Promises, Promises

The answer to Roger Waldinger’s title question is: Yes, but it all depends on what was promised and to whom. Since Waldinger’s title evokes Moses Rischin’s history of east European Jewish immigrants, it is worth noting at the start that no other immigrant group, and certainly not African Americans, have found in this metropolis such fulfillment as Jews. Rischin calls New York The Promised City, a site of Jewish collective aspirations as well as individual ambitions that competed with the biblical promised land. Yet if the promises are scaled down to less prophetic dimensions of security, social mobility, a decent livelihood, and dreams of a better future, then even postindustrial New York can be said to be delivering the goods, albeit in different forms and at varied speeds to new immigrants and African Americans.

New York does not lend itself easily to analysis. It is enormous and atypical. As Waldinger repeatedly emphasizes, it is “a minority majority” city, which means that its story goes “beyond black and white,” as he persuasively puts it in his conclusion. Furthermore, New York for well over a century was a white ethnic city that resisted easy characterization since it lacked a single majority population. In taking up the challenge of making sense of the city, Waldinger also faces the scholar’s legitimate concern that his larger argument might be dismissed by readers as applicable only to New York and thus irrelevant to other American cities. Sagely he addresses not only the specifics of his subject but also current debates about urban decline and African American socioeconomic failure. The result is a stunning synthesis that offers a richly nuanced interpretation of postindustrial New York even as it suggests a compelling new model to understand class, race, and ethnicity in urban America at the end of the twentieth century. One can only hope that Waldinger’s interpretation proves as powerful on the national scene as some of his predecessors who took New York City as their laboratory.

Waldinger posits a single explanation to account for immigrant and African-American economic behavior. He combines the concept of the ethnic queue, in which newcomers enter the job market behind earlier arrivals and then gradually move up the ladder as those ahead of them advance, with the immigrant and ethnic niche. Immigrants establish economic niches and these often develop by the second generation into ethnic niches. Mobility does not necessarily involve abandoning ethnic niches for widely scattered jobs. Given the reality of job competition, ethnic networks retain their importance for second-, third-, and even fourth-generation white workers. “This book tells us that getting a job remains very much a matter of whom you know” (p. 302). Yet changes do occur, and Waldinger argues that history and politics often affect the outcome. To understand why immigrants and African Americans develop different niches and socioeconomic trajectories in the city, one cannot ignore racial discrimination and the ethnic exclusiveness that accompanies ethnic niches. Both influence job strategies and one can often see the historic imprint of past discrimination and exclusion in current occupational patterns.

Waldinger’s analysis refutes two popular accounts explaining why African Americans, unlike European immigrants, failed to find economic opportunity in American cities. One explanation suggests that there was a mismatch between African-American skills and jobs available, that blacks arrived in the cities just as the good, unskilled factory production jobs were disappearing, and that newer opportunities for employment required levels of education and skills that segregated schools failed to provide. An alternative account points to restructuring that comes with postindustrialization, generating lots of unskilled and poorly paid service jobs that have been filled by new immigrants who have elbowed aside native-born African Americans in a polarized economy. Neither interpretation fits New York.

The reality is far more complex. First, factory jobs never provided African Americans with an economic niche so the decline of such jobs did not affect them. Second, African...