended on thirty-four legal and religious holidays in 2005,
including the Asian Lunar New Year, Purim and Passover, the Feast of
the Assumption, the Muslim holiday of Id-al-Adha, and the Hindu
celebration of Diwali.
In a city which prides itself on its immigrant history, New Yorkers Á
both old and new Á feel comfortable with ethnic succession. Kasinitz
and his colleagues put it well when they note that if ‘Italians are
yesterday’s newcomers and today’s establishment, then maybe Colombians
are the new Italians and, potentially, tomorrow’s establishment.
New Yorkers . . . are happy to tell themselves this story. It may not be
completely true, but the fact that they tell it, and believe it, is
significant and may help them make it come true’ (Kasinitz,
Mollenkopf and Waters 2004b, p. 399).
The construction of race and ethnicity
How have the special features of New York City and its immigrant
population affected the way race and ethnicity are constructed?4
And
is this different, and in what ways, from what has happened in other
major US immigrant destinations?
Inevitably, perceptions of race and ethnicity in New York have been
shaped by national trends and developments in the country as a whole.
Throughout the United States, blacks are the ‘quintessentially
racialized Americans’, with their special position of disadvantage
rooted in two hundred years of African slavery and a hundred years of
state-sponsored discrimination (Glazer 1999; Foner and Fredrickson
2004). The growing number, and significance, of Hispanics and Asians
in the past few decades in New York, as elsewhere in the nation, have
led to a move away from thinking about race as a matter of black and
1004 Nancy Foner
white (‘the black-white binary’) and to the common usage of the terms
‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ and ‘Asian.’ Furthermore, New Yorkers’ views
of ethnoracial differences have been influenced by, among other things,
national political debates, the use of ethnoracial categories by the US
census and federal and local government agencies, and television and
other national media.
Yet the construction of race and ethnicity in New York City has
taken its own direction in some ways, and this is largely a result of
basic demographics, both past and present. Consider the way that
‘whiteness’ is constructed. On the one hand, virtually everywhere in
the United States ‘white’ is shorthand for, and generally synonymous
with, ‘non-Hispanic white.’ In the urban capitals of immigrant
America, moreover, Euro-Americans Á read ‘white’ to most Americans
Á are increasingly absent from the lower and even middle ranks,
so that, as Waldinger (2001b, p. 328) points out, class and ethnicity
tend to overlap in ways that cumulate advantages for Euro-Americans,
who set the standard to which others aspire.
On the other hand, ‘whiteness’ has particular associations depending
on the region. There are even different terms to describe it. In
Texas and southern California ‘Anglo’ is commonly used to describe a
white person who is not of Hispanic origin whereas in New York it is
rarely heard. The use of ‘Anglo’ derives from the long-term Mexican
presence in the US-Mexico border region, a region that was once part
of Mexico and now has an enormous Mexican-origin population.
‘Anglo’ has not caught on in New York (or other northeastern and
midwestern cities), where, given the history of immigration, ethnic
differences among the non-Hispanic white population still have a
strong resonance and ‘Anglo’ conjures up images of white AngloSaxon
Protestants or WASPS, a category that excludes white ethnics.
In New York City, in addition, the immigrant strains in the white
population have been kept alive by the ongoing influx of European
newcomers from areas that were important sending countries in the
past, Poland and Russia in particular. In 2000, non-Hispanic whites
represented 35 per cent of the city’s population, about a quarter of
them foreign-born (see Table 2). The large proportion of immigrants in
the non-Hispanic white population distinguishes New York from most
other major American immigrant cities. In contemporary New York,
the term ‘immigrant’ encompasses a substantial number of whites
from Europe.
‘Blackness’ also has a different meaning in New York than in many
major immigrant cities because of the large West Indian community
and growing number of Africans. New York is not alone in this regard.
In 2000, when more than a quarter of New York City’s non-Hispanic
black population was Afro-Caribbean and 3 per cent was Africanborn,
more than a third of the non-Hispanic blacks in the Miami and
How exceptional is New York? 1005
Fort Lauderdale metropolitan areas were Afro-Caribbean; over a third
of the Boston metropolitan area’s non-Hispanic blacks and ten per
cent of Washington DC’s were Afro-Caribbean and African (Logan
and Deane 2003; Logan and Mollenkopf 2003). However, in the main
gateway cities in California, Texas, and the Midwest with substantial
African American populations, there are few foreign-born blacks:
black there unambiguously means African American. This is not so in
New York and other urban centres which have experienced a large
influx of black immigrants and where notions of blackness are
changing as a result.
