Immigrants, New York City

IRISH AND GERMAN IMMIGRANTS

THE NEW IMMIGRATION

ASSIMILATION

CHALLENGES FOR IMMIGRANTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For most countries, immigration constitutes an engine of transformation. For the United States, New York City serves as a symbol of the many peoples from all over the globe who have arrived in the country. It also serves as a microcosm of the complex cultural, political, and socioeconomic issues that immigration gives rise to.

By the time the first Europeans sailed into what is today New York City in the early sixteenth century, the migration of indigenous people into the region had been occurring for thousands of years. The Lenape—who spoke the Algonquin language—populated the area at the time. The influx of European immigrants was slow at first. It was not until the third decade of the seventeenth century that the first major wave of European immigrants settled in the New York City area. The largest immigrant groups were of northern and western European background. Dutch immigrants were the first to locate in what is now Manhattan, founding a settlement they called New Amsterdam. African populations also made an early appearance in the region. On September 15, 1655, the ship Witte Paert brought 300 African slaves to New Amsterdam. By 1664, the black population was estimated at between 20 and 25 percent of the total.

In the summer of 1664, New Amsterdam fell to the British. In 1674, the colony was granted to James, the Duke of York, giving New York its name. The Dutch remained the largest immigrant group throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed by French Huguenots. Over 60, 000 people resided in the city in 1800.

Immigration into New York greatly expanded in the period between 1815 and 1880, which became known as the Old Immigration era. The immigrant flow from northern and western Europe continued, but from different countries. Hundreds of thousands of Irish and German immigrants moved into the city, followed by English and Scots. By 1860, New York City had 813, 669 residents, out of which 383, 717 were foreign-born, including 203, 740 Irish and 118, 292 Germans.

IRISH AND GERMAN IMMIGRANTS

The Irish migration to the United States in the nineteenth century was motivated by a wide array of forces. The American economy had been expanding rapidly and was an attractive source of jobs. New York City itself was booming as a result of the opening of the Erie Canal, which allowed transportation of goods along the Hudson River all the way to the Great Lakes. At the same time, what is now Ireland had become the most densely populated part of Europe, with hundreds of thousands of young workers desperately looking for employment, some in the United States. Immigration peaked in the 1850s, when close to a million Irish moved to America. This migration surge was a result of sharply deteriorating economic conditions in Ireland. In 1845, a fungal disease viciously attacked Irish potato fields, leaving crops almost entirely destroyed. Famine and disease followed, with more than a million people dying and many others fleeing to the United States and other countries in the ensuing decade.

Many of the Irish immigrants were poor and unskilled. They lived in tenements, which were large, cramped, multifamily housing units with scant plumbing, heating, or lighting. They were often discriminated against and vilified for taking employment opportunities from U.S.-born Americans. Nativist groups, whose ideology was that the immigrants were hurting the American economy, society, and culture, campaigned against Irish immigrants, often spreading bigoted views of the Irish. Like other immigrant groups, the Irish were initially marginalized from the city’s social and political mainstream. Historians such as Noel Ignatiev and David R. Roedinger find that these immigrants were considered racial minorities at the time, not part of the white population of the city. This poverty and social exclusion exploded in the draft riots of 1863. In July, as the names of thousands of Civil War draftees were announced, many poor Irish who could not pay the $300 draft waiver ran into the streets of the city in protest, burning buildings, looting stores, and assaulting and killing thousands of people. Black residents of the city came under savage attacks that were fueled not just by prejudice but also by the rioters seeking a scapegoat, blaming blacks for their many miseries, including the Civil War draft, low wages, and lack of employment opportunities.

Despite the initial barriers, Irish immigrants gradually progressed in the economy and in society. Because of their growing numbers, they were able to exert considerable political influence in New York City’s government institutions, especially through the Democratic Party. Indeed, from being considered a disenfranchised racial minority, the Irish eventually became part of the ethnic white majority population of the city.

