Just as America is widely regarded as the world’s immigrant nation, New York City is America’s immigrant city. In the 1980s, the U.S. has experienced the largest absolute levels of legal immigrants since the first decade of the century - about 7.4 million. The official number of legal immigrants per thousand of the U.S. population rose from 1.7 - 2.0 in the 1960s and 1970s to 2.5 in the mid 1980s to 3.5 in 1996 (Ehrenberg and Smith, 2000, table 10.4). Most have settled in a handful of cities. Just ten metropolitan areas accounted for two-thirds of all immigrants between 1985 and 1990. Even more striking, almost 40 percent of all immigrants in this five year period located in just two metropolises, Los Angeles and New York. In 2000, more than one in every three New Yorkers was born abroad.
    New York City’s economic and cultural preeminence is unquestionably attributable to the size and diversity of its population, a reflection of the political openness, social networks, and economic opportunities that have attracted immigrants from nearly every nation on the planet. By the late 1990s, the largest numbers of newcomers were from the former Soviet Union (Russian speakers), the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Columbia (Spanish speakers), China (Mandarin mainly), Jamaica (English), and Haiti (French). This extraordinary diversity can be seen on nearly every street, construction site, school and office in the city. It was also seen, tragically, in the September 11th attack, in which individuals from some 80 (50?) nations lost their lives.
But this vast experiment in globalism has not gone uncontested. There has been a growing concern over the changing composition of immigrants, from European to relatively poorly educated Asian and Hispanic immigrants who are perceived to burden the public budget,  compete with the most disadvantaged native-born in the labor market, and now, threaten U.S. with terrorism. Immigration and welfare reform legislation was passed in the mid 1990s with the intention of limiting access of noncitizens to a variety of social programs and a wide variety of proposals are now being considered to enhance domestic security by tightening the borders making it more difficult to remain in the country “out of status.”
    As for labor market effects, while earlier studies failed to find much in the way of negative effects, there is increasing evidence that, indeed, less educated African-Americans have not shared commensurately in the benefits of rising immigration, and some studies have found negative effects of immigrants on African-American wages and employment opportunities (Smith and Edmonson, 1997; Hamermesh and Bean, 1998; Howell and Mueller, 2001). This is certainly what economists would expect if there is any overlap in immigrant and native-born job markets, particularly in a period in which labor market shelters have been dismantled (declining membership and power of unions; declining real value of the legal minimum wage, and declining share of less-skilled employment opportunities in regulated and public sector jobs).  As the nation slips into a recession and perhaps an extended period of slow growth, these negative labor market effects can be expected to worsen, making immigrant workers less welcome than in the roaring 1990s. Tighter eligibility for public services, tighter enforcement of the immigration laws, and economic slowdown are all likely to take a heavy toll on many immigrant communities.
    This book is concerned with immigrant incorporation in New York City in the 1990s, a period - in retrospect - of unparalleled opportunity for less-skilled newcomers. As such, it provides a kind of baseline from which to judge developments in the early years of this new century and aims to help point to the most useful directions for future research. The papers in this volume were  written as part of a project on the public policy implications of the new immigration to New York City, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and administered by the New School University's International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship (ICMEC).  The project was designed to document and better understand some key dimensions of this new immigration, with a focus on processes of immigrant incorporation, changes in immigrant well-being, and effects on metropolitan area institutions and non-immigrant populations.
    Even limited to the current period for a single metropolitan area,  the scope of the topic was still far too broad for a comprehensive treatment in a single volume. Other recent books on current immigration to New York City have narrowed the focus to particular demographic groups. For example, Waldinger’s Still the Promised City (1996) explored the implications of immigration for African-Americans to New York City in the postwar period, particularly in the labor market. Nancy Foner’s recent edited volume, Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York (2001), examined a single immigrant ethnic group. Cordero-Guzman, Grosfoguel, and Smith’s (2001) Migration, Transnationalization, and Race in a Changing New York focuses on transnational processes and the incorporation of selected national groups.
    Our strategy has been different. The papers in this book examine a few key dimensions of the regional political economy crucial for immigrant incorporation and immigrant and native-born well-being: the labor market; public benefits programs and welfare reform; health care and health outcomes; and educational access and performance. Rather than looking for broad overviews of each of these areas, the project aimed to advance public understanding by taking advantage of the particular expertise of each of the authors. While this approach required some sacrifice in comprehensiveness, it seemed the most appropriate for advancing the project’s main goal of producing important new policy-relevant knowledge. Our ultimate objective was to produce a set of scholarly but widely accessible and policy-relevant essays focused on those current policy debates closely linked to the rapid increase of less-skilled immigrants in the metropolitan area.

