S Y L L A B U S

Course Description

This student/faculty research seminar will use New York City as a laboratory to analyze the cultural, social, economic, and political changes brought about by the new immigration. It will involve each student in "hands on" research using qualitative and quantitative methods to:

• Analyze the status and trajectory of a major immigrant or native born ethnic group on questions of education, employment, housing and neighborhood formation, quality of life, and community organization and political participation.
• Examine how the chosen groups are interacting with each and other racial and ethnic minorities in the labor market, the process of residential neighborhood formation, and in political participation, with special attention to patterns of conflict and/or cooperation.
• Explore the issues of leadership development, group identity formation, and political representation as the new immigrants are incorporated into the larger civic culture.

1. statistical analysis of individual-level data from the 1980 and 1990 Census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), which will reside on the CUNY mainframe computer and/or the GSUC's local network of PCs;
2. computer mapping analysis of 1990 census tract-level data using a PC-based GIS program, Atlas*GIS;
3. a review of the existing secondary literature on the chosen group and the more general topics of immigration in relationship to inter-group relations;
4. begin primary field research on your chosen group.

We expect each of you to prepare three "products:"

1. A draft descriptive profile of your group which summarizes the secondary literature and contains a set of tables (common for all the profiles) giving a basic description of the group using the Census materials from census characteristics.
2. A revision and expansion of this draft based on comments from the professors.
3. By a month later, a final draft of a professional-quality research report on your group which contains a set of questions or issues you would like to pursue with additional field research over the summer.

We will use four books as basic texts for this course.

• Nancy Foner, ed., New Immigrants in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
• John Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
• Dowell Myers, Analysis With Local Census Data: Portraits of Change (San Diego: Academic Press, 1992).
• Alejandro Portes and Rubin Rumbaut, Immigrant America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

• Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
• Peter Kwong, The New Chinatown (New York: Noonday, 1987).

Course Outline

Week 1. Introduction, orientation, and overview of groups by Philip Kasinitz and John Mollenkopf

First lab sessions: Familiarize yourself with the system, get account and password, run one or two descriptive procedures, make arrangements to learn how to do the requirements for the second lab session if needed. For the first several lab sessions, read Myers, Analysis With Local Census Data, Chapters 3, 4, and 12.

Week 2. Then and now: key analytic issues in understanding the process of immigrant incorporation into the political economy of the U.S. and New York City.

• Kathleen N. Conzen, "Immigrants, Immigrant Neighborhoods, and Ethnic Identity," Journal of American History 66 (December 1979): 603-615.
• David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840-1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 151-217.
• Suzanne Model, "The Ethnic Niche and the Structure of Opportunity: Immigrants and Minorities in New York City," in Michael Katz, ed., The "Underclass" Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 161-193.

Week 3. Immigrants and native born minorities today: how did they get here, where are they situated in the social structure, and how are they relating to each other and the political system?

• Alejandro Portes and Rubn Rumbaut, Immigrant America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), Chapters 1-3.
• Roger Waldinger, "Immigration and Urban Change," Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 211-232.
• Nancy Foner, ed., New Immigrants in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), Chapters 1-3.
• John Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), Chapter 3.

Week 4. Immigrant trajectories in contemporary New York: what are the similarities and differences across Dominicans, Koreans, and Russian Jews and what factors account for them?

• Foner, ed., New Immigrants in New York, Chapters 4, 8, and 10.
• Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, Chapter 6.

Week 5. [Draft Group Profile Due]. Presentation of highlights of draft group profiles and discussion of the points they raise.

Week 6. The social construction of "ethnic" space: kinship, group identity, patterns of residential segregation and overlap, commercial districts, religion, communal institutions, and "community."

• Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 26-57,130-142.
• Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 30-89.
• Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 1-13, 163-218.
• Peter Jackson, "Ethnic Turf: Competition on the Canal Street Divide," New York Affairs 4:3 (Winter 1983): 149-158.

Week 7. A case study of extreme diversity: Latin-Asian Queens as a new global zone?

• Richard Alba, Nancy Denton, Shu-yin Leung, and John Logan, "Neighborhood Change Under Conditions of Mass Immigration: The New York City Region, 1970-1990," (paper to the 1993 annual meeting of the Population Association of America).
• Materials from the press on Corona, Elmhurst, and Flushing.
• Hsian-Shui Chen, Chinatown No More (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 27-44, 51-90.

