Abstract
The data and insights of sociologists and anthropologists have always been essential to the immigration historian. Survey textbooks in immigration history liberally cite such studies, whether they are still recognized as high quality, such as Emily Greene Balch’s (1910) Our Slavic Fellow-Citizens, or whether their racist assumptions tell us more about nativist attitudes than about immigrants themselves, such as Madison Grant’s (1916) The Passing of the Great Race. Will Herberg’s (1955) Protestant, Catholic, Jew and Robert Park’s “Chicago School” theories of assimilation still generate debate but cannot be ignored either by historians or present-day sociologists. So it is not surprising that a new crop of books on recent immigration and ethnic relations prominently features the work of sociologists and demographers.
Scholarly work on current immigration patterns and ethnic relations is so important to historians of U.S. history because the changes in immigration law in 1965 and global economic and military events since then have profoundly changed the makeup of American society. In 1965, after the long hiatus in immigration caused especially by restrictive 1924 legislation and the Great Depression, only about 5 percent of U.S. residents were foreign-born, but this percentage more than doubled by 2000. In California, immigrants constituted one-fourth of the population in 2000 (Myers, 27, 57). Moreover, the new immigrants, who come overwhelmingly (84 percent from 1980 to 2000) from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe, from whence 86 percent of immigrants came from 1900 to 1920, are dramatically reshaping the racial basis of the U.S. population (Iceland, 36). Those who identified themselves as “white” on U.S. census forms declined from 83 percent in 1970 to just under 70 percent in 2000 (Iceland, 31); the recently released 2010 census data—which appeared too late for its inclusion in any of the studies under review here—reports a continuing relative decline in the white population. While the number of Latinos had barely nosed ahead of African Americans in 2000, there were in 2010 ten million more Latinos than African Americans in the United States. Residents of Asian descent, meanwhile, constituted the fastest growing racial group in the first decade of this century. 1 And while “two-thirds of all immigrants lived in just six states in 2005”—California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey—the influx of immigrants to places such as North Carolina, Nevada, and Washington, D.C., is a new phenomenon (Iceland, 37-8).
Of course, the issue is not really numbers, but the impact that new immigrants and new racial patterns have on life in the United States. How do the immigrants and their children fare, economically, politically, and socially? What relations do they maintain with their homelands? What is the quality of interactions between newer groups and more established Americans? And for the historian, especially, what are the similarities and differences between the new immigrants and previous groups? The six books under review grapple with these questions and provide snapshots of the impact of the newest immigrants. The standard sociological techniques of in-depth interviews with selected group members and analysis of census and other relevant data predominate. Meanwhile, the authors’ perspectives show that Emily Greene Balch has won out over Madison Grant among most recent scholars.
The most wide-ranging of the six books is the edited collection, Gender and U.S. Immigration, with thirteen case studies of almost uniformly high quality based on intensive surveys and interviews with female immigrants or their daughters, along with three introductory essays, and one synthesis of the literature on paid labor among Asian immigrant women. The case studies reveal the varied backgrounds of the new immigrants, from middle-class Indians who often came to the United States as graduate students to Salvadorans who fled civil war and severe social disruption, from Filipina nurses to Mexicanas prevalent among domestic workers in California. This book also hints at the geographical spread of new immigrants in the United States, with chapters focused on groups in New York City, Long Island, Chicago, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco area. It is by no means comprehensive, however. Vietnamese, Middle Easterners, and West Indians make an appearance only in one chapter each; Cubans and Africans are left out entirely; and there are no studies on the new migration to the Southeast or the rural Midwest. One introductory essay alludes to the importance of sex trafficking of immigrant women, but none of the case studies examine this issue.
The insights here will be both familiar to immigration and women’s historians and add to their understanding of past and present. Several emphasize the ties that immigrant women and families maintain with their home countries, made easier than in the past due to modern transportation and communication. Salvadoran women may work as couriers, bringing consumer goods and remittances home from Long Island. Israeli Jewish women, in contrast to their counterparts from the former Soviet Union, are more likely to wish to return home than their husbands; Israeli families, unlike Soviet Jews, tend to come to the United States for the husbands’ jobs. But immigrant men from Mexico are more likely than women to remain involved in political affairs at home. Yemenis will send their children home to be raised by relatives if they get into trouble or behave too “American”—displaying disrespect to parents, for example. Other essays demonstrate the affinity between global and immigration history, such as the analysis of the Philippine government’s involvement in fostering migration as an economic development strategy, with men off to the Middle East to work in construction, less-educated women to mainland Southeast Asia as domestics, and educated women to the United States as nurses.
