Immigration And America S Cities

Since the 1960s, new and more diverse waves of immigrants have changed the demographic composition and the landscapes of North American cities and their suburbs. The Housing and Economic Experiences of Immigrants in U.S. and Canadian Cities is a collection of essays examining how recent immigrants have fared in getting access to jobs and housing in urban centres across the continent. Using a variety of methodologies, contributors from both countries present original research on a range of issues connected to housing and economic experiences. They offer both a broad overview and a series of detailed case studies that highlight the experiences of particular communities. This volume demonstrates that, while the United States and Canada have much in common when it comes to urban development, there are important structural and historical differences between the immigrant experiences in these two countries.

Immigration today touches the lives and economies of more people and places than ever before.Yet the places that are disproportionately affected by immigrant flows are not countries but cities. This remarkable collection examines contemporary global immigration trends and their profound effect on specific host cities. The book focuses not only on cities with long-established diverse populations, such as New York, Toronto, and Sydney, but also on less known gateway cities, such as Birmingham (UK), Marseille, and the emerging gateways of Johannesburg, Washington, D.C., and Dublin. The essays gathered here provide a global portrait of accelerating, worldwide immigration driven by income differentials, social networks, and various state policies that recruit skilled and unskilled laborers. Gateway cities vary in form and function but many are hyperdiverse, globally linked through transnational networks, and often increasingly segregated spaces. Offering penetrating analysis by the leading scholars in the field, Migrants to the Metropolis redirects the global narrative surrounding migration away from states and borders and into cities,where the vast majority of economic migrants settle.

The compelling history of how Latino immigrants revitalized the nation's cities after decades of disinvestment and white flight Thirty years ago, most people were ready to give up on American cities. We are commonly told that it was a "creative class" of young professionals who revived a moribund urban America in the 1990s and 2000s. But this stunning reversal owes much more to another, far less visible group: Latino and Latina newcomers. Award-winning historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz reveals this history by focusing on two barrios: Chicago's Little Village and Dallas's Oak Cliff. These neighborhoods lost residents and jobs for decades before Latin American immigration turned them around beginning in the 1970s. As Sandoval-Strausz shows, Latinos made cities dynamic, stable, and safe by purchasing homes, opening businesses, and reviving street life. Barrio America uses vivid oral histories and detailed statistics to show how the great Latino migrations transformed America for the better.

Generations ago, immigrants came to the U.S. from Europe and Africa in large numbers. Today they are arriving mainly from Latin America and Asia. Most are documented but many are not. While the federal and most state governments have done little beyond controlling borders and ports of entry to address pressing immigration issues, public officials and community organizations at the local level have been advancing commonsense, pragmatic solutions to accommodate the newest members of American society. This collection of essays provides a handbook for developing good county- and municipal-level immigrant services. The contributors cover a diverse range of trends, issues and practices, including immigration reform, language access, identification and driver's licensing, employment, education, voting, public safety and legal assistance.

All over the world immigration is one of the most urgent political issues, creating tensions and unrest as well as questions of justice and fairness. Academics as well as politicians have been relating to the question of how states should cope with immigrants; but 96% of immigrants end up in cities, and in Europe and the USA, two thirds of the immigrants settle in 7 or 8 cities. Indeed, most of us encounter with immigrants as city-zens, in our everydaylife, rather than as citizens of states. Should cities issue visas to immigrants when the state is reluctant to do so? Should immigrants vote in local elections before naturalization? What can be learnt fromcities which successfully integrate immigrants? This book addresses the question of migration and integration as a question of urban policies. It discusses questions which have been rarely considered in academic literature, and it is based on hundreds of interviews with city dwellers around the world.