Week 8. Immigrants in the Racial, Ethnic, Gender, Nativity Division of Labor.

• Tom Bailey and Roger Waldinger, "The Racial Division of Labor," in John Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, ed.s, Dual City: Restructuring New York (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), pp. 43-78.
• Chapters from Roger Waldinger's forthcoming book on ethnic competition in the New York City labor market.

Week 9. Further discussion of how your group fits into the racial, ethnic, gender, nativity division of labor in New York City.

• Maria Entchautegui, "The Effects of Immigrants on Wages and Employment of Black Males," (Urban Institute paper, May 1993).
• Vernon C. Briggs, Mass Immigration and the National Interest (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), pp. 10-11, 91-92, 114-115, 240-255.
• Roger Waldinger, "Who Makers the Beds? Who Washes the Dishes? Black/Immigrant Competition Reassessed," (Working Paper 45, IIE, UCLA, April 1993).
• Alejandro Portes and Robert Manning, "The Immigrant Enclave: Theory and Empirical Examples," in Joane Nagel and Susan Olvak, ed.s, Competitive Ethnic Relations (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1986), pp. 47-68.
• Min Zhou and John R. Logan, "Returns on Human Capital in Ethnic Enclaves: New York City's Chinatown," American Sociological Review 54 (October 1989): 809-820.
• Peter Kwong, The New Chinatown (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), pp. 57-80.
• Jimy Sanders and Victor Nee, "Limits of Ethnic Solidarity in the Ethnic Enclave," American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 745-767.
• Portes and Jenson critique and rejoinder by Sanders and Nee, pp. 768-773.

Ninth lab session: use mapping program to examine your group in terms of electoral data for the 1993 mayoral and council elections.

Week 10. Exclusion from the political order in New York City, the struggle for political incorporation, and the relevance of home-country politics.

• John Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes, pp. 56-68, 76-92.
• Eugenia Georges, "New immigrants and the political process: Dominicans in New York," (Working Paper No. 45, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University, 1984).
• Michael Jones Correa, "The Political Socialization of Latin American Immigrants in New York City," (paper to the 1993 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association).
• Paul Bailey, "Analysis of the Asian American Voters' Organizations Response to 1991 Redistricting in New York City," (GSUC, Spring 1991).
• Portes and Rumbault, Immigrant America, Chapter 4.

Week 11. Crime as the American Way of Life.

• Daniel Bell, "Crime as the American Way of Life: A Queer Ladder of Social Mobility" from The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press, 1962), pp. 127-150.
• Mercer Sullivan, "Crime and the Social Fabric," in Mollenkopf and Castells, ed.s, Dual City: Restructuring New York (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1991), pp. 225-244.
• Lorie Gunst, "A Jamaican Posse Grows in Brooklyn," The Portable Lower East Side 7:1 (1990): 89-100.
• Peter Kwong, The New Chinatown, pp. 107-123.

Week 12. Immigrants, color, and the second generation: West Indians and native born African-Americans; Dominicans and Puerto Ricans.

• Herbert Gans, "Second Generation Decline: Scenarios for the Economic and Ethnic Futures of the Post-1965 American Immigrants," Ethnic and Racial Studies 15:2 (1992): 173-192.
• Milton Vickerman, "The Responses of West Indians to African Americans: Distancing and Identification," Research in Racial and Ethnic Relations 7 (forthcoming).
• Mary C. Waters, "The Intersection between Race and Ethnicity: Generational Change Among Caribbean Immigrants to the US," (unpublished paper).
• Foner, ed., New Immigrants in New York City, Chapters 5, (Stafford), 7 (Foner), and review Chapter 4 (Pessar).

Week 13. Immigration, CUNY, and the role of college education in group mobility. (Visit by Vice Chancellor Richard Freeland and associates).

Thirteenth lab session: Runs from 1990 PUMS of members of your group who are attending college.

Week 14. The future of immigration and the politics of nativity.

• Portes and Rumbault, Immigrant America, Chapter 7. Carolyn Setlow and Renae Cohen, "1992 New York City Intergroup Relations Survey," (American Jewish Committee Working Papers on Contemporary Anti-Semitism, 1993).
• Empire State Survey by Robert Behn and Doug Muzzio, "New Yorkers and Immigration," (Lerhman Institute, January, 1994).

Week 15. Final Report Due.