These authors demonstrate that the “recurring phrase” in previous historical and sociological accounts—that “the immigrants sent for their wives and children” (p. 242)—is both offensive and outdated. There are more female than male immigrants from some countries, and changes in the American economy make it easier for some immigrant women than men to get low-wage factory or service jobs. So, many low-skilled Asian immigrant women are now “coproviders, if not primary providers, for their families” (p. 81). Indeed, one reason second-generation Caribbean women in New York do better in school than men of their cohort is the optimism of the former about job prospects in the racialized and gendered white-collar labor market. On the other hand, many Korean retail businesses survive on the unpaid labor of female family members, and Asian-owned clothing subcontractors routinely exploit “coethnic” women workers.
Most of these essays present a nuanced picture of the impact of immigration on women’s attitudes and family relations. Prema Kurien, for example, reports that Hindu temples, even though often established by high-status Indian men, provide a space for women—some of whom came here through arranged marriages—to meet and assert their desires for more egalitarian family relations, in part through a reinterpretation of the Hindu epics. On the other hand, marital violence may be higher in South Asian households here than in India, because the mediating efforts of extended family members are absent. Cecilia Menjívar, who studied Central American women in California, argues “that when women become the main providers they do not gain more authority automatically, and it often brings serious, negative consequences for them,” such as alcohol abuse and even violence by husbands or boyfriends (p. 109). In the provocatively titled “‘We Don’t Sleep Around Like White Girls Do’: Family, Culture, and Gender in Filipina American Lives”—an essay that, like several others, should work well in undergraduate or graduate classes—Yen Le Espiritu explores the tensions in gender-based morality, as Philippine immigrants assert their superiority over American culture while they at the same time reinforce control over young Filipinas. Does immigration lead to women’s emancipation or subjugation? For Patricia Pessar, this question posed by early women’s historians and sociologists is far too simplistic, and the case studies here bear out her judgment.
Where Gender and U.S. Immigration provides an implicit national overview based on the collection of individual cases, John Iceland’s Where We Live Now does so through rigorous analysis of U.S. census data on residency patterns in metropolitan areas. The compilation and analysis of such data—which is trickier to accomplish than this reader with a limited background in statistics would have imagined—is indispensable in helping us think about the persistence or overcoming of racial and ethnic segregation. Iceland himself recognizes that his predominantly quantitative approach cannot answer some of the most important questions involved, noting that mere physical proximity of different groups does not necessarily breed better relations. The author provides some intriguing qualitative analysis of the Latino and Asian presence in the Washington, D.C., area, but this reader would have welcomed more such sections. Iceland’s findings are nevertheless significant, as he exhibits a “cautious optimism” that residential assimilation of immigrants with the broader American society is taking place, indicating a degree of success of immigrants as new Americans and the welcoming of such immigrants and their children by others. As immigrants live longer in the United States, for example, they are “generally less segregated than new arrivals” (p. 132), and their children are even more likely to live in proximity to whites. Iceland argues that much of the residential segregation that does exist among immigrants is due to the continuing influx among such groups. Moreover, such segregation is not entirely negative, as it helps new arrivals find jobs and cope with their limited ability to speak English. In addition to these broad generalizations, Iceland offers specific insights, such as the fact that less residential segregation exists in the newer metropolitan areas of the South and West than in older northern cities and that there is substantially greater interracial pairing among couples who cohabit than among married couples.
As indicated by his subtitle, Immigration and Race in the United States, Iceland also seeks to determine the legacy of racial discrimination in this country for the newer, predominantly non-white immigrants. He tests Park’s assimilation thesis against the discriminatory barriers traditionally erected against African Americans, as identified in path-breaking studies by W. E. B. DuBois and Gunnar Myrdal. In other words, would the newest immigrants become part of American society as had their white predecessors, or would they remain barred from the mainstream as had African Americans and other earlier non-whites? Iceland’s conclusions here, too, are guardedly optimistic, as he notes that the newest immigrants have helped to erode traditional color lines, with a pan-Latino identity that often crosses racial lines, and with African Americans as well as Asians and Latinos more likely to live in mixed-race neighborhoods with whites than in the past. Recent reports of the freer self-identification of young adults as “mixed race” corroborate part of Iceland’s thesis. 2 On the other hand, immigrants of African descent are still more likely to live in racially segregated neighborhoods than other immigrants, and much of the increase in what is perceived as residential assimilation may be the result of Latinos serving as a buffer between whites and African Americans.
