How the Other Half Works solves the riddle of America's contemporary immigration puzzle: why an increasingly high-tech society has use for so many immigrants who lack the basic skills that today's economy seems to demand. In clear and engaging style, Waldinger and Lichter isolate the key factors that explain the presence of unskilled immigrants in our midst. Focusing on Los Angeles, the capital of today's immigrant America, this hard-hitting book elucidates the other side of the new economy, showing that hiring is finding not so much "one's own kind" but rather the "right kind" to fit the demeaning, but indispensable, jobs many American workers disdain.

How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor

Business & Money

Waldinger, Roger

Lichter, Michæl I.

Economics

University of California Press

Immigration is remaking the United States. In New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Chicago, the multiethnic society of tomorrow is already in place. Yet today's urban centers appear unlikely to provide newcomers with the same opportunities their predecessors found at the turn of the last century. Using the latest sources of information, this hard-hitting volume of original essays looks at the nexus between urban realities and immigrant destinies in these American cities. Strangers at the Gates tells the real story of immigrants' prospects for success today and delineates the conditions that will hinder or aid the newest Americans in their quest to get ahead. This book stresses the crucial importance of understanding that immigration today is fundamentally urban and the equally important fact that immigrants are now flocking to places where low-skilled workers--regardless of ethnic background--are in particular trouble. These two themes are at the heart of this book, which also covers a range of provocative topics, often with surprising findings. Among the essayists, Nelson Lim enters the controversy over whether and how immigrants affect the employment prospects for African Americans; Mark Ellis investigates whether low immigrant wages depress other workers' salaries; William A.V. Clark contends that immigrants seem to be experiencing downward mobility; and Min Zhou asserts that trends among second-generation immigrants are decidedly more optimistic. These well-integrated and well-organized essays sit squarely at the intersection of sociology and economics, and along the way they point out both the strengths and the weaknesses of these two disciplines in understanding immigration. Providing a theoretically and empirically comprehensive overview of the economic fate of immigrants in major American cities, this book will make a major contribution to debates over immigration and the American future.

Strangers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Coined in the third century B.C., the term diaspora has evolved into a buzzword used to describe the migrations of groups as diverse as ethnic populations, religious communities, and even engineers working abroad. This concise book provides a critical introduction to the concept of diaspora, bringing a fresh, synthetic perspective to virtually all aspects of this topic. Stéphane Dufoix incorporates a wealth of case studies―about the Jewish, Armenian, African, Chinese, Greek, and Indian experiences― to illustrate key concepts, give a clear overview on current thinking, and reassess the value of the term for us today.

Diasporas

History

Dufoix, Stephane

Rodamor, William

Africa

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

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 cities: 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.

Harvard University Press

International migration presents the human face of globalization, with consequences that make headlines throughout the world. The Cross-Border Connection addresses a paradox at the core of this phenomenon: emigrants departing one society become immigrants in another, tying those two societies together in a variety of ways. In nontechnical language, Roger Waldinger explains how interconnections between place of origin and destination are built and maintained and why they eventually fall apart.Newcomers moving away from the developing world find that migration is a good thing, letting them enjoy the benefits of residence in the developed world, some of which they send on to their relatives at home in the form of remittances. Residing in a democratic state, free from the long arm of their place of origin, emigrants mobilize to produce change in the homelands they left. Emigration states, in turn, extend their influence across boundaries to protect nationals and retain their loyalty abroad. Time, however, proves corrosive, and in the end most immigrants and their descendants become progressively disconnected from their home country, reorienting their concerns and commitments to the place where they actually live.Although widely studied, cross-border connections remain misunderstood, both by scholars convinced that globalization is leading to a deterritorialized world of unbounded loyalties and flows, and by policy makers trying to turn migration into an engine of development. Not since Oscar Handlin’s classic The Uprooted has there been such a precisely argued, nuanced study of the immigrant experience.

The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and Their Homelands

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 cities: 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.

International migration presents the human face of globalization, with consequences that make headlines throughout the world. The Cross-Border Connection addresses a paradox at the core of this phenomenon: emigrants departing one society become immigrants in another, tying those two societies together in a variety of ways. In nontechnical language, Roger Waldinger explains how interconnections between place of origin and destination are built and maintained and why they eventually fall apart.“When are immigrants ‘us’? When are they ‘them’? Waldinger implores readers to reframe the debate from a before-after dichotomy to a new transnational approach, revealing migrants to be here, there, and in-between at all stages of their migration tenure…The book’s real strength is in the elegance of the author's argument, supported by evidence that transnationalism itself is not static but an ongoing dialectic.”―R. A. Harper, Choice“The Cross-Border Connection is to be commended for putting substance into the black box of transnationalism, offering scholars a dynamic model to account for the ebb and flow of transnationalism in the real world and yielding testable propositions about the circumstances under which cross-border connections can be expected to expand or contract.”―Douglas S. Massey, American Journal of Sociology

Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Immigrant Business in Industrial Societies (SAGE Series on Race and Ethnic Relations)

Everywhere immigrants settle in advanced Western societies, ethnic minority businesses flourish - whether they be Turkish tailors in Amsterdam, Moroccan grocers in Paris or Chinese restaurateurs in New York. This book examines the phenomenon of minority business development in industrial societies. Contributions challenge the conventional `wisdom′ which claims that immigrants do well in business because their culture makes them entrepreneurial. Rather, they show how the development of a particular ethnic minority business is always the product of unique, historical circumstances. These include opportunities for newcomers, ethnic group characteristics, and strategies used to exploit entrepreneurial options. They also show that not all groups

Aldrich, Howard

Ward, Robin Harwood

Business Development & Entrepreneurship

Sage Publications, Inc.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Waldinger, Roger. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Waldinger, Roger

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Waldinger, Roger. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor

Strangers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America

How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor

Diasporas

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

The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and Their Homelands

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

The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and Their Homelands

Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Immigrant Business in Industrial Societies (SAGE Series on Race and Ethnic Relations)

Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Immigrant Business in Industrial Societies (SAGE Series on Race and Ethnic Relations)