Although most German immigrants in the nineteenth century moved to America for the same reason as the Irish—economic opportunity—they had very different origins. They tended to be highly skilled and were able to avoid poverty. From piano production and rubber manufacturing to finance, Germans dominated many high-income sectors of the New York City economic structure. Despite its comparative wealth, the German community in New York—called Kleindeutschland—became highly segregated from the rest of the population. This was partly the result of language differences, but it also reflected the reproduction of German institutions within the community.

THE NEW IMMIGRATION

The ethnic composition of immigrants to New York City changed drastically in the period from 1880 to 1920, when it shifted toward immigrants of southern and eastern European background. This immigrant wave, consisting of Italians, Russian Jews, Poles, and Greeks, among others, became known as the New Immigration. Many of these immigrants passed through the immigrant reception center at Ellis Island in the New York City harbor, which opened January 2, 1892.

Like many other mass migration movements, this one followed a chain migration process, by which the initial flow of migrants self-sustains and expands over time. The earlier immigrants sent information about employment opportunities back home, then provided social, economic, and cultural support to later migrants. Between 1880 and 1920, more than 4.1 million Italian immigrants arrived in the United States. Many of these stayed in New York City. Although only 14, 000 Italian immigrants resided in New York City in 1880, by 1920 there were almost 400, 000. Similarly, the city’s Russian Jewish immigrant community grew from 14, 000 in 1880 to over half a million in 1920, becoming the largest foreign-born population.

The reasons for this mass migration episode are many. In the early nineteenth century, travel from Europe to the United States could take months. By the late nineteenth century, however, the growth of steamship and railroad travel had made the global movement of people both faster and cheaper. Economic dislocations in southern and eastern Europe, particularly those associated with the decline of agriculture, had generated populations of workers eager to seek opportunities elsewhere. A large share of Italian immigrants, for example, came from southern Italy, especially Sicily and the Mezzogiorno, regions that had stagnated relative to north. Many of these immigrants were unskilled and obtained relatively low-paying jobs in America, including construction (for men) and the garment industry (for women). The mass migration of Russian—and other—Jews to America in the period from 1880 to 1920 was triggered not just by economic forces but also by the resurgence of anti-Semitism, pogroms, and other restrictive laws in many parts of central and eastern Europe. This led them to seek refuge in America. Many of these migrants were skilled workers who became artisans, craftsmen, traders, and financiers.

The late 1920s saw immigration to New York City decline sharply. One reason was the Great Depression, which started in 1929 and lasted through the 1930s. In New York City, unemployment rates reached as high as 25 percent, discouraging potential migrants from moving to America. But economic distress was not the only reason for the drop in immigration. Until the 1920s, the United States had virtually no immigration restrictions. Although border checkpoints had been introduced at twenty-four seaports and popular border crossings such as Ellis Island beginning in the early 1890s, the only restrictions were to exclude sick persons, known criminals, and the like. The

one country that faced sharp restrictions was China; the 1882 Chinese Exclusion and Immigration Act effectively barred Chinese immigration until the 1940s. But the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1924 ended this lax immigration policy. The law imposed the first permanent quotas on immigration, although Western Hemisphere migrants were exempted. It also created a system of immigration preferences that gave an advantage to western and northern Europe. The 1930s saw further restrictive immigration policy initiatives; immigrants were seen as taking jobs from Americans in a period of severe unemployment.

ASSIMILATION

Immigration began to rebound in the 1940s and 1950s, and it surged again after 1965. In that year, legislation that repealed the quota system established in the 1920s was signed into law. The result was a sharp increase in immigration, especially from developing nations. The proportion of New Yorkers born outside the United States had declined from 34 percent in 1924 to a low of 18 percent in 1970, but by 2000 the proportion had risen back to 36 percent. Most of these immigrants were not from Europe but from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. Out of the 2,871, 032 immigrants counted by the 2000 U.S. Census of Population, 53 percent were born in Latin America and the Caribbean and 24 percent in Asia. Table 1 shows the population of the largest immigrant groups in 2000. The countries of origin where the largest number of immigrants originated were the Dominican Republic, China, Jamaica, Mexico, and Guyana. Most of these migrants had an economic reason for moving to the city, motivated by huge wage differences between their home countries and a New York City economy that has displayed renewed and resilient strength since the early 1980s. Indeed, recent immigrants have generally been able to raise their families’ standard of living, sending billions of dollars back to their home countries in the form of remittances. But their social and economic progress in the United States has not been without challenges.