Only the most specialized graduate classes could use Where We Live Now as a text, but historians and others will profit from reading its first and last chapters and from skimming the more technical middle chapters. In addition to a greater appreciation for the national scope of immigration since the 1970s, grappling with Iceland’s statistical methodology will help historians reflect on familiar themes in our field, such as ethnic succession.
But Karin Aguilar-San Juan’s Little Saigons, while corroborating Iceland’s data about the importance of the suburbs as a destination for even recent immigrants, poses a challenge to Iceland that is also worth consideration. Her comparative study of the contemporary Vietnamese immigrant “communities” in southern California and Boston shows that they revolve around two specific institutions—the Asian Garden Mall, with hundreds of Vietnamese-owned businesses, and the Fields Corner Vietnamese-run community center, respectively—which are not the centers of residence of these immigrants. The quarter-million Vietnamese Americans in greater Los Angeles are widely dispersed in the largely suburban region, especially in Orange County, while Fields Corner is a multiracial and multiethnic neighborhood in which Vietnamese Americans only became the dominant political players because of the community center itself. Aguilar-San Juan’s organizing concept, “making place,” which refers to the meaning that groups assign to particular locations, demonstrates that this group may be residentially assimilated but still determined to “stay Vietnamese in America.” With suburbanization, in other words, ethnic residential patterns may not have the same meaning as in the past.
Little Saigons, the only one of these books structured as a single ethnographic study, has major flaws. 3 It is hopelessly repetitive, key events and people are not clearly introduced, academic jargon often overwhelms the case study, and there are numerous errors in the text. The latter range from the careless (“the transpacific railroad” [p. 33]) to the grossly inaccurate (calling the Viet Cong “the armed insurgents of North Viet Nam” [p. 4]).
But the author discusses important issues, some of which are specific to immigrant groups in the contemporary period and some of which have parallels to the past. Vietnamese immigrants, even as they retain their identity in the United States, had much greater prior exposure to American society and culture than most other immigrant groups, so the question with which she begins her book—“Where does Vietnam end and America begin?”—is both fair and complex. Vietnamese immigrants have also had an ambivalent relationship to the U.S. state, which welcomed them as immigrants and refugees but which important sectors of the Vietnamese American community blame for abandoning their anti-Communist cause. There are significant divisions within this immigrant group, especially between ethnic Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese. Even as overseas Chinese financing has contributed to the success of “Vietnamese” businesses in Orange County, many ethnic Vietnamese resented what they perceived to be a dilution of their contribution to what has become an important tourist attraction marketed to whites. Thus, Vietnamese integration into a larger Asian American racial group is fraught with tension.
Historians will appreciate the complications of “staying Vietnamese in America,” which really means commitment to the resurrection of an anti-Communist South Vietnam. This ideological fixation has resulted in physical intimidation within the Vietnamese American community against any perceived dissenters: a dispute over the display of an image of Ho Chi Minh in an Orange County storefront is one of the signal events covered here. Historians for the past forty years have tended to describe—and sometimes to celebrate—the retention by immigrants of their culture and identity as a resource that helps them survive and perhaps prosper as they confront American capitalism and nativist hostility. Aguilar-San Juan, too, at times cheers the determination of her subjects to resist Americanization as a mark of rebellion against a racist society, but she also acknowledges that such resistance is often politically reactionary, and even that the maintenance of ethnic distinctions serves U.S. capitalism through “marketplace multiculturalism.”
While Aguilar-San Juan focuses on the persistence of ethnic identity in Orange County, demographer Dowell Myers uses California’s experience to argue that immigrants are assimilating into American society and that it is in their own interest, as well as the interest of native-born Americans, that they do so. Indeed, Myers argues that immigration can and must be a unifying force in the United States. His thesis in Immigrants and Boomers is on one level practically self-evident: the looming retirement of baby boomers will have huge negative economic repercussions unless they are replaced by younger skilled workers and home-buyers, and the only realistic source of such younger workers is among immigrants and their children. A new “intergenerational social contract” is essential, in which today’s older voters—still largely white—must approve investment by government in education and training of the young—increasingly minority—to promote long-term economic development that can pay for their retirement. For their part, immigrants and their children must fully commit to American life and education to earn the trust of the still-powerful older, whiter Americans. The author, who teaches at the University of Southern California, focuses on his home state because it was the first to become “majority minority” and thus represents, he says, the future of the nation. Forty percent of all immigrants in the 1980s came to California, which became a flashpoint of white anxiety over illegal immigration specifically and changing demographics more generally.
