From the beginning, America has been a country of immigrants. Gary Gerstle and John Mollenkopf, in their article The Political Incorporation of Immigrants, Then and Now, critically analyze the transformation of immigrants as well as their involvement in politics. The authors note two specific eras of immigrants that share similar characteristics but are also different on some basic levels. The changes over the past century have lead to a transformation as to how immigrants and their progeny contribute to their community and their political involvement.

Gerstle and Mollenkopf describe what they call old immigrants and new immigrants, the former being mostly from Eastern Europe while the latter being mostly from Latin American countries. They bear many similarities, among them antagonism from native people and in the labor force. An interesting point the authors make was regarding the respective career paths of the two types of immigrants. Old immigrants became involved in specific work that, as a result, became ethnically distinctive, while new immigrants pursued jobs that involved unskilled labor. The two types of immigrants did not interact because of the obvious time gap and also because by the time new Latino immigrants came, the old immigrants already appeared less distinctive in society. As later noted, they had sacrificed their ethnic distinctiveness; they gained more acceptance into society but lost claims to their uniqueness. Immigrants may have felt that sending their children to public schools would smoothly incorporate them into society, but in reality they still had to deal with the reality of having a unique identity. Gerstle and Mollenkopf assert that now that Americans are more liberal, they are less hostile to new immigrants than they were to old ones. I disagree with this claim because there is still native-immigrant fighting, the only difference being that there is more government involvement toward promoting tolerance.

The immigrants themselves are not the ones who mostly take a role in politics and advocate for equality rights, but rather it is the second generation that feels responsible for doing this. They are involved in American politics, but some new immigrants are as involved in US events as they are in their native country. Those from the Dominican Republic, for example, have dual citizenship and can vote in both America and in the Dominican Republic. Such a powerful involvement with their homeland, Gerstle and Mollenkopf note, is actually more common in new immigrants than old immigrants. Upon reading this, I assumed that the connection must surely have been facilitated by the advent of technology, and not because of a deeper connection with their homeland. A question that popped into my head was: if email existed a century ago, would America’s economic relationship with various Eastern European countries be much stronger?