Admittedly, given the history of racism in America, and the legacy
of the one-drop rule, whites in New York City, as in South Florida,
Washington, DC and Boston, often lump blacks together and are
insensitive to ethnic differences among them. But there is evidence for
a growing awareness of such distinctions. In Vickerman’s (2001)
phrase, monolithic conceptions of blackness are being ‘tweaked’ rather
than dispelled. According to Vickerman, the increasing number of
black immigrants in cities like New York (along with the expansion of
the African American middle class and a rising number of mixed race
individuals) is challenging notions of a monolithic blackness there and
pushing negative stereotypes of blacks to change. He contends that
there is a growing scope for immigrants to lay claim to a West Indian
or African identity instead of undergoing submersion into a larger
black identity, and even the possibility that the conceptions of race
that black immigrants bring with them from their countries of origin
will have an influence.
A further complication in New York is that many Hispanics in the
city identify as black when asked their race by the census, which is
unusual in the US urban context. (Of the New York metropolitan
area’s Hispanics, 9 per cent identified as black on the 2000 Census,
compared to 1 per cent in the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan
area, 2 per cent in Chicago, 3 per cent in Miami, and 1 per cent in
Houston, Logan 2003). This no doubt has to do with the large
numbers of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in New York, many of
whom are dark-skinned and have some African heritage.
Table 2. Population of New York City by Race and Hispanic Origin, 1970Á
2000 (Percentages)
1970 1980 1990 2000
Non-Hispanic White 62.5 52.4 43.4 35.0
Non-Hispanic Black 19.4 24.0 25.6 24.4
Hispanic 16.2 19.9 23.7 27.0
Asian 1.2 3.4 6.8 9.8
Source: Lobo and Salvo 2004: 128Á129
1006 Nancy Foner
Another distinguishing feature of New York’s Hispanic population
is its heterogeneity. New York is home to a growing number of
Hispanics Á 27 per cent of the city’s population in 2000 Á yet there is
no one dominant Latino nationality as in southern Californian and
Texas cities where Mexicans predominate and Miami, where Cubans
outnumber other Latino groups.5
The combination of nationalities, generations, and class backgrounds
of Latinos in particular cities influences how they see
themselves, and are seen by others, including the way the panethnic
category ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic’ is constructed. Even the preference for
‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic’ varies by region, with one survey suggesting that
Texans and people in the South tend to favour ‘Hispanic’ while
Californians and people in the Northeast prefer ‘Latino’ (Rodriguez
2003).
In Texas, as Neil Foley (2004, p. 341) notes, the word ‘Mexican’
historically denoted a race as well as a nationality from the midnineteenth
to the mid-twentieth century: ‘a fifth-generation Mexican
American was still a ‘‘Mexican’’ rather than an American in the eyes of
most Anglos.’ Anglos, he writes, do not call Mexican Americans
‘Mexicans’ anymore; they have become ‘Hispanic . . . a post-1960s,
post-civil rights term that unites Mexican Americans to other groups
who trace their heritage to Spanish-speaking countries.’ Still, the
overwhelming dominance of people of Mexican origin among
Hispanics in cities like Houston and Los Angeles means that Hispanic
or Latino usually means ‘Mexican’ or ‘Mexican American,’ which is
not the case in New York.
People from the Hispanic Caribbean may have a very different
understanding of the Hispanic or Latino label than those from Mexico
and Central America Á which has important implications in New York
City where, in 2000, two out of three Latinos were of Caribbean origin.
Caribbean Latinos, Itzigsohn (2004, p. 208) argues, construct their
racial identity vis-a`-vis blackness: ‘First-generation Dominicans, for
example, reject being associated with blackness because in the
Dominican Republic blackness is associated with Haiti and Dominicans
construct their national identity in opposition to Haitians.
Mexican Americans, on the other hand, particularly those who adopt
a Chicano and Chicana identity, build their racial identity around
notions of ‘‘mestizaje’’ and Native American origin.’ An added
complexity is the large number of Puerto Rican New Yorkers, around
830,000 in 2000. In the mid-twentieth century, New Yorkers thought of
minorities in the city as ‘black’ and ‘Puerto Rican.’ Now, Hispanic is
often used in public discourse to refer to all Spanish-speaking
Caribbean and Latin American groups, although the continued
plurality of Puerto Ricans in the city’s Hispanic population still gives
Puerto Ricans a central role. Another dynamic is involved in the
How exceptional is New York? 1007
self-identity process. Given the stigma attached to Puerto Ricans in
New York, people with origins in other Caribbean or Latin American
countries generally want to avoid being identified as Puerto Rican (see
Grosfoguel 2003). Something similar has been reported for Chicago,
where there is a substantial Á but, by New York City standards, much
smaller Á Puerto Rican population and a huge Mexican community.
(In 2000, Chicago’s 113,000 Puerto Ricans constituted 15 per cent of
the city’s Latino population compared to over 530,000 Mexicans who
accounted for 70 per cent.) As in New York, Chicago Mexicans often
stigmatize Puerto Ricans as lazy and lacking a good work ethic; for
their part, many Puerto Ricans construct Mexicans as ‘illegal’ and
unsophisticated newcomers from the Third World (DeGenova and
Ramos-Zayas 2003).
The dominance of Cubans in Miami is a different story. Not only
are Cubans the main Hispanic group in terms of numbers, but persons
born in Cuba or of Cuban descent are Miami’s largest ethnic group.
