I was intrigued to learn that many immigrants are moving into the midwestern and southern states, areas that are not known to be immigrant gateway states. There are many reasons accounting for the dispersal of immigrants in these states. Waters and Jimenez focuses on the Mexican immigrants. Due to anti-immigrant sentiment, a deep recession, and the new law that legalized previous undocumented immigrants in California, Mexican immigrants fled California in search of other places to settle.

Immigrants are also drawn to new gateways by economic opportunities. Many of these new gateways have a high demand for low-wage labor. These industries prefer to hire immigrant workers over  all native-born workers. I found this similar to the situation of garment industries in New York City, where the Korean garment industries prefer to hire Hispanic immigrants and the Chinese garment industries prefer to hire Chinese immigrants. Furthermore, I found a similarity between the social networks in these gateways and in the garment industry in New York City. In the Poultry Plants, employers encourage Latino workers to recruit other workers by referring potential employees. Those who do bring in new workers receive cash bonuses, as long as the new workers remain in the industry for a period of time. This is similar to the Chinese workers who recruit new workers; they receive “easier or smaller-sized clothing to sew” as their reward, “enabling them to sew more pieces in a given day and earn more money (Chin 106).

I found the linguistic pattern ‘three generation model’ to be interesting: the first generation is said to remain dominant in the native tongue, the second generation to be bilingual, and the third generation to be only fluent in English. Does this model work for every immigrant group? If so, I am saddened by this because the language is important to culture. While assimilating into the American culture, one should not lose their own culture as well; they should maintain it.

I found immigrant replenishment to be very fascinating. It forces the second and third generation of immigrants to reconnect to their culture, such as speaking in their native tongue.

-Anissa Daimally