Deja Vu All Over Again? Contemporary International Migrants in Comparative Historical Perspective

Nancy Foner. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York City's Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. x + 334pp. Figures, notes, references, and index. $29.95

The experience of continuously absorbing millions of international migrants over the course of two centuries has left a profound mark on national, group, and individual self-consciousness among Americans. Much of what Americans know of themselves grows out of narratives constructed from immigration stories. The same may be said of what we do not know of the Others around us. The mostly uninformed immigration stories of yesterday's immigrants and their descendents often valorize their experience, as they have constructed it, over that of today's immigrants. In these constructions, recent arrivals always seem somehow to struggle less with adversity, to get more public assistance in resettling, to be poorer candidates for American citizenship, and to make less respectable and responsible neighbors, and they are seen to lower the cultural level of the society they enter. As my mother-in-law, a grandchild of the mid-nineteenth-century German and Scots-Irish immigrants, once told me, a grandchild of early-twentieth-century Russian Jewish immigrants, her people made better Americans than the later European arrivees, because they came to the United States desiring to be Americans. (If so, they show little resemblance to the Germans and Irish about whom I have been doing research for two decades!) This sort of informal phileopietistic discourse is laden with self-serving mythologies that enable us to seat our ancestors at the right-hand of the Founding Fathers. It unrealistically conceives of immigration as an ideological pilgrimage rather than a practical search, whether desperate or calculating, for cheap land or a decent wage. Just now, it pervades the consciousness of many Americans of European background as they witness our history's third massive wave of immigrants--the newcomers from Asia, South and Central America, and elsewhere beyond Europe, who have arrived in ever-increasing numbers since the change in the immigration quota laws in 1965. If such comparisons were left on that informal level, they might have little more cultural authority than reruns of Archie Bunker episodes, many of which traversed the same terrain and provided the liberal Rob Reiner with the opportunity to get a laugh at the expense of his bigoted TV father-in-law, while serving as Norman Lear's spokesman for democratic pluralism. But, of course, these comparisons between a mythologized past and a dubiously rendered present do routinely enter the public realm, shaping the agenda of politics, especially at the state and local level, and providing ammunition for the faltering insurgency of Patrick Buchanan, the latest incarnation of political nativism.

Recognition of the pervasive character of this sort of nativist discourse should prompt us to be especially grateful to Nancy Foner for undertaking a systematic comparison of significant aspects of contemporary and turn-of-the-century international migration to New York City, historically the nation's primary immigrant receiving center. To the best of my knowledge, though a local case-study, Foner's is the only extended effort thus far to undertake this sort of project, which would seem essential for public enlightenment at a time when a massive wave of immigration is remaking the character of the American people for yet a third time.

An anthropologist who has written extensively about contemporary West Indian migration to the United States, Foner pays history a significant compliment in doing this study. Having become aware in her research and in her daily experience in New York City of what she calls the "invention of immigration (p.3)," by which yesterday's wretched foreign refuse become today's folk heroes through comparisons to today's wretched foreign refuse, she concluded that only a large-scale comparative analysis that takes advantage of the massive historical literature could evaluate this...