Our cultural consciousness generally thinks of immigrants as poor, often uneducated. This does not necessarily mean that we think of newcomers to this country as less intelligent or hardworking—we just assume that there is some financial or educational deficit that drove them to come here.
Foner begins the chapter by noting that this is no longer true. Many immigrants now arrive in New York with advanced degrees; unlike the Jews and Italians of a century ago, many now arrive comfortably ensconced in the middle class. I found this interesting because it places my family’s immigration in a larger context. My father finished medical school before arriving here, and my mother came here to study physical therapy at NYU. It was not an absence of education or money that led them to make the trip to the United States. They were already educated and they were not poor. What led them to come here was the prospect of more and better education, and a belief that being comfortable in America is very different from being comfortable in India, often described as the most dysfunctional democracy on Earth.
This fits in with what Foner is saying. The post-1965 set of immigrants to New York are economically diverse. Indians, who are currently the wealthiest ethnicity in the US, are a far cry from both the immigration waves of the past and of the experience of many other immigrant groups today. While my parents were only in New York briefly before moving to Austin and eventually Atlanta, I think that Foner’s statement about New York can be applied to the whole country. Immigrants are a socioeconomically different sort now, so much so that the word “immigrant” can no longer imply poverty.
The second thought I had was about the ethnic diversity of the two waves she discusses. It is clear that immigration to New York is extremely varied, but what will that immigration look like in the future? Given the immigration quotas set by the INS for each country, it seems unlikely that a single ethnic group will come to dominate new immigration to New York in the coming years. The idea of immigration as a series of waves, an explosive succession of Germans and Irish and Jews and Italians, may be dead. Also, the world is becoming more prosperous. Expanding middle classes in Africa and China and South America mean that in the future, many people may not have a reason to flee.