A Demographic Overview
    According to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, throughout the 1990s about 115,000 newcomers chose to settle in New York City each year, about 15 percent of all immigrants to the United States (NYC Department of City Planning, 1999, p. 2).  Table 1 provides a glimpse of the metropolitan population they were joining. The data describe the share of the total population, the age distribution, educational levels and labor force status of demographic groups defined by race, ethnicity, and nativity in the metropolitan area in 2000.
    The first column shows that slightly less than two-thirds (64%) of the residents of the metropolitan area were born in the United States. About two-thirds of these native-born New Yorkers were non-Hispanic whites. The native-born who identified themselves as Hispanic were 7.4 percent of the metropolitan area and about two-thirds (5.7%) of these were from Puerto Rico. African-Americans (defined here as native-born non-Hispanic blacks)  accounted for 12.6% of all residents, nearly the same share of the metropolitan population as foreign-born Hispanics (11.5%). One-quarter (24.9%) of all residents of the metropolitan can be considered recent immigrants, having arrived since 1980.
    While the Dominican Republic has been a leading sending country since the 1980's, Mexico and Columbia moved rapidly to the top of the list in the late 1990s. Indeed, from hardly any measured population in the mid 1990s, Mexicans are now as the second largest immigrant group, at 2.1% of all metropolitan area residents. To give an idea how rapidly the Mexican population has grown, our data show Mexicans at 1.5% of the total just a year earlier, in 1999. The other nations in the top six were Jamaica, China and Haiti. Russia does not appear in this table, but made the sixth spot in 1999 (1.5% of the total).
Columns 2-4 present figures on the distribution of the population into three age groups (under 20, 20-59, and over 59).             Comparing rows for total native- and foreign-born we find that New Yorkers born in the U.S. are both younger and older than their foreign-born counterparts. Whereas about 8 percent of the native-born are under age 20 and almost 21.7 percent are over age 59, the foreign-born figures are 5 and 17.6 percent. As a result, the share of the population that is prime working age (20-59) is substantially higher for immigrants (77.3% vs 70.4%). This is significant for social policy since working age people tend to pay the bulk of  taxes and children and older people are the main beneficiaries of our publicly funded social programs. The difference in the age distributions for the native- and foreign-born would be even greater but for two outliers: the high concentration of children in the Mexico population (16.9%) and the high share of older people in the foreign-born white group (29%). By way of contrast,  among the Hispanic foreign-born, the share in the oldest group was less than half as large as the white foreign-born (13.7%).
    Educational attainment plays a key role in the way newcomers become incorporated into the larger community, helping to determine, among other things,  job and housing opportunities, levels of income, access to health care, and eligibility for social programs. Column 5 shows dramatic differences in the share of each demographic group in the 20-59 age group with low education levels (defined as a high school degree or less). Not surprisingly, the native-born have much lower shares of those with low education levels: 36 percent of prime age people had just a high school degree or less compared to over 55 percent for the foreign-born. Interestingly, this figure for the foreign-born was nearly identical to that for recent immigrants (57%).  The relatively good performance of the native-born was driven by non-Hispanic whites (27.8%), while higher  foreign-born figure was due in large part to Hispanic immigrants, nearly three-quarters (72.3%) of whom have no more than a high school degree. Among the largest sending nations, Mexicans are by far the least well educated (84.8%). It should be noted that foreign-born blacks do about as well as African-Americans (50.9%), and Haitians are much less likely to have low education than the other leading sending nations (47.4%). By this measure, the most well-educated group, whether native- or foreign-born, were Asians. These educational attainment results were confirmed by similar tabulations for 1999.
    The last three columns present information on labor market activity for 20-59 year olds for 2000. At the top of the activity rankings are native-born whites and Asians, of whom 78-79 percent were employed. Slightly below were all the all the foreign-born groups (72-76%). Native-born black and Hispanic groups show much lower employment rates (64-65%), but lower still  were Puerto Ricans (60.7%; the figure for 1999 was 61.9%). Nearly 35 percent of Puerto Ricans between 20 and 59 years old were not in the labor force. This compares to under 30 percent for native-born blacks, 20-21 percent for foreign-born blacks and Hispanics, 16 percent for Jamaicans, and just 8 percent for Haitians.