Miami’s Cubans are politically dominant, economically powerful, and
largely set the cultural tone for the city (Grenier and Perez 2003,
pp. 47Á48). The dominance of Cubans, many of whom are phenotypically
white or light-skinned, no doubt helps to explain why 86 per
cent of the Hispanics in the Miami metropolitan area identified
themselves as white on the 2000 Census Á compared to 45 per cent in
Los Angeles, 42 per cent in New York, 50 per cent in Chicago, and
54 per cent in Houston (Logan 2003).6
Having acquired unprecedented
economic and political power that they do not share with other
Hispanic groups reinforces a focus among Cubans on national
identity, a tendency to repudiate the stigmatizing tag ‘Hispanic’, and
a resistance to making linkages to other less successful Hispanic
newcomers, although the recent growth of new Hispanic populations
in Miami (Nicaraguans, Colombians, and others) may lead Cubans to
reach out, at least in some situations, to these other groups (Itzigsohn
2004, p. 212).
Miami stands out not just for the Cuban presence, but for the Asian
absence. In 2000, only 1.4 per cent of Miami-Dade County’s residents
were Asian, a far smaller proportion than in any other major US
immigrant gateway city. Clearly, New York’s four-part ethnoracial
hierarchy Á white/black/Hispanic/Asian Á is not relevant in Miami.
Even in many gateway cities with large numbers of Asian immigrants,
the category ‘Asian’ is constructed differently than in New York,
depending on which Asian groups are present and predominate.
New York City’s Asian newcomers are a mix of nationalities. The
Chinese Á the only Asian population of note in the city prior to 1965 Á
are still the dominant Asian group, a little over two-fifths of the city’s
Asians in 2000. But they have been joined in the past few decades by a
significant number of South Asians, Koreans, and Filipinos. What
1008 Nancy Foner
New York lacks in any number, however, are Southeast Asians, who
are much more numerous in California, including Los Angeles.7
Given
the extremely low levels of education and high poverty rates among
foreign-born Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong, these groups do not
fit the ‘model minority’ stereotype of Asians which flourishes in cities
like New York. Where these Southeast Asian groups are a significant
presence, for example, in Fresno, Long Beach, and Stockton,
California and St. Paul, Minnesota, a less positive image of ‘Asians’
may well emerge. There is another difference between New York’s and
California’s Asians that may affect how they are perceived and how
they see themselves (including whether they develop a panethnic Asian
identity). Several cities in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay
regions have an Asian majority or near-Asian majority, with many
well-to-do Asian residents. By 2000, there were five cities in the Los
Angeles and San Francisco regions with an Asian majority; another
nine were more than 40 per cent Asian. Not a single city in the New
York region came close to having an Asian majority (Zhou and Kim
2003, pp. 129Á33).
New York, in short, cannot stand for the nation as a whole.
Regional and urban differences in immigrant flows, and in the
ethnoracial make-up of the native-born population, have led, not
surprisingly, to variation in the way that racial and ethnic categories
are constructed and perceived. At the same time, as I noted at the
outset, no city (or urban region) is an island, and various forces lead to
commonalities in the way race and ethnicity are constructed across the
United States. Indeed, the views that develop in New York may have
an undue influence, and diffuse across the United States, precisely
because the city is such an important media centre in the country Á
hub of the advertising and publishing industries, headquarters of
major television broadcasting companies, and location for the
production of dozens of magazines (see Gans 1999, p. 379). Los
Angeles, of course, is also a media capital. Because both New York
and Los Angeles are the major immigrant centres in the nation, the
production of popular culture is taking place in cities where notions of
race and ethnicity have been deeply affected Á though often in
different ways Á by the recent and massive immigrant influx.
Intergroup relations
The incredible ethnic and racial diversity in New York City and its
history of immigration have affected on-the-ground relations, and
created a mixture and mingling of ethnoracial groups. In the 1990s,
when he was in office, former Mayor David Dinkins often referred to
the city as a gorgeous mosaic. More recently, sociologists studying
second-generation New Yorkers have argued that New York may serve
How exceptional is New York? 1009
as a ‘positive model of creative multiculturalism and inclusion’ for the
rest of the country (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, and Waters 2004a, p. 17).
The city is not, of course, a racial paradise. People of colour
continue to experience prejudice and discrimination, and tension and
conflict between racial and ethnic groups are far from eliminated.
Residential segregation between whites and blacks persists at extraordinarily
high levels; black and Latino immigrants often engage in
distancing strategies to set themselves apart from African Americans
and Puerto Ricans; native minorities often resent what they see as
numerical, residential, economic, or political encroachment by immigrants;
and there is a general tendency, out of preference but also on
account of prejudice, for members of racial and ethnic groups to stick
to their own kind in day-to-day interactions (see Foner 2000, 2005). In
the 1990s, the city witnessed several black boycotts of Korean-owned
stores as well as two significant riots: one, in Brooklyn’s Crown
Heights in 1991, involving African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans,
began after a car driven by Hasidic Jews jumped the curb and killed a
young black (Guyanese) boy; the other, in the Dominican neighbourhood
of Washington Heights in 1992, was sparked by the fatal police
shooting of a suspected Dominican drug dealer (see Halle and Rafter
2003).