The development of this basic argument is elegant and sophisticated, with Myers accounting for numerous variables in his number-crunching and moving beyond statistics to assess the psychology of public opinion and to critique several prevalent but faulty attitudes among whites about the new immigrants. While a full summary of the arguments and evidence is not possible here, among Myers’s most important insights is that the nativist atmosphere among whites in California developed because the high immigration of the 1980s coincided with the end of the long postwar economic boom, and that this perception of crisis remained fixed even as immigration and economic patterns changed in the mid-1990s and later. Among the author’s key findings are that half of Latino immigrants own their own homes after twenty years in the United States and that practically all second-generation Latinos speak English proficiently. Myers effectively marshals these data as part of a ten-page assault on Samuel Huntington’s 2004 screed (shades of Madison Grant) that Latinos could never assimilate into American life.
Even a sympathetic reader, however, will spot weaknesses in Myers’s presentation. First, he presents a hopeful view of the place of immigrants in California’s future in part because the rate of immigrant growth slowed down after the mid-1990s. However, such growth accelerated after that time in some other states. So if, as a result, the negative perceptions whites elsewhere hold of immigrants rise, then countering what Myers calls the “extrapolated expectations” of whites about immigrants may be more difficult than he admits. Second, in his statistical analyses Myers with a few exceptions discusses only the immigrants themselves. Consequently, his argument about the reduced influx of immigrants may not adequately take into account the racialized fears by whites of the American-born children of these immigrants. For example, since his book appeared, the rate of illegal immigration from Mexico has slowed, but nativists have escalated their attacks on the birthright citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Third, while there are good reasons to focus on the need for an educated, middle-class workforce of immigrants and their children, Myers ignores the low-paid service sector jobs that a bulging cohort of retirees also requires. This duality of economic needs will likely generate different kinds of conflict between immigrants and older, native-born Americans. Finally, while Myers presciently alludes to the end of the California housing boom by 2007 (the year the book was published), the economic crisis that escalated in 2008 has undercut political support for investment in public services and has undoubtedly reduced the short-term chances for the alliance Myers admirably advocates. Indeed, of the major racial/ethnic groups, Latinos have seen the greatest decline in household wealth during this recession, so much of the progress Myers celebrates has evaporated. 4
The authors of Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age shift the investigation to New York City and base their conclusions more on interviews than on census data. But like Myers and Iceland, they adopt a relatively positive viewpoint; the title of the 2010 film, The Kids Are All Right, kept running through this reader’s mind. Three of the sociologists who wrote this book are based in New York, but the choice of locale for this large-scale study makes sense on its own terms. Immigrants and their children constitute a majority of this city’s population (as they do in Miami and Los Angeles), and because New York has no single dominant immigrant group, a comparative approach is possible. A small army of graduate students conducted telephone interviews from 1998 to 2003 with over three thousand young adults, each the child of an immigrant from one of five groups—Dominicans, South Americans, West Indians of African descent, Chinese, and Soviet Jews—or the member of a control group of native-born whites, African Americans, or Puerto Ricans. Follow-up face-to-face interviews ensued with a tenth of these young people. (Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens, are not immigrants in any legal sense.)
The authors, all highly respected scholars, continually compare and contrast their findings with the broader literature, resulting in a beautifully written, nuanced contribution to issues of assimilation and ethnic retention, racial dynamics, and recent immigration and urban history. Although not as consciously focused on comparisons between past and present immigrant groups as some recent works, 5 Inheriting the City makes informed comments on this subject. The book would make a fine supplementary text in a range of classes, or some chapters could be assigned on their own: chapter 2 surveying the five immigrant groups and chapter 6 on work experiences are particularly strong.
