Something Old, Something New, and Some Things Really for the Future: Recent Work on American Immigration and Ethnicity

It has taken time, but publishers have finally begun to realize that the twenty million immigrants who have arrived since the mid-1960s are well deserving of their own literature in formats that make them accessible for classroom use as well as in collections that assemble resources and essays on the vast array of ethnic groups, new and old, many of whom few Americans had heard about previously. Perhaps the newest multitudes simply needed enough time here to provide observers with more information than for journalistic accounts. Indeed, much of what has appeared has been written by sociologists, demographers, economists, and urban anthropologists rather than by historians. ¹

We have reached the point where we have enough perspective to provide more substantive comparisons between the earlier waves of newcomers and those arriving during the last third of the twentieth century. That perspective reflects the many new scholarly studies of particular groups and various aspects of their place and impact in the United States, including works on the arrival and integration of refugees; the economic impact of the new immigrants in the fields of agriculture, manufacturing, small businesses, and whole new industries; their place in the revitalization of many urban centers; their education and the dilemmas facing school systems in many parts of the country; the political consequences of their citizenship and increasing participation in the political processes; their share of various federal, state, and local social services and welfare support; their reshaping of various aspects of America’s culture, including music, art, architecture, festivals, and foods; and the nativist anxieties they have generated (largely in native-born Americans) due to these various consequences of their arrival as well as to the fallout from the sizeable numbers of undocumented aliens. Hardly any of this is new when one looks at the impact of, and responses to, the earlier waves of immigrants. What we face now is understanding what aspects of the contemporary experiences are old patterns with new faces, or new patterns with novel wrinkles, or really strikingly different patterns that represent new directions in American ethnicity.

What we have before us are two approaches to these issues: four volumes in a series of nine, edited by Nancy Foner for Allyn and Bacon, each of which focuses on a separate ethnic group in a different part of the United States (Four of the other five were reviewed by me elsewhere. ²), and a two-volume collection of essays edited by David Levinson and Melvin Ember for Macmillan, which includes some 160 essays on that many subgroups. At the outset, let me also acknowledge at least three new collections most worthy of attention but which cannot be reviewed here, those published by Twayne, Greenwood, and Oxford, as well as a few other items that reflect the trend of works being designed to bring an ever greater array of materials to students and the public with a breadth that has been made more feasible with the advent of high-speed computers and CD-ROMs. ³

In the old view of immigrant and ethnic communities we had, for example, the Poles’ Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, the Jews’ Lower East Side in Manhattan, the Irish’s South Side of Boston, Chinatowns in...