Assimilation refers to the process of absorption or fusion of immigrant groups and their descendants into American culture or society. Robert E. Park and the Chicago school of sociology were among the first social scientists to study the process of assimilation in Chicago, New York, and other cities, beginning in the 1920s. Their analysis suggested that for the European immigrant groups entering America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assimilation did gradually occur over time. From the acquisition of English to a successful accommodation to the labor market, the immigrants and their descendants (second and third generations) were becoming an integral part of American civil society. This became known as the melting pot view of American society.

But concern has been expressed by some social scientists about the process of assimilation of recent immigrants, particularly those from Latin America and the Caribbean. For instance, political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, in his book Who Are We? The Challenges to American Cultural Identity (2004), claims that, unlike previous immigration flows, recent immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean have not assimilated into mainstream American society. Other social scientists have also expressed concerns that recent immigrants may face difficulties assimilating to the American labor market. The evidence on these issues is not clear-cut.

CHALLENGES FOR IMMIGRANTS

Recent New York City immigrants struggle in an economy that is increasingly unequal and that rewards skills and schooling above anything else. For immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, whose level of schooling is substantially below the average, this leads to comparatively low income levels and high poverty rates. Table 1 displays basic indicators of socioeconomic status for various New York City populations. The data are from the 2000 U.S. Census of Population. As can be seen, the annual income per person in the average New York City household was $24, 010. But for Dominican migrants, the largest immigrant group in the city, the average income per capita of $10,417 was less than half the average for the city and less than one-third the income per capita of the white population. Poverty rates among immigrants also tend to be higher than among the overall city population. For example, according to the 2000 census, about 30 percent of both Dominican and Mexican immigrants in New York had income below the poverty line, much higher than the citywide poverty rate of approximately 20 percent. The struggle of immigrants in and around New York City is poignantly portrayed by Dominican writer Junot Diaz in his novel Drown (1996).

Table 1 shows that the lower socioeconomic status of New York immigrants is not linked to high unemployment. The unemployment rates among immigrants are not that different from those of other New Yorkers. But wages are much lower, an outcome connected in part to lower educational attainment. As Table 1 depicts, the percentage of immigrants twenty-five years of age or older who had not completed a high school education in 2000 was much higher than for the rest of the city’s population; for Dominicans it was 56 percent, more than twice the average citywide.

Some recent immigrants are also undocumented workers and face even more serious socioeconomic challenges. Estimates for 2005 suggest that as many as 10 million undocumented workers may be residing in the United States, with half a million in the New York City area. Recent immigration policy initiatives have led to more stringent U.S. immigration enforcement efforts, especially after the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks. As a consequence, many undocumented workers—whether from China, Mexico, or Ecuador—are forced further underground, fearing deportation after many years of residence in the country. Entry into the United States from many developing countries has also become much tougher for both documented and undocumented immigrants.