The fact is, however, that, by and large, peaceful coexistence between
members of different racial and ethnic groups is the rule in New York,
as in other gateway cities. Nor is it just a case of tolerance and
accommodation; genuine cooperation and coalition building also
often occur. Among other things, friendships develop in schools,
colleges, playgrounds, and workplaces, and political alliances are
formed on certain issues and electoral campaigns. A growing number
of multi-hued neighbourhoods have emerged in New York and
elsewhere, providing the basis for the creation of ties, particularly
among Asians, whites, and Latinos (see Sanjek 1998). Significant
numbers of American-born Hispanics and Asians have non-Hispanic
white spouses or partners, and though still relatively rare, black-white
intermarriages are rising in frequency (Foner and Fredrickson 2004).
These are national trends and dynamics. Of relevance here is
whether the forces for accommodation are stronger in New York
than in other immigrant gateway cities because of its history, its
institutions, and what one journalist calls its polyglot cosmopolitanism
(Tilove 2004).
New York and Los Angeles
When it comes to comparisons of New York City and Los Angeles, the
answer is a cautious ‘yes’. New York and Los Angeles are the premier
immigrant gateways in the contemporary United States, together
1010 Nancy Foner
home to about one in five of the nation’s foreign-born.8
A general
assumption, in the scholarly as well as popular literature, is that New
York City is a more immigrant-friendly place than Los Angeles, where
the reception of immigrants has been much cooler, indeed often
hostile. In the mid-1990s, Angelenos provided the votes needed to pass
Proposition 187, which, had it been implemented, would have made
undocumented immigrants ineligible for government-funded social
and health services. (Most of the provisions were later invalidated by
California court decisions.) In the same period, pro-immigrant New
York City mayors supported an executive order barring city employees
from disclosing a person’s immigration status to federal authorities.
When, in 2003, Mayor Bloomberg revised this policy in order to bring
New York City in line with federal regulations, he backtracked after a
few months in response to intense public pressure.
A number of reasons have been advanced to explain the warmer
welcome extended to newcomers in New York City (Waldinger 1996b;
Mollenkopf 1999; Keogan 2002; Sabah and Bozorgmehr 2003). New
York has always been an immigrant mecca, and the non-Hispanic
native white population is closer to its immigrant roots. Large-scale
immigration from abroad, by contrast, is new in Los Angeles, which,
until recently, was a heavily Anglo city filled with transplanted white
Midwesterners, many from rural areas and small towns. Los Angeles’s
native whites are less likely than Jewish-, Italian-, and Irish-American
New Yorkers to identify with their immigrant ancestors, who tended to
settle in America longer ago and in the midwestern or eastern homes
the Angelenos left behind. That Europeans continue to constitute a
significant proportion of first-generation immigrant New Yorkers has
also, as Keogan (2002) puts it, ‘facilitated the reproduction of an
inclusive immigrant identity.’ In 2000, first- and second-generation
immigrants accounted for less than a third of Los Angeles County’s
non-Hispanic whites compared to about half in New York City
(Mollenkopf, Olson, and Ross 2001).
The speed of the recent immigrant build-up plays a role. As against
the more gradual increase in New York City in the past few decades,
Los Angeles has experienced a growth spurt. The foreign-born
population of Los Angeles County went from 9.5 per cent in 1960
to 36 per cent in 2000; in New York City, the increase was more
modest, from 20 per cent in 1960 to 36 per cent in 2000. Moreover, the
overwhelming dominance of Mexicans and Central Americans in Los
Angeles Á about three-fifths of the region’s foreign-born Á has tilted
the immigrant profile there towards those with low skills, who are
more likely than the better-educated and highly-skilled to be perceived
as putting extra pressure on social services. In New York, the
proportion of high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants is fairly evenly
balanced, and the region’s least skilled newcomers tend to arrive with
How exceptional is New York? 1011
higher levels of education than the Mexicans who predominate in Los
Angeles (Waldinger and Lee 2001, pp. 62Á63).
The large Mexican and Central American presence in Los Angeles
has also led to a relatively high proportion of undocumented
compared to New York City. Opposition to immigrants and high
levels of immigration is generally greater when newcomers are seen as
being largely undocumented. It has also been argued that New York
City’s political institutions and culture, with a strongly partisan
political system and a long history of balancing ethnic interests and
managing ethnic competition, have been more effective in recognizing
and incorporating claims from immigrants (Mollenkopf 1999; Logan
and Mollenkopf 2003). In New York, ethnic competition is a fact
of life. As Mollenkopf (1999, p. 419) observes, far from finding
intergroup competition threatening, the city’s white population, largely
made up of first-, second-, and third-generation Catholics and Jews,
‘are masters of the art.’