The United States is an immigrant nation—nowhere is the truth of this statement more evident than in its major cities. Immigrants and their children comprise nearly three-fifths of New York City’s population and even more of Miami and Los Angeles. But the United States is also a nation with entrenched racial divisions that are being complicated by the arrival of newcomers. While immigrant parents may often fear that their children will “disappear” into American mainstream society, leaving behind their ethnic ties, many experts fear that they won’t—evolving instead into a permanent unassimilated and underemployed underclass. Inheriting the City confronts these fears with evidence, reporting the results of a major study examining the social, cultural, political, and economic lives of today’s second generation in metropolitan New York, and showing how they fare relative to their first-generation parents and native-stock counterparts. Focused on New York but providing lessons for metropolitan areas across the country, Inheriting the City is a comprehensive analysis of how mass immigration is transforming life in America’s largest metropolitan area. The authors studied the young adult offspring of West Indian, Chinese, Dominican, South American, and Russian Jewish immigrants and compared them to blacks, whites, and Puerto Ricans with native-born parents. They find that today’s second generation is generally faring better than their parents, with Chinese and Russian Jewish young adults achieving the greatest education and economic advancement, beyond their first-generation parents and even beyond their native-white peers. Every second-generation group is doing at least marginally—and, in many cases, significantly—better than natives of the same racial group across several domains of life. Economically, each second-generation group earns as much or more than its native-born comparison group, especially African Americans and Puerto Ricans, who experience the most persistent disadvantage. Inheriting the City shows the children of immigrants can often take advantage of policies and programs that were designed for native-born minorities in the wake of the civil rights era. Indeed, the ability to choose elements from both immigrant and native-born cultures has produced, the authors argue, a second-generation advantage that catalyzes both upward mobility and an evolution of mainstream American culture. Inheriting the City leads the chorus of recent research indicating that we need not fear an immigrant underclass. Although racial discrimination and economic exclusion persist to varying degrees across all the groups studied, this absorbing book shows that the new generation is also beginning to ease the intransigence of U.S. racial categories. Adapting elements from their parents’ cultures as well as from their native-born peers, the children of immigrants are not only transforming the American city but also what it means to be American.

New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have long been shaped by immigration. These gateway cities have traditionally been assumed to be the major flashpoints in American debates over immigration policy—but the reality on the ground is proving different. Since the 1980s, new immigrants have increasingly settled in rural and suburban areas, particularly within the South. Couple this demographic change with an increase in unauthorized immigrants, and the rural South, once perhaps the most culturally and racially "settled" part of the country, now offers a window into the changing dynamics of immigration and, more generally, the changing face of America. New Destination Dreaming explores how the rural context impacts the immigrant experience, how rapid Hispanic immigration influences southern race relations, and how institutions like schools and law enforcement agencies deal with unauthorized residents. Though the South is assumed to be an economically depressed region, low-wage food processing jobs are offering Hispanic newcomers the opportunity to carve out a living and join the rural working class, though this is not without its problems. Inattention from politicians to this growing population and rising black-brown tensions are both factors in contemporary rural southern life. Ultimately, Marrow presents a cautiously optimistic view of Hispanic newcomers' opportunities for upward mobility in the rural South, while underscoring the threat of anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictive policymaking that has gripped the region in recent years. Lack of citizenship and legal status still threatens many Hispanic newcomers' opportunities. This book uncovers what more we can do to ensure that America's newest residents become productive and integrated members of rural southern society rather than a newly excluded underclass.

In less than a generation, the dominant image of American cities has transformed from one of crisis to revitalization. Poverty, violence, and distressed schools still make headlines, but central cities and older suburbs are attracting new residents and substantial capital investment. In most accounts, native-born empty nesters, their twentysomething children, and other educated professionals are credited as the agents of change. Yet in the past decade, policy makers and scholars across the United States have come to understand that immigrants are driving metropolitan revitalization at least as much and belong at the center of the story. Immigrants have repopulated central city neighborhoods and older suburbs, reopening shuttered storefronts and boosting housing and labor markets, in every region of the United States. Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization in the United States is the first book to document immigrant-led revitalization, with contributions by leading scholars across the social sciences. Offering radically new perspectives on both immigration and urban revitalization and examining how immigrants have transformed big cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as newer destinations such as Nashville and the suburbs of Boston and New Jersey, the volume's contributors challenge traditional notions of revitalization, often looking at working-class communities. They explore the politics of immigration and neighborhood change, demolishing simplistic assumptions that dominate popular debates about immigration. They also show how immigrants have remade cities and regions in Latin America, Africa, and other places from which they come, linking urbanization in the United States and other parts of the world. Contributors: Kenneth Ginsburg, Marilynn S. Johnson, Michael B. Katz, Gary Painter, Robert J. Sampson, Gerardo Francisco Sandoval, A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, Thomas J. Sugrue, Rachel Van Tosh, Jacob L. Vigdor, Domenic Vitiello, Jamie Winders.