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>> 1 Introduction New York and Amsterdam: Immigration and the New Urban Landscape Jan Rath, Nancy Foner, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Rogier van Reekum Immigration is dramatically changing major cities throughout the world. Nowhere is this more true than in Amsterdam and New York City, which, after decades of large-scale immigration, now have populations that are about a third foreign born. Amsterdam and New York City have had to deal with incorporating hundreds of thousands of immigrants whose ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds differ from those of many long-established residents, and who display a variety of different languages, religions, cultures, and lifestyles. How have the specific urban contexts of Amsterdam and New York shaped the fates of these newcomers? And—conversely—how has the massive recent immigration transformed New York City and Amsterdam? These are the central questions that will be addressed in this book. A Transatlantic Comparison of Immigrant Cities Amsterdam and New York City share more than a high proportion of foreign born. That the immigrants arriving there in the last half century have mostly come from outside of Europe is a new development in both cities. Newcomers have had to face a wide array of challenges of adjustment and accommodation, and these processes show remarkable similarities in the two cities. Immigrants have sometimes gotten a cold or 2 > 3 a growing interest in comparisons of immigration in European and American cities. Within Europe, there have been some attempts to look at the effects of immigration in cities in the same or different countries (e.g., Alexander 2007; Body-Gendrot and Martiniello 2000, Garbaye 2006; Penninx et al. 2004); within the United States, comparisons of different gateway cities have risen on the research agenda, especially in light of large-scale immigration to new or emerging urban destinations (e.g., Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell 2008).7 A central question has been understanding how cities differ as contexts of reception depending on the way geographic and historical particularities have shaped immigrant flows—including their skill levels, national origin composition, and timing of arrival—and the effects of particular social, economic, and political institutions and structures on the options available to newcomers from abroad (Brettell 2003; Foner 2005; Price and Benton-Short 2008; Waldinger 2001). New York has loomed large in cross-city comparative efforts in the United States, which have often tried to explain why Los Angeles—the other major U.S. immigrant city—has provided a different, and until recently a much less welcoming, reception for millions of immigrants who have moved there in the last half century (e.g., Sabagh and Bozorgmehr 2003; Foner 2005, 2007; Foner and Waldinger 2013; Mollenkopf 1999; Waldinger 1996). As Roger Waldinger (1996) has pointed out, the case of New York has been too often considered as a proxy for “the” immigrant experience in American cities. Certainly, many of the same kind of social relations and processes are found in different cities, but “the unique characteristics of each of the places and the differences in their respective immigrant flows highlight the way in which the urban context matters” (Waldinger 2001: 5). Comparisons of European and American immigrant cities are also scarce. John Mollenkopf (2000) in a thought-provoking paper explored the fate of the second generation in Amsterdam and New York. Bowen Paulle (2005) has provided a comparative ethnographic account of schools in the Bronx (New York) and Bijlmer (Amsterdam) that focuses heavily on immigrant-origin youth, and Maurice Crul and Jennifer Holdaway (2009) have examined how the different educational systems in New York and Amsterdam shape the trajectories of the children of immigrants in schools. A number of edited collections—Unraveling the Rag Trade: Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Seven World Cities 4 > 5 First, as has already been said, such comparative studies are thin on the ground and this is actually quite striking in a field as global as international migration to world cities. It is precisely because Amsterdam and New York are both so similar and so different that a book bringing together essays on them as immigrant cities is valuable. Juxtaposing essays on, and contrasting, immigration in the two cities helps to illuminate the contextual factors shaping immigration’s effects. The transatlantic , trans-city comparison also calls attention to dynamics that might be missed or taken for granted if we focused on only one city. Scholars of immigration in New York, for example, often downplay the role of the state, while for Dutch academics it is central; in New York...

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