Changes, however, are in the air in Los Angeles, as the 2005 election
of Antonio Villaraigosa, son of a Mexican immigrant, as Los Angeles
mayor indicates. The pressure of demographics and, perhaps more
important, the increasing political clout of Latinos have lessened antiimmigrant
sentiment in Los Angeles in the past few years. Indeed, as
immigration continues and as more native-born Angelenos leave the
region, a growing number of Los Angeles area residents are
immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants. One sociologist
speculates that Los Angeles may even emerge as ‘an engine of proimmigrant
sentiment comparable to, and even in some respects
outdoing, New York City’ (Halle 2003). Villaraigosa’s victory has
been hailed as a sign of the integration of Latinos into the mainstream
of Los Angeles political life and Villaraigosa praised as a gifted
coalition builder Á a ‘pol for a polygot city’ Á who ‘carried every
quadrant of this famously fractious city’ (Meyerson 2005).
Also bear in mind the reaction to immigrants in many suburban and
outer-rim areas of New York City, where formerly all- or nearly allwhite
communities have received large numbers of non-white, often
Latino, immigrants in the last decade. Not only (as in Los Angeles) is
the immigrant influx a radical change, but, in the case of predominantly
native white suburbs, residents have often moved there precisely
to flee the problems and ethnoracial diversity of the inner city.
Tensions are frequently rife between established residents and
newcomers, particularly when the new arrivals are low-skilled,
poorly-educated, often undocumented Latinos who have entered the
community in search of low-level work. In the New York area,
conflicts have arisen over day-labourer sites in towns in Westchester
County and on Long Island. Two hate crimes on Long Island in
Farmingville, a community about fifty miles from New York City,
1012 Nancy Foner
attracted national attention; in 2000, two Mexican day labourers were
beaten nearly to death by two men from nearby towns, and three years
later, four Farmingville teenagers burned down the house of a Mexican
family, who barely escaped (Gootman 2003; Smith 2003). While these
two crimes are extreme, they are indicative of a deep anti-immigrant
and anti-Latino sentiment and reaction that have not occurred, or at
least been sharply curtailed and contained, in New York City.
Hispanics and African Americans
New York City has adjusted more easily to the influx of new arrivals in
yet another way. In many cities around the country, relations between
Latino immigrants (and their children) and native blacks have become
deeply strained, some would say even potentially explosive. Nationally,
Hispanics now surpass blacks as the largest minority, and in a number
of cities Hispanics have numerically overtaken African Americans and
begun to challenge their newly-won accession to positions of power
and control. Whether this demographic shift leads to open conflict
depends on a host of factors, including the existence of interethnic
political institutions and the actions of particular political leaders.
There is, however, no denying the existence of competition between the
groups for political influence, jobs, housing, and educational resources
Á competition which is often exacerbated by negative stereotypes and
factors such as language divisions.
In cities in Texas and elsewhere in the Southwest where Hispanics
have recently outnumbered African Americans, the two groups are in
direct competition for representation on school boards and city
councils and in other local arenas of power (see Foley 2004). South
Central Los Angeles is another area where black-to-brown residential
succession has been taking place in many neighbourhoods. In the
lower-income city of Compton, in the southern end of South Central
Los Angeles, African Americans finally achieved power after a long
struggle, only to see their position contested by a growing Latino
population that is almost exclusively of Mexican origin. (Blacks went
from 71 per cent of Compton’s population in 1970 to 40 per cent in
2000, while the Hispanic share went from 13 to 57 per cent.) Some
black leaders have rejected the legitimacy of Latinos’ calls for
affirmative action, arguing that it was created to redress the wrongs
of slavery, not to benefit immigrants, and that Latinos are latecomers
who did not engage in civil rights struggles. For their part, Latinos
complain of lack of access to municipal jobs and leadership positions
in local government as well as African American school officials’ and
teachers’ biases against Latinos and insensitivity to Latino students’
special language needs (Johnson, Farrell, and Guinn 1999; Camarillo
How exceptional is New York? 1013
2004; see also McLain and Tauber 2001; Morawska 2001; Mindiola,
Niemann, and Rodriguez 2002).
There is a different twist to African-American-Latino strains in
Miami, where a large and established black minority find themselves
living in a city dominated demographically, politically, and economically
by Latinos. Tensions between Miami’s African Americans and
Cubans, it is said, ‘are seething constantly and fuming periodically’ Á
with the two communities divided by space, class, political party,
ideology and language. African Americans regard Cubans as their
‘new masters’ who, among other things, give preferential governmental
treatment to Hispanics and are indifferent to African American
concerns (Grenier and Castro 2001, pp. 150, 155). Blacks, as one
observer puts it, have felt engulfed ‘in a Latino maelstrom. Not only
did Latinos end up controlling most of Miami’s major political,
economic, and educational institutions, but their leaders appeared to
have little regard for the history of suffering that Blacks had been
subjected to or appreciation for their pioneering role in the civil rights
movement’ (Vaca 2004, p. 110).