But the social and economic struggles of the new immigrants are not new. Unskilled immigrants have historically struggled in the New York City economy. Even social scientists who proposed the melting pot theory noted that immigrant assimilation took several generations and that immigrants themselves often remained embedded in ethnic enclaves with limited linguistic, political, and economic incorporation into American society, whether in the form of a Kleindeutschland or a barrio. Some find that America, particularly urban America, was not and probably never will be culturally homogenous. For instance, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan concluded in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963) that in New York City cultural diversity and ethnic identity remain even after many generations, a conclusion shared more recently by sociologists Victor Nee and Richard Alba. At the same time, some immigrant groups have historically been able to make the transition from being marginalized racial and ethnic minorities to being considered as part of the country’s majority white population while others have not. Social scientists such as Milton M. Gordon and John Ogbu have argued that discrimination and social exclusion may delay or permanently stall any processes of assimilation of stigmatized immigrant groups. The “racialization” of these immigrants may not, however, run along simple black-white racial lines. As sociologists Jennifer Hochschild, Clara Rodriguez, and Mary Waters have noted recently, racial formation for recent immigrants may evolve complex constructions, involving perhaps multiple racial identities. In addition, the recent waves of migrants to New York City include many who move back and forth between their source countries and the United States. This transnationalization, which makes the new immigration different from the old European immigration waves of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, generates new opportunities but also challenges for the migrants. Sociologists Hector Cordero-Guzman, Robert C. Smith, and Ramon Grosfoguel summarize these issues and discuss the work of the authors mentioned above in their edited volume Migration, Transnationalization, and Race in a Changing New York (2001).

National opinion surveys suggest that most recent immigrant groups and their children, including those from Latin America and the Caribbean, wish to succeed in American society in a way similar to their earlier cohorts. As in the past, despite serious challenges, many immigrants remain the strongest advocates of the American Dream. Sharply improved standards of living relative to the situation in source countries, as well as positive expectations of future economic progress and social mobility, are behind these opinions. But various populations in the United States—from blacks and Chinese to Puerto Ricans and Mexicans—have faced severe and persistent barriers to their socioeconomic progress. Recent immigrants are not immune from these forces, and they are well aware of the difficulties. For instance, the 2003 Pew Hispanic Center National Survey of Latinos found that over 90 percent of immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean believe that it is very important (for most, essential) that their children receive a college education in order to succeed in American society. But the same survey found that these immigrants are also seriously concerned about the quality of the high schools their children attend, the rising cost of college tuition, and similar issues.

Particularly worrisome is the condition of undocumented immigrants. In 2006, tens of millions of undocumented immigrants and other concerned groups peacefully marched in New York City, Los Angeles, and many other cities to encourage policy makers to adopt policies that will allow the immigrants to emerge from the underground labor markets in which they work. As in the past, appropriate economic, social, and immigration policies that facilitate immigrant socioeconomic mobility will be required to ensure that the new immigrants achieve their goals.

SEE ALSO African Americans; American Dream; Assimilation; Caribbean, The; Citizenship; Diaspora; Disease; Ethnicity; Famine; Great Depression; Huntington, Samuel P.; Immigrants to North America; Immigration; Latinos; Melting Pot; Migration; Mobility, Lateral; Naturalization; Nuyoricans; Ogbu, John U.; Park School, The; Segregation, Residential; U.S. Civil War

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Binder, Frederick M., and David M. Reimers. 1995. All the Nations Under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City. New York: Columbia University Press.

Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. 1998. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cordero-Guzman, Hector, Robert C. Smith, and Ramon Grosfoguel, eds. 2001. Migration, Transnationalization, and Race in a Changing New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Diaz, Junot. 1996. Drown. New York: Riverhead Books.

Foner, Nancy. 2000. From Ellis Island to JFK, New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. 1963. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Harvard University Press.

Hernandez, Ramona, and Francisco L. Rivera-Batiz. 1997. Dominican New Yorkers: A Socioeconomic Profile. New York: Dominican Research Monograph, City College Dominican Studies Institute.

Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenges to American Cultural Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Kasinitz, Philip, John H. Mollenkopf, and Mary C. Waters. 2004. Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the Second Generation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Portes, Alejandro, and Ruben Rumbaut. 2006. Immigrant America: A Portrait, 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rivera-Batiz, Francisco L. 2004. NewYorktitlan: The Socioeconomic Status of Mexican New Yorkers. Regional Labor Review 6 (1): 33–45.

Smith, Robert. 2005. Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Francisco Rivera-Batiz