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This chapter first discusses the differences between Los Angeles and New York in the origins and characteristics of the immigrants who have moved there, their immigrant histories, and their economic, social, and political institutions, which have a wide-ranging effect on the foreign-born. It then considers the surprising degree of convergence between New York and Los Angeles as immigrant centers, which has become more prominent since 2000, particularly when the two metropolitan areas are compared rather than simply focusing on the two major cities within them. This is the case, not only in terms of characteristics of the two regions' immigrant populations, but also relating to features of the regions' social and political contexts and responses to newcomers. This convergence, to a large degree, is due to the declining impact of geography and history.

This chapter briefly explores the geographic (and temporal) diversity in attitudes toward immigrants within American states and localities. While the federal government has the formal responsibility for determining how many immigrants come into the country and for preventing those who lack permission from entering, it falls to local and regional jurisdictions to frame the living experience of immigrants. In this context, local and regional coalitions of civil leaders set the political tone for whether localities welcome new immigrant populations or resist their presence. Thus the chapter presents the scope, methodology, and thematic elements underlying the different studies undertaken in this volume.

This chapter extols the attributes of immigrant—and Russian, in particular—Jews and seeks to debunk common impressions of these Jews as dirty, unable to speak the English language, and living closely crowded in unwholesome, ill-smelling tenement quarters, therefore forming an objectionable appearance as the dregs of the population. It argues that it is not the condition in which the immigrant comes that determines their usefulness, but the power that they show in rising above their condition. The Russian Jew thus possesses the strength of character necessary for this undertaking, especially when considering how many of them had escaped oppression prior to entering the United States. Furthermore, these immigrant Jews are socially minded and temperate, favoring their coffee-houses over the taverns often frequented by other immigrant populations.

This chapter discusses changes in the categories of ethnicity and immigration in the US census. From the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1930s, statistics on immigration and ethnicity took first place in schedules, published reports, and public policy. Not only did census figures establish immigration quotas, but census statisticians, with their methods and their culture, constructed the mechanism for exclusion by national origin. However, after 1928 there was a retreat from measuring ethnicity, which became evident in the 1930 and 1940 censuses by a marked lack of interest in questions of place of birth, mother tongue, and degree of assimilation. The history of the categories that made it possible to measure ethnicity is a complex one, involving three main groups of actors: advocates of immigration restriction, representatives of immigrant populations, and Census Bureau statisticians, with each group attempting to respond to contradictory demands and to defend their own interests.

This chapter introduces Charlotte, North Carolina, as a city and a place where Latina/o immigrants have settled. Starting with recent studies that position Charlotte as a “globalizing city” in a region (the U.S. South) experiencing globalization, it presents a brief labor history of the city and region and then focuses on the Central Avenue corridor, a thoroughfare that passes through several Latino neighborhoods and a place of concentrated ethnic businesses, including music venues. The contemporary southern U.S. city must be understood in terms of struggles over immigration and the “right to the city” that have come to the forefront of current politics, the vulnerability of immigrant populations within this setting, and the momentous economic shifts that have occurred over the past decades resulting in Charlotte's rise as a center of financial industry.

This chapter asks readers to step back from the contemporary era to survey the longer arc of American legislative and economic history over the last 150 years that has worked on the one hand to improve the social mobility of mostly working-class and immigrant populations through the acquisition of property and on the other to actively bar racial minorities, African Americans in particular, from the means of securing advancement through property. The result, the chapter suggests, has been a divided nation where a large number of blacks still struggle with the effects of intergenerational dispossession.

This chapter discusses the complexity of the immigrant population from Ireland in terms of denominational affiliation and social status and calls for reconsideration of the Irish (mainly Catholics from the “south” of Ireland) and Scotch-Irish (mainly Ulster Protestants of Scottish ancestry) distinction. Since this was a distinction that originated within Ireland itself, its replication in the southern colonies and states ought to have been no surprise at all and to have made the need for comparison and contrast between Ireland and the American South all the more obviously a subject for scholarly investigation.

This chapter takes a close look at how migration patterns alter the political landscape of states, in part by influencing changes in state population characteristics. The migration analysis addresses the effects of both internal (state-to-state) and external (foreign) migration. It shows that population migration is a potentially important source of demographic and political change in the states. But not all states are affected equally by migration, with some state experiencing higher levels of migration compared to others. The source of migration streams is also as important as the volume of migration. Separating the foreign-born population from internal migrants, for instance, shows that states with a high level of foreign-born population are almost uniformly states that also have large increases in support for Democratic presidential candidates. In addition, states with a large number of internal migrants from liberal (conservative) states tend to move in a Democratic (Republican) direction.