New York City is not without tensions between African Americans
and Hispanics, but several factors have reduced their salience and
seriousness. Partly owing to large-scale black as well as Hispanic
immigration, Hispanics and blacks in New York City are almost equal
in number Á a demographic balance that has held for the past thirtyfive
years (see Table 2). In Los Angeles, Houston, Miami and other
cities, Hispanics far outnumber blacks, and this is a radical change that
has taken place over the past few decades. (Between 1970 and 2000, for
example, the proportion of Hispanics in metropolitan Miami more
than doubled, from 24 to 57 per cent, while blacks only slightly
increased their share, from 15 to 19 per cent. The city of Los Angeles
was 17 per cent black and 18 per cent Hispanic in 1970; by 2000, blacks
had declined to 11 per cent while Hispanics were up to 47 per cent. Onefifth
of Houston’s residents were black and only five per cent Hispanic
in 1960; by 2000, the proportion of blacks had grown only a little, to
25 per cent, but the Hispanic share had mushroomed to 37 per cent.)
Moreover, in New York City, unlike the Southwest and California
where the Hispanic population is overwhelmingly Mexican, or Miami,
where it is overwhelmingly Cuban, no one Hispanic group dominates
Á and there are large numbers from several nationalities. As a result,
the different groups are sometimes at odds with each other rather than
in conflict with native blacks. Robert Smith (2001) suggests a potential
division in New York City’s Latino community between those from the
Caribbean (Puerto Ricans and Dominicans) and those from Mesoamerica
and Andean countries (Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru,
and others) based on cultural and racial differences as well as
Dominicans’ and Puerto Ricans’ earlier access to elected office and
1014 Nancy Foner
political clout. Furthermore, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans are often
competitors, not allies, in political contests and Latino immigrants of
all stripes often seek to distinguish themselves from Puerto Ricans
(Pessar and Graham 2001; Smith 2001). Also, as will be recalled, an
unusually high proportion of Hispanic New Yorkers identify themselves
as blacks; ‘black Hispanics’ may be especially likely to develop
amicable ties and alliances with native and Caribbean blacks, and in
some cases to intermarry.
Intermixing and the second generation
Finally, there is the question of ‘creative multiculturalism’ in New
York City and the interactions between the second generation, native
minorities, and native whites. As the children of immigrants come of
age, new cultural patterns, often referred to as cultural hybrids, are
emerging as they grow up, go to school, work beside, and sometimes
intermarry with the long-established native-born. This is true throughout
the United States. Yet because of New York City’s extraordinary
ethnic heterogeneity, the creation of cultural hybrids involves a
remarkable number of groups Á Asians, Latin Americans, Caribbeans,
and Africans from many countries as well as native-born African
Americans, Puerto Ricans, and non-Hispanic whites, the latter mostly
Jewish-, Italian-, and Irish-American. Moreover, because established
minority and second-generation immigrant young people in New York
dominate their age cohort, they have a great deal of contact with each
other in their neighbourhoods and a variety of city institutions
(Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, and Waters 2002, p. 1027).
In the boroughs of New York City, young people in the first and
second generation mix and mingle with each other as well as native
minorities (less often with native whites) in a range of contexts (see
Malkin 2004; Trillo 2004; Warikoo 2004). It is in these interactions in
multi-ethnic neighbourhoods, workplaces, and colleges that new
popular cultural forms are born Á and that members of the second
generation come to see themselves as ‘New Yorkers’, rather than
American. Discussing the second-generation young adults in their
study, Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, and Waters (2002, p. 1034) write that a
‘New York identity embraced the dynamic cultural activities familiar
to them, but not necessarily the larger white society. ‘New Yorkers’, for
our respondents, could come from immigrant groups, native minority
groups, or be Italians, Irish, Jews, or the like.’
Anyone (like myself) who has taught at the City University of New
York Á where, in 2005, the undergraduate student body was 30 per
cent black, 28 per cent white, 26 per cent Hispanic, and 15 per cent
Asian Á can see this identity-creation process in action. Students from
places all over the world interact in class, become more comfortable
How exceptional is New York? 1015
with those from different national backgrounds, and come to take for
granted the incredible ethnic mix in their classes, on the subway, in
stores, and on the streets as a basic part of life in the city. Although
many second-generation youth live in ethnic enclaves where one or two
groups dominate, many also grow up in places like Jackson Heights,
with its incredible ethnic stew, including Indians, Pakistanis,
Mexicans, Dominicans, Chinese, Irish, and Pakistanis or ‘a Puerto
Rican, Mexican, Chinese, Arabic neighbourhood like Sunset Park
(where the aging population of ‘‘real Americans’’ are Norwegians)’
(Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, and Waters 2002, p. 1034). They may feel the
sting of disadvantage and discrimination, but they ‘move in a world
where being from ‘‘somewhere else’’ is the norm’ (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf
and Waters 2004b, p. 397). Ethnic diversity is the expectation in
New York. Indeed, this can sometimes be confusing to the newest
arrivals. Soviet teenagers whom Annelise Orleck (1987, p. 295) studied
were confounded when they entered high school in Brooklyn, wanting
to know where the Americans were: ‘It is. . . . hard to know what we
are supposed to be becoming. Everybody here is from someplace else.’
