Strangers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America (review)

Immigrants have been a driving force in the American economy for centuries, and today's newcomers continue to remake the country's economy and communities. Nowhere is their presence more visible than in U.S. large cities: New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago. Immigrants today are more likely than their native-born counterparts to head for large urban centers, magnifying the impact of immigration in a handful of places.

Many new immigrants are highly skilled and quickly find their niche in these urban, information-based economies. But most—and this series of essays focuses primarily on them—bear a strong resemblance to past immigrant groups in that they lack skills, especially when compared to native-born whites.

Shifts in the urban economy are marginalizing low-wage workers of any ethnicity or national background. Manufacturing, long a dependable staple of the urban economic base, has been hemorrhaging jobs. Many of the new jobs that attract the native-born to large urban centers require a skill and education level that puts them out of reach of first-generation immigrants.

This collection of essays, edited by Roger Waldinger, builds on previous scholarship and census data, along with the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey which tracks population in inter-census years, to look at one of the central questions in the contemporary immigration debate: can today's immigrants make it?

The changes in the distribution of wealth and income in the United States—and especially in the urban entry points to which the new immigrants are heading—have made this a far more unequal society than it once was. The demand for low-wage workers is still strong, but these newcomers are trying to make it in a labor market oversupplied with the less skilled, and in which real wages have been depressed for the past two decades.

This scenario provides grounds for the concern that fuels these essays. Each chapter tackles the question from a different perspective, drawing on data from the five gateway regions and making comparisons between regions, ethnic groups, and newcomers and the native-born population. The authors use quantitative data to shed light on wage trends, rates of employment, displacement, ethnic niches, poverty and the future of the second generation. In language accessible to non-statisticians, each author uses the data to detail the impact of highly concentrated regional immigration at a time of great inequality.

These interdisciplinary essays borrow from sociology and economics to provide a comprehensive view of the economic future of today's immigrants and of the cities in which they settle. The overarching conclusion that emerges is that if newcomers seem to be lagging behind, it has more to do with where they choose to settle than with their skill level. Immigrants who settle in the large urban centers of the U.S. fall behind their counterparts in other parts of the country.

As one of the authors concludes, "The source of the problem of catching up lies in the new era of inequality in which we are living and the particularly severe form it takes in the regions to which immigrants have moved. While today's economy has reduced the earnings of the less skilled of all ethnic stripes, pay structures in the capitals of immigrant America have become more unequal than anywhere else."

This book is important and reasonably accessible reading for anyone interested in the impact of changes in the American economic structure and also for those interested in the ongoing immigration debates.