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

– Why is it necessary to consider empirical data about immigrants away from the major cities? How would such insight allow research to better understand new immigration patterns?

I was interested to find that most new immigrants settle in suburban areas rather than large cities.  In the case of Mexican immigrants, this trend is due to flagrant anti-immigrant sentiments. It is interesting to note that the immigrants in these new gateway locales do not form long-term relationships with native-borns because they are often transient.  The large number of school aged children however draws upon the necessity to accommodate such students.  The uniqueness of settling is such areas, however, lies in the ability of immigrants to carve out their own position and define their own reputation, sans preconceived notions about their place in society from others. Settling in a smaller town with fewer resources means greater interaction between immigrants and native born residents.

I also found the discussion of immigrant replenishment to be quite thought-provoking.  I had not previously considered this concept, but the implications of the interaction between new immigrants and integrated coethnics is interesting to consider.  According to Waters and Jimenez, immigrant replenishment allows integrated second and third generation individuals to connect with coethnics, and renew their sense of ethnic identity.  These interactions also allow those that are settled access to ethnic raw materials.

Evidence of language assimilation in the third generation – that is, loss of the mother tongue – is one that I find quite shocking.  Although it does seem intuitive that the immigrant generation would be dominant in their native tongue, the second generation would be bilingual, and the third generation would be English speaking only, I find loss of the mother tongue to be a loss of an integral part of culture. Although language assimilation is important, maintaining one’s own language is also an integral part of remaining connected to one’s roots.