In describing the vibrant inner-city youth culture emerging in New
York, Kasinitz (2000, p. 41) speaks of a ‘melting pot of urban youths,
all ‘‘of color’’ but from a variety of cultures’ and young people creating
new forms of music (for example, Filipino and Indian hip-hop) that
fuse Asian and African-American forms and of fluid exchanges
between African Americans and Jamaicans and other West Indians:
‘The New York youth sporting dreadlocks . . . is as likely to be African
American as Jamaican, and the street slang of central Brooklyn youth
owes as much to Kingston and Port of Spain as to the American
South. . . . African-American young people dance to Jamaican dance
hall music and imitate Jamaican patois, even as West Indian youngsters
learn African American street slang. Puerto Ricans can meringue
and Dominicans can play salsa and rap in two languages.’
Does this mean that there is no interethnic/racial conflict among
second-generation youth from different countries or among secondgeneration
youth and native minorities and whites? Of course not.9
Does it mean that the children of immigrants, in many contexts, do not
‘hang out’ with peers from their own ethnic and racial group? Again,
the answer is no. Nor does it mean that members of some groups Á in
particular those of African ancestry Á do not experience subtle (and
often not so subtle) barriers to inclusion into new kinds of ethnoracial
mixes.
A few years ago, I taught a freshman seminar at CUNY that
included students from Colombia, the Philippines, Pakistan, India,
Russia, the republic of Georgia, Uzbekistan, as well as an African
American, Puerto Rican, and native white. It was clear that friendships
had developed among students from different groups, although an
1016 Nancy Foner
Indian student complained that when Russians gathered in the student
lounge they spoke Russian with each other, thereby excluding the
others, and the lone African American student appeared to have
developed few ties to the other students in the class. There is a danger
of reading too much into this one example, yet observations in my own
and others’ classes suggest that the kind of mixing among students of
Asian, Latino, and European background that I have described in the
seminar is nothing out of the ordinary in the context of CUNY. It is a
normal feature of college life, which will, I suspect, continue for many
students as they carve out careers in New York City workplaces after
graduation.10
If students of African ancestry appear to be less
integrated into informal social groups with those from other backgrounds,
they, too, are developing multi-ethnic ties that include age
peers of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and African background.
In some cases, these ties include Latinos, Asians, and non-Hispanic
whites as well. A fascinating example comes from recent research in
New York City high schools that indicates that some academically
successful Mexican young people identify and hang out with their
black counterparts as a way of becoming incorporated into the black
middle-class culture of mobility and facilitating their own upward path
(Smith 2004).
Thus while New York is obviously not a perfect model of inclusion
for the rest of the country, it does offer many optimistic signs Á and
the emergence of what has been called a ‘new kind of multiculturalism
. . . of hybrids and fluid exchanges across group boundaries’
(Kasinitz, Mollenkopf and Waters 2004a, p. 16).
Conclusion
New York is clearly exceptional in many ways as an American
immigrant city. The composition, and extraordinary diversity, of
immigrant streams to New York City have created a racial and ethnic
order that is unlike the Latinization of Los Angeles, Miami, or
Houston. Nor is it just the immigrant flows that make a difference as
they affect the basic demographic contours of the city. The particular
shape of New York City’s political structure and culture Á and the very
history of immigration there Á have implications for the dynamics of
ethnoracial identities and relations.
At the same time, as I have also noted, New York is not a world Á or,
I should say, city Á apart, and its ethnoracial structure is deeply
affected by national laws, policies, and institutions. Notions of
‘blackness’, for example, have been shaped by the legacy of slavery
and segregation in the nation as a whole; the category Hispanic is a
classification developed by the U.S. Census Bureau; and views of
Asians have been influenced by US political relations with (and
How exceptional is New York? 1017
economic developments in) Asian countries. The fact is, too, that the
national media and public discourse by national-level political leaders
have had a role in the construction of race and ethnicity in New York.
With regard to the media, however, another dynamic comes into play.
New York has been, and may well continue to be, a trendsetter for the
rest of the country. To the extent that much of the media in the country
is based in New York City, the ethnoracial hierarchies, categories, and
attitudes that hold sway there may have an impact elsewhere. Indeed,
Gans (1999, p. 379) even suggests that because New York and Los
Angeles are the country’s ‘prime creators of popular culture’, their
‘distinctive racial and ethnic characteristics will probably be diffused in
subtle ways throughout the country as a whole’.
