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>> 143 5 Nativism, Racism, and Immigration in New York City Mary C. Waters When immigrants enter a new society the history and institutions of that society shape the opportunities and obstacles they will encounter. Most comparisons of the integration of immigrants in Europe and the U.S. begin with an acknowledgement of that fact. The United States’ long history of immigration is often held up as a resource that provides a model or pathway for current immigrants to follow, one that is lacking in European countries. On the other hand, America’s dark history of slavery and racism is seen as a roadblock or barrier to incorporation for today’s nonwhite immigrants and their children. In this chapter I explore the interplay between these two historical patterns and how they manifest themselves in the local history and context of New York City. My argument is that it is important to make a distinction between racism and nativism. Racism can be defined as the belief that “socially significant differences between human groups or communities that differ in visible physical characteristics or putative ancestry are innate and unchangeable” and when “such a sense of deep, unalterable difference [ . . . is] accompanied by the notion that ‘we’ are superior to ‘them’ and need to be protected from the real or imagined threats to our privileged group position that might arise if ‘they’ were to gain in resources and rights” (Foner and Fredrickson 2004: 2–3). Nativism is defined as an “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground 144 > 145 and hopelessness. Thus nonwhite immigrants enter a city that remains deeply unequal in terms of race, highly segregated, and occasionally hostile. As if this paradox was not enough, both of these phenomena—nativism and racism—are changing in the wider society. Events since the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s have led to declines in the grip of racial inequality on the life chances of nonwhites and better race relations than the U.S. has ever experienced (although with quite a long way to go). And the rapid growth of Mexican immigration and most especially undocumented immigration since the early 1990s has led to a growth of nativist rhetoric and punitive laws targeting both legal and illegal immigrants and even their children (Massey and Sánchez R. 2010). These American conditions have improved vis-à-vis race in the last few decades and deteriorated vis-à-vis immigration. The current wave of immigration to the U.S. began at about the same time as the passage of the Civil Rights Act that finally ended de jure segregation and discrimination on the basis of race. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration Act of 1965 were both a result of the Civil Rights Movement, and the rationale for the 1965 act was to finally remove the racial quotas that had been the core of American immigration decisions since the 1920s. Even though the law set out specifically to allow equal access to immigration among all the countries in the world, most of the lawmakers who passed it did not understand that the result of the new system would be to change the racial distribution of immigrants coming to the United States. The immigration to the U.S. since the early 1970s has been predominantly nonwhite and has changed the racial distribution of the entire U.S. population. At the same time the changes in the status of native minorities—mostly African Americans, but also native-born Hispanics, American Indians, and Asians—in the post–Civil Rights era have meant that the nature of race relations is increasingly complicated and contested. Progress has most definitely occurred for native minorities, at the same time as racism has persisted. The election of Barack Obama was heralded by many as a symbol of this new postracial society. At the same time national statistics on race show persisting gaps between whites and blacks on every important measure of wealth and wellbeing (Massey and Denton 1993; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Conley 1999; 146 > 147 lackofstoresandotherinstitutionsinghettos.Atthesametime,scholarsof immigration were describing many of the same cities as magnets for new immigrants, sites of investment in neighborhoods, rising home ownership ,andthehometosmallbusinessesandevenmanufacturing. New York City is a site where all of these paradoxes are present. Home to a large and long-standing population of native African Americans and Puerto Ricans, and a gateway city with a very large and diverse immigrant population, New York is a place where race and immigration intersect. Identified as...

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