New York and Amsterdam: Immigration and the New Urban Landscape by Nancy Foner etal.

Reviewed by: New York and Amsterdam: Immigration and the New Urban Landscape by Nancy Foner etal. Fatmir Haskaj New York and Amsterdam: Immigration and the New Urban Landscape. By Nancy Foner, Jan Rath, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Rogier van Reekum. New York: New York University Press, 2014, 336 pages, $85.00 Cloth. The last half century has witnessed the largest human migration in history. This movement has been from rural to urban centers, from the global South to the global North, from poor villages in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, to the centers of capital and finance in Europe and North America such as New York, London, Toronto, Paris, and Amsterdam. This collection of essays looks closely at this migration by focusing on two global cities in particular: New York and Amsterdam, and grapples with a set of questions that the authors suggest [End Page 99] arise from this unprecedented mass migration. Specifically, they posit that the contrast between the cultural, linguistic and ethno-racial identity of relatively recent immigrants and "long-established residents" (1) of the receiving countries' societies into which they migrate, is of particular concern. In other words, these new immigrants are non-white, non-European and are moving into what was (if only briefly and never completely in North America) majority white cities. These essays, then, touch on two issues simultaneously, migration and race, and attempt to situate them within a transatlantic comparative perspective in order to gauge how the migrants and the host societies influence, respond to, and adapt to one another over time. Why New York and Amsterdam as sites of study rather than the nation-state or just one city? The authors suggest these two cities have particular qualities that make them fertile ground for the exploration of global migration from the South to the North and that a comparative urban study reveals more than an individual or state level study for three reasons. First, both cities "are relatively liberal with progressive elites" (2) and have undergone dramatic demographic shifts, and can thus benefit from a transatlantic, trans-city comparison highlighting contrasting responses, needs and developments "on the ground" (5). Second, looking at the city gives a richer, more accurate contextualized picture of the immigrant experience, especially since most immigration is urban oriented. Third, a comparative urban approach more effectively puts existing theories about migration and race to the test, giving us a better picture of immigrant incorporation, institutional adjustments and response, urbanization, and demographic shifts. The book is organized into five sections, each containing two essays by different authors on Amsterdam and New York. The first section is historical. Nancy Foner argues for a dialectical understanding of New York's institutional and cultural response to immigration. She claims New York is the "quintessential immigrant city" (29) and one that has integrated immigrants and immigrations as a core of its public culture, ethos, and identity. This is mainly due, she argues, to early twentieth century Jewish and Italian immigrants who made long lasting and indelible marks on the city and who continue to remember their own migration as a type of collective memory. In contrast, Leo Luccassen's Amsterdam suffers from a collective forgetting and selective remembering of former migrants and migration [End Page 100] (75). The selective remembering of the first large wave of immigration during Holland's golden age of the 17th century has caused a disjointed and uneven response to current immigration. Further, the combination of economic restructuring in the 1970s and social welfare policies tied to democratic ideals has cast new migrants in negative stigmatizing roles as "bad migrants" (76) even if inaccurate. The second section focuses on economic conditions. Kallick analyzes split labor market conditions for immigrants in New York, paying close attention to racial and ethnic disparities noting that migrants do well, but some do better than others. Kloosterman traces the struggles, debates, shifts, and restructuring of the welfare state in the face of "cognitive-cultural capitalism" (128) and its effect on labor market conditions for natives and migrants, finding that state intervention is a key element for both groups' successful economic integration. Yet it is especially important for the "persistent cultures of...

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