    Female labor force participation rates appear in the last column. Puerto Rican women are among the least likely to have a job or look for work (55.7%), almost 10 percentage points below the Hispanic foreign-born figure (64.4%). Also quite low were the Asian foreign-born rate (59.8) and well above the figure for Mexican women (48.5%). It is likely that the low Asian female participation rate reflects the failure to account in the official statistics for underground economy employment, which by anecdotal accounts appears to be quite substantial. At the other end of the spectrum, the participation rate for foreign-born black women is nearly 75 percent, and it far higher still for Jamaican women (89%). This reflects in part the concentration of these women in the health care sector (see Lynn McCormack’s paper in this volume) and in household services (as nannies, for example).
    After a decade-long economic boom and three years after the implementation of welfare reform, these data show that in 2000 there remained vast differences in employment and labor force participation rates across demographic groups. The Howell and Gester paper explores in substantial detail recent changes in the employment and earnings outcomes for these groups. Together, the differences in labor market participation shown in Table 1 and the employment outcomes documented by Howell and Gester have direct implications for the adequacy of family incomes. The topics covered in the remaining essays are all impacted by these labor market outcomes: who has and will be affected by welfare reform (Chernick and Reimers; Kaestner and Kaushal); the causes of poor health outcomes and who gets access to health care (Joyce; Fahs and Muennig) and who gets In 1910, two of every five New Yorkers was foreign-born; in 2000, more than one in every three was born abroad. to go to which schools and how well they do in them (Gershberg and Schwartz, Bailey and Weininger, and Mollenkopf et.al.).

The Organization of the Book
    After an essay by Nancy Foner on the historical context, the essays in this volume are organized into three groups, each with four essays: 1) Demographic Shifts and Labor Market Outcomes; 2) Education: Access, Resources and Performance; and 4) Public Benefits, Welfare Reform, and Health Outcomes.
    Nancy Foner begins the volume with an historical perspective in which she challenges the widespread tendency to view the current immigrant wave unfavorably in comparison to a romanticized vision of turn-of-the-century immigrants. Focusing on immigrant “quality,” racial differences, and educational outcomes at the beginning and end of the last century, Foner brings out the way the contemporary immigration recapitulates some of the early twentieth century experiences of Italians and Jews but also the ways that it is genuinely novel. For example, like the earlier episode, immigrants tend to have low levels of education, but she points out that a substantial share of the recent immigrant wave were highly educated and took professional and managerial jobs, a pattern that certainly did not characterize Jews and Italians a centruy ago. Her essay underscores the importance of keeping in mind the substantial differences in the economic, social, and political context faced by each immigrant wave.
    In the first essay in Part II,  Howell and Gester then describe this demographic transformation in terms of labor market outcomes. They find an increasingly polarized  job quality structure - a declining middle, as the share of employment grows in both the bottom (worst) and top (best) job tiers. Another key finding is demographic polarization, with black and Hispanic immigrants increasingly concentrated in the bottom tier and white native-born workers increasingly located in the top tier. They also find sharply declining earnings for white, black and Hispanic immigrants relative to the white native-born and substantial increases in overall earnings inequality, whether or not recent immigrants are included.
    Has this dramatic increase in the presence of immigrants in the New York metropolitan labor market helped push the native-born out of the area?  Kathy Hempstead examines the relationship between the growing presence of the foreign born and the mobility patterns of the native-born in New York City. Her results lend support to those who have found that immigrants do not appear to cause native-born outmigration from the entire labor market, but she also finds that rising shares of immigrants are associated with moves of the native born within the city (among boroughs), a finding consistent with those who have found immigrant effects on native born mobility. Rather than fleeing to new labor markets, Hempstead’s results suggest that some native-born relocations within the metropolitan area may reflect a preference for residential segregation.
    Two case studies follow. Focusing on nurse aides in New York City’s health care industry, Lynn McCormick finds both skill upgrading and job quality downgrading. As the industry has restructured to cope with cost containment realities, there have been substantial consequences for who gets which jobs, upsetting conventional views of the nature of job ladders and ethnic niches. Tarry Hum shifts the focus to labor market outcomes for immigrants in a particular community - Sunset Park in Brooklyn. She concludes that the revitalization of the area has been largely dependent on local, small, highly competitive businesses that employ immigrants in insecure jobs that pay poverty-level wages. A central theme of this part of the volume is that as New York’s economy took off in the 1990s, immigrants became an increasing presence throughout the job structure, but the quality of job opportunities for immigrants declined, suggesting that addressing the low wage problem ought to be a top policy priority.
