Still the Promised City?: African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York

by Roger Waldinger

Still the Promised City? addresses the question of why African-Americans have fared so poorly in securing unskilled jobs in the postwar era and why new immigrants have done so well. Does the increase in immigration bear some responsibility for the failure of more blacks to rise, for their disappearance from many occupations, and for their failure to establish a presence in business?

The two most popular explanations for the condition of blacks invoke the decline of manufacturing in New York and other major American one claims that this decline has closed off job opportunities for blacks that were available for earlier immigrants who lacked skills and education; the other emphasizes "globalization"--the movement of manufacturing jobs offshore to areas with lower labor costs. But Roger Waldinger shows that these explanations do not fit the facts. Instead, he points out that a previously overlooked factor--population change--and the rapid exodus of white New Yorkers created vacancies for minority workers up and down the job ladder. Ethnic succession generated openings both in declining industries, where the outward seepage of whites outpaced the rate of job erosion, and in growth industries, where whites poured out of bottom-level positions even as demand for low-level workers increased. But this process yielded few dividends for blacks, who saw their share of the many low-skilled jobs steadily decline. Instead, advantage went to the immigrants, who exploited these opportunities by expanding their economic base.

Waldinger explains these disturbing facts by viewing employment as a queuing process, with the good jobs at the top of the job ladder and the poor ones at the bottom. As economic growth pulls the topmost ethnic group up the ladder, lower-ranking groups seize the chance to fill the niches left vacant. Immigrants, remembering conditions in the societies they just left, are eager to take up the lower-level jobs that natives will no longer do. By contrast, African-Americans, who came to the city a generation ago, have job aspirations similar to those of whites. But the niches they have carved out, primarily in the public sector, require skills that the least educated members of their community do not have. Black networks no longer provide connections to the lower-level jobs, and relative to the newcomers, employers find unskilled blacks to be much less satisfactory recruits. The result is that a certain number of well-educated blacks have good middle-class jobs, but many of the less educated have fallen back into an underclass. Grim as this analysis is, it points to a deeper understanding of America's most serious social problem and offers fresh approaches to attacking it.

Genres: Sociology

384 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 1996

Reviews

[Rain Sailing · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book mainly because of Waldinger's critique of William Julius Wilson and the "mismatch hypothesis". While the book does a good job at providing concrete case studies as to how Wilson's hypothesis does not conform to the empirical reality, Waldinger does not necessarily provide the reader with substantive evidence that would point to a clear alternative. What is clear from "Still the Promised City?" is that the new wave of immigration is a key factor that for the most part remains untheorized. Based on the case studies that Waldinger presents it is clear that the new immigrants did not displace Black workers from economic niches although they most definitely have restricted the opportunities available to Blacks via the development of their own economic niches. This situation was able in part due to past circumstances and the force of racism among ethnic whites which defended particular industries or advancement within particular industries from Black encroachment. In the face of limited opportunities for advancement, Blacks found greater opportunity in pursuing jobs in the public sector, which had the unintended side effect of raising educational requirements to access the dominant Black niche.

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

First half drags a bit with descriptions of dissimilarity indices, second half is a valuable historical piece with interviews and detailed accounts of employees and employers in NYC and the various issues and contexts in which they operated