The analysis in this article is a beginning attempt to understand how
constructions of race and ethnicity and intergroup relations develop in
particular urban centres in the United States in the context of largescale
immigration, applying a ‘city as context’ approach to the
examination of migration and multiculturalism. My own eye has
been on New York, yet future studies of immigration, race and
ethnicity will no doubt seek to place other cities on centre stage in
the quest to appreciate what makes them unique as well as what they
share with other American cities (for an account of multicultural
Miami and the hybrid cultural mixes that have developed there see
Stepick et al. 2003). Such endeavours will of necessity entail branching
out beyond established immigrant destinations to explore emerging
urban gateways that have only recently begun to receive large numbers
of immigrants (e.g. Gozdziak and Martin 2005). Given that immigration
has been occurring in an era of metropolitan decentralization and
suburbanization, they will also involve going beyond a focus on central
cities like New York to consider wider metropolitan areas and the
combination of central cities, inner and outer suburbs, and suburban
cities within these areas (Waldinger 2001a; Singer 2004). One thing
is clear: whether the spotlight is on central cities or suburbs of
metropolitan regions, the particular features of specific urban, or
suburban, contexts cannot be ignored or taken for granted Á and need
to be an integral part of studies by anthropologists and other scholars
who seek to comprehend the complex dynamics of migration and
multiculturalism in an American society that continues to be dramatically
transformed by the recent and ongoing massive immigration.
Notes
1. I deliberately use this broad definition of multiculturalism which, as Alba and Nee
(2003, p. 141) observe, is at one end of the spectrum of definitions of the term and ‘refers to
an undeniable empirical fact’. At the other end, as they note, ‘the term suggests a grand
ambition, to raise minority cultures to parity with the majority (or ones)’ (see Vertovec 1998
1018 Nancy Foner
for a discussion of the various meanings that multiculturalism can have for different social
and political actors). In my use of the term multiculturalism, I do not oppose it to
assimilation: assimilation is not a zero-sum game that requires the disappearance of ethnicity
or ethnic markers Á the more ethnic you are, the less you are a member of the dominant
culture (Alba and Nee 2003, p.11, Kasinitz 2004, p. 293). Ethnic diversity, to put it another
way, can go along with involvement in a common culture and commitment to shared
national core values and allegiances.
2. In 2000, 49 per cent of New York City’s non-Hispanic white population was foreignborn
or US-born with at least one foreign-born parent; this was true for 42 per cent of the
city’s non-Hispanic blacks (Mollenkopf, Olsen, and Ross 2001, p. 32).
3. On the structure of economic opportunities, wages, and housing see Foner 2000, 2001,
2005; Waldinger 1996a; Ellis 2001.
4. Race is a highly problematic, and highly charged concept, partly because it takes on
meanings in popular discourse that differ from academic understandings and partly because
of a concern that using the term can legitimize the very inequalities it describes. I follow
George Fredrickson in using race to refer 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’ (Foner and Fredrickson 2004, p. 2).
‘Ethnicity’ is often distinguished from race by defining ethnicity as based on ancestry and
descent as opposed to biology or genes, but such distinctions are not as easy or unambiguous
as scholars sometimes maintain. Fredrickson (2002, pp. 154Á155) argues that race can be
described as what happens when ethnicity is deemed essential or indelible and made
hierarchical.
5. In 2000, in Los Angeles and Houston, for example, around two-thirds or more of the
Hispanic population was of Mexican origin; in New York City, 38 per cent was of Puerto
Rican ancestry, 27 per cent Dominican, 9 per cent Mexican, 16 per cent South American, and
7 per cent Central American (Logan and Mollenkopf 2003).
6. Almost half of all Latinos in the nation chose ‘white’ as their race on the 2000 Census.
7. As a refugee population, Southeast Asians have been spread out around the country
and stand out in a number of states that have small immigrant populations. In 2000,
Vietnamese were the largest immigrant group in Louisiana, and Laotians the second largest
in Minnesota and Wisconsin. A third of the nation’s foreign-born Cambodians, 41 per cent
of the nation’s foreign-born Vietnamese, and 32 per cent of the nation’s foreign-born
Laotians lived in California (Camarota and McArdle 2003).
8. This is based on 2000 figures for New York City and Los Angeles County. If only the
city of Los Angeles is considered, then it is one in seven. If the larger New York and Los
Angeles metropolitan areas are the units, they were home to one out of three US immigrants
(see Singer 2004).
9. The respondents in the New York second generation study conducted by Kasinitz,
Mollenkopf, and Waters (2004a, p. 10) reported that the greatest hostility occurs between
groups that are relatively close to each other in residential space and the labour market Á
English-speaking West Indians reporting conflicts with Haitians and African Americans, for
example, and South Americans colliding with Puerto Ricans and Dominicans.
10. Data from the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York Survey
suggest that large numbers of second-generation adults are employed in multicultural
worksites (reported in Malkin 2004).
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NANCY FONER is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, Hunter College, City University
of New York, 695 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10021,
USA. Email:Bnfoner@hunter.cuny.edu
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