The most important finding of Inheriting the City is that these second-generation Americans have already outpaced their parents in education, acquisition of English, and occupational status. In a comparative methodology that may provoke controversy, the authors also conclude that the children of these immigrant groups have risen above what they define as an analogous native-born racial group: Chinese and Soviet Jews above whites, Dominicans and South Americans above Puerto Ricans, and West Indians above African Americans. While many of the children surveyed first worked in “ethnic niche” jobs, especially immigrant-run small businesses, few currently do so. Like Myers, the authors use their findings to challenge Huntington’s assertions about Latinos.
While different groups maintained different levels of transnational ties, such as visiting or sending remittances to the country of origin, Americanization was clear: “For most of our respondents, the United States was indisputably home” (p. 262). Ethnic identity remains important to these young people, but it is fluid and combines several influences; the authors compare ethnicity to historian E. P. Thompson’s dynamic notion of class formation, a conceptualization also found implicitly in the other books under review. Racial identity had some unexpected ramifications. Where some might see a disadvantage for immigrant children perceived as Black, and this was certainly the case in dealing with police, there were also advantages, as West Indians benefited from affirmative action programs and have “fully absorbed” the African American commitment to struggle for political power.
Not everything is rosy, however, and these five ethnic groups are anything but homogeneous. Assimilation into “American” jobs does not always mean upward mobility, for example, as many are in low-paid retail or clerical work. Children of Chinese and Soviet Jewish immigrants are far more likely to succeed in higher education and to have professional careers than the others, partly because of the education and professional background of some of their parents, their greater likelihood of growing up in two-parent families, and the relative lack of obstacles they face based on race. (Think here of Amy Chua’s controversial child-rearing, as chronicled in the widely discussed Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother [2011].) But even Chinese American children of working-class parents benefit from being part of a community in which a strong middle class places great emphasis on education and helps parents find out about such opportunities for their children. Dominicans, who were least likely to grow up in two-parent families, had fewer educated members in their community, and were most likely to return “home” for extended periods, are generally the least successful by conventional measures of these second-generation Americans. Their progress as compared to their racial peers is in part due to the relative lack of success of Puerto Ricans born in New York, which some will see as damning with faint praise. While the carefully drawn comparisons between these immigrant groups are sometimes obvious to anyone who has lived in New York anytime in the past quarter century, many are worth pondering, such as the fact that involvement in gang activity as teens was less likely to inhibit later educational and occupational success among Chinese than among West Indians and Latinos. Some readers may be surprised that Soviet Jews often exasperated the long-established Jewish community by their lack of interest in practicing Judaism.
The authors acknowledge that their findings might not apply to the nation as a whole, because of the historic legacy of immigration in New York, its large infrastructure of affordable public colleges, and the relatively low proportion of undocumented immigrants in these five groups. The appendix on research methodology is seemingly exhaustive, but the authors ignore the possible biases in self-reporting. Not only did their sampling technique exclude those in prison or who returned “home,” but young adults are likely to accentuate the positive about their achievements and plans. And as with Myers’s study, one fears that the Great Recession has damaged the prospects of these young people.
Inheriting the City concludes that whereas the “central cleavage in American life was once clearly between whites and nonwhites,” now there “is mounting evidence that it is between blacks and non-blacks” (p. 368). Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, a major figure in the field of “whiteness” studies, would vehemently object, as he argues in his meditation on the “white ethnic revival in post-civil rights America” that those who have reveled for the past forty years in their “Ellis Island immigrant” background have been using it as a way insulate “whiteness” from both African Americans and recent non-white immigrants. Roots Too is not mainly about the post-1965 immigrants, but about how the groups that used to be called “the new immigrants,” the southern and eastern Europeans who came mainly from 1880 to 1920, along with the Irish, whose arrival began earlier, have asserted their identity as whites, as ethnics, and as Americans.
Jacobson has written a sharp-edged, often meandering cultural and intellectual history of this white ethnic revival, analyzing films and television shows, memoirs and fiction, heritage tourism, state-sponsored projects such as the restoration of Ellis Island, and political campaigns in which the candidates’ background in immigrant slums replaced an older “log cabin” myth. Some of his most incisive comments cover the rightward drift of Michael Novak, author of The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1971), and the strained efforts of Jewish and Black feminists to find common ground. The range of the author’s interests and knowledge—on display earlier in Whiteness of a Different Color (1999) and Barbarian Virtues (2001)—is dazzling. In a particularly clever—and intellectually justified—literary device, Jacobson begins by deconstructing John F. Kennedy’s visit to Ireland, his ancestral homeland, in 1963, and he ends with “Ireland at JFK,” contrasting the welcome that Irish illegal immigrants received from powerful white politicians in the 1980s and 1990s with the fear and disdain accorded to Latino and Muslim immigrants.
