It’s always nice when a week’s readings reach back to and build upon previous material (which I suppose shouldn’t be so surprising considering that most of our reading assignments are the consecutive chapters of a small set of closely related books… but I digress). This set of articles/chapters adds several interesting new layers to the Old v. New immigrant debate, most notably by digging deeper into the issue of economic mobility. I have to agree with several of the posters below that the increased access of “new” immigrants to both professional and trade related education, by way of modern technology (cough*internet*cough) and vastly improved public service institutions (i.e. libraries, unemployment assistance programs, etc.), has left them astronomically better off than their “old” immigrant peers in the realm of mobility opportunities. And of course, as we mentioned last week, contemporary immigrants tend to arrive with much more in the way of marketable skills than their predecessors. That being said, finding employment isn’t exactly unicorns and rainbows for the “new”-er newcomers either: modern day immigrants must also deal with the reality that, as higher-education grows more common, all but the lowest paying work now requires increasingly lofty levels of minimum schooling. So on the whole, I’m with the majority of those below: the “new” and “old” are fairly different in a number of important ways.
Reading about the dynamics of inter-ethnic relationships on the NYC job market was also pretty interesting. Eden makes a great point about such relationships being closely tied to chain migration, as immigrants within each ethnic group did tend to offer each other work and assistance along filial and communal lines of contact. Much in the same way as it explained the formation of ethnic communities, this helps explicate why members of many ethnic groups often clustered about certain occupations and professions. In fact (to bring this full-circle) by explaining why different immigrant groups didn’t, historically speaking, blur together into one amorphous blob, coethnic grouping does a good deal to make sense of how the various distinctions between “old” and “new”immigrants is made possible at all.
