Where We Live Now: Immigration and Race in the United States (review)

Rather than a full-blown analysis of the impact of immigration on racial identity and race relations in the contemporary United States, Iceland’s book is an optimistic interpretation of the spatial assimilation of immigrants in city neighborhoods and the significance of this process for racial hierarchy. Drawing on his own previous research, a case study of the Washington, DC, area, and a wide range of relevant sociological literature, he presents an empirically rich portrait of increasingly diverse urban communal spaces and projects an urban society in which “many groups of people share, with some degree of harmony and conflict, communal space” (p. 131). The increasing ethnic diversity driven by massive immigration from diverse sources, Iceland argues, is actually decreasing the degree of residential segregation in American cities and leading to a more equal society.

Immigrants tend to concentrate in certain states but within cities they live in increasingly diverse communities in close proximity to native Whites and Blacks. Iceland draws our attention to the fact that immigrants relate to a number of different ethnic communities as they settle in.

The book begins with an overview of theories regarding immigrant assimilation and gravitates toward the notion of “segmented assimilation,” arguing for considerable integration of new groups, while acknowledging that racial, class, and other distinctions shape the process of assimilation, meaning that poorer and racially stigmatized immigrants tend to assimilate more slowly. Subsequent chapters lay out the patterns of residential segregation and develop Iceland’s article, depending particularly on the dissimilation index and the isolation index. An Appendix lays out his methods for measuring ethnic and racial segregation as well as a series of tables and figures illustrating the generalizations in the text.

The book is loaded with fascinating observations that go well beyond its main focus on urban space. Broader identities are emerging in both the Latino and Black communities. In the first case, a Latino identity can and does cross-racial lines, while second- and third-generation West Indian and other Black immigrants often develop an identity as African Americans.

One of Iceland’s more controversial arguments, in distinction to Douglas Massey’s and Nancy Denton’s in American Apartheid (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), is likely to be his observation that “immigration has softened the black–white divide,” that the increasing diversity brought by immigration has been leading to a change of status for native Blacks. Iceland is dealing with a later period, roughly the past 25 years, and he is careful to note that the spatial assimilation has been slower and more uneven for Black immigrants. Nevertheless, he argues that racial segregation has been decreasing for a generation and clearly demonstrates a modest change in terms of residence. The number of all-white neighborhoods is declining; the number of stable ethnically diverse ones is increasing. But Iceland’s argument that such gradual and uneven residential integration is part of a broader process of racial leveling is more tenuous. Deep gaps remain in the areas of employment, earnings, wealth, education, and other areas. Where we do find decreasing residential segregation, it is not clear how this is leading in any direct way toward a more general integration of African Americans and certainly not the Black poor.

A strictly spatial approach to the problem of spatial assimilation has many advantages, and Iceland clearly establishes the fact that residential segregation has declined in the context of increasing diversity. Yet the degree to which these immigrants actually interact on a regular basis with people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds (and presumably assimilation is driven to some degree by such interaction) is far from clear. Historians of immigrant communities have long recognized that the notion of “ethnic ghettos” is very misleading, that a particular ethnic enclave might develop in close proximity to other ethnic groups, and that what we refer to as...