The author acknowledges that the white ethnic revival contained elements that reached toward an inclusive American society. But he argues that for the most part this revival sought to parry the civil rights movement and to portray the white immigrants of the 1880s to the 1920s as having pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, unlike African Americans and recent non-white immigrants. Focusing attention on their own status as victims in the past—the Irish famine, the Holocaust, American slums—allows these white ethnics to downplay the enslavement of African Americans, the conquest of Native Americans, and the exclusion and disfranchisement of Asian immigrants as the dominant paradigms of U.S. race relations. It also allows these ethnics to ignore the “white privilege” that they received, from nearly unrestricted immigration, voting rights, and access to the GI Bill. Indeed, Jacobson effectively quotes Martin Luther King in 1967 decrying the “nation of immigrants” trope as marginalizing the African American experience. By the way, he might have added to his catalogue of the sensibility of white victimization the efforts by many Italian Americans to equate the internment during World War II of a small percentage of Italian immigrants who had declined to become U.S. citizens with the wholesale incarceration without due process of second-generation Japanese American citizens and their parents who by law could not become U.S. citizens.
Roots Too will be indispensable for anyone teaching or researching U.S. racial/ethnic relations or cultural history since the 1960s. But the argument is not entirely convincing. At the same time that the state-sponsored Ellis Island restoration, for example, was reinforcing white privilege, in Jacobson’s view, governments at all levels were encouraging an increased emphasis on African American history. Jacobson links white ethnic authors to Alex Haley and Maxine Hong Kingston, but he did not convince this reader that the white authors were presenting, or their readers were taking away, a message that on balance distanced whites from non-whites. While I accept that white ethnics benefited from white privilege, Jacobson’s explanation is too cursory to be compelling to skeptics. And few would have anticipated in 2006, when this book was published, that a self-identified African American, albeit one with a nontraditional background, could be elected president. Furthermore, Barack Obama’s triumphal “return” in 2011 to his mother’s ancestral homeland of Ireland makes it more difficult to see similar earlier trips by JFK and Ronald Reagan as simply reinforcing the primacy of the white immigrant experience.
Teachers and researchers will certainly use the findings of Jacobson’s Roots Too to argue that there is no clear distinction between the persistence of ethnicity and Americanization, a theme equally prominent in Gender and U.S. Immigration, Little Saigons, and Inheriting the City. All of the books under review suggest that the non-white origins of so many of the newest immigrants require scholars and active citizens to link studies of immigration and ethnicity with studies of race relations, and Roots Too reminds us to keep in mind the reception that new immigrants receive, even from the descendants of previous immigrants. The newest immigrants have now been in the United States long enough that classes and textbooks in U.S. history and its subfields must afford equal treatment to them and to the no-longer-new “new immigrants.” Inheriting the City can easily stand with Our Slavic Fellow-Citizens, and Gender and U.S. Immigration will both supplement and enrich readings of Jane Addams’s reports from Hull House. Books by sociologists about current immigrants will provide today’s historians with material to use in class to make past immigration more real to students, as well as new questions for research about the past. And these texts will provide ethnographic and demographic data for future historians looking back on the major changes in immigration and racial patterns that took place from the 1970s to the 2010s and beyond.
Finally, one issue that made headlines in the summer of 2011 demonstrates both the achievements of these works and what remains to be done as the story of immigration continues to evolve. The charge of rape by a Guinean Muslim working as a maid in an expensive Manhattan hotel against the head of the International Monetary Fund reinforces the importance of gender as a factor in immigration and of the service sector as a locus of employment for immigrants today, both points made in these studies. But the charge highlights the fact that none of these books devoted sustained attention to Africans or Muslims, who have become increasingly prominent among immigrants over the past twenty years. Moreover, the fact that the maid’s allegations lost some credibility because she had embellished her application for asylum—including a false accusation of gang rape—has brought renewed attention to the issue of refugee policy, also not systematically covered in any of these readings. 6 When dealing with current immigration issues, which all too quickly become the past, the daily newspapers must supplement even the most recent scholarly studies.