    Although it may take a generation or more, raising educational attainment can help lower skill immigrants improve their access to better jobs and reduce their dependence on public assistance. Immigrants and public education is the focus of Part III. The first two papers address issues of enrollment, resource allocation and performance within the New York City public schools. In the first essay, Alec Gershberg provides and overview of what New York City, New York State and the Federal government have been doing to address the needs of immigrant students. Based on qualitative research, he finds the current approaches too focused on language deficits and that more attention should be paid to migration-related cultural and emotional issues faced by students and their families. In a second paper, Gershberg teams up with Amy Schwartz to “paint a statistical portrait of the resources and characteristics of the public schools attended by immigrant students.” Contrasting immigrants and  Limited English Proficient (LEP) students, they note that “the issues and experiences of LEP students and recent immigrants are different enough that they merit more refined policy responses,” a data-based conclusion that strongly supports the qualitative findings of the first paper.
    The remaining two papers in Part IV shift the focus to the relative performance of immigrants and the children of immigrants in terms of educational attainment. Tom Bailey and Elliot Weininger examine the educational outcomes of foreign and native born students in the City University of New York (CUNY). They find that foreign born students do remarkably well. While Hispanics and blacks were the most concentrated in community colleges, they concluded that minority status was less important than nativity in determining educational achievement. Clearly,  CUNY is continuing to play its historical role of greatly facilitating immigrant incorporation, but the authors warn that these successes “should not divert attention from the continued educational problems faced by many native groups.”
    How has the second generation been doing? Drawing on data from a major on-going project, John Mollenkopf, Philip Kasinitz and Mary Waters look at educational outcomes for young (18-32) second generation and (other) native born individuals by race/ethnic group. Even after controlling for various background characteristics, they find that blacks and Latinos did the worst (both second generation and other native born), “with the Chinese second generation a positive outlier and Puerto Rican natives a negative outlier.”
    These papers on immigrants and education in the New York area suggest that in addition to facing the same hurdles as disadvantaged native-born students, children with poorly educated parents also face language and acculturation barriers that need special attention, but also that the educational performance of immigrants and the second generation appears to vary sharply across race and ethnicity lines, much like the pattern of labor market outcomes documented by Howell and Gester in Part II - it is no surprise to find poor education outcomes for blacks and Hispanics from disadvantaged backgrounds. The poor showing for Puerto Ricans is striking and of particular concern. The strong showing for foreign born minorities in the CUNY system almost surely reflects self-selection and positive family background effects. Consistent with the findings on health outcomes, these findings regarding educational performance suggest that it is not necessarily those from low-skilled immigrant households who are most in need for targeted policy interventions.
    Part IV considers changes in immigrant eligibility for public benefits, the effects of welfare reform, the consequences of legislative changes and other factors for immigrant health outcomes, and the extent to which immigrants impose disproportionate health care costs on society. Howard Chernick and Cordelia Reimers find that immigrants experienced greater rates of decline in public benefits than the native-born only in the case of food stamps. They find no evidence of a “chilling effect” of welfare reform on noncitizens and conclude that policy choices at the state and local level have become increasingly important for immigrant access to public benefits. Robert Kaestner and Neeraj Kaushal investigate the behavioral responses to welfare reform for native and foreign born women. They find that federal welfare reform induced women to increase their employment, that the effects were greater for foreign-born women, and that among the latter the impacts were largest for recently arriving immigrants. Like the previous paper, they also find no evidence for the “chilling” hypothesis, concluding that actual eligibility for benefits is an important determinant of the behavioral response to welfare reform. These two papers find that the effects of new legislation on the eligibility of immigrants for public benefits have been mixed. While immigrants were not as disproportionately affected by legislative restrictions in the 1990's as many believe, their labor market participation was particularly responsive to the incentives embedded in the welfare reform legislation.
    Employment opportunities, income and educational levels, and public benefit programs can have large impacts on health outcomes. The last two essays examine immigrant health outcomes and their determinants. Ted Joyce looks at this question with an analysis of the prenatal care and birth outcomes of foreign born women in New York City. Joyce finds that although the Medicaid eligibility expansions of the late 1980's significantly lowered the proportion of births to uninsured, mostly foreign-born women, it was the waning of the crack epidemic that had the most substantive impact on birth outcomes - mainly by improving outcomes among the native-born. Despite some expansionary legislative changes (increasing Medicaid eligibility), behavioral and social factors appear to play the main roles in the relatively positive health outcomes experienced by immigrants.
    Marianne Fahs and Peter Meunnig address the broader question of immigrant health care utilization and health status in New York City. They find that the foreign born have lower mortality rates than native-born (and Puerto-Rican) New Yorkers, that the foreign born are much less likely to be hospitalized for most major categories of illness, and consequently, that the relative cost of providing health care to New York City’s immigrants is lower than for the comparable native-born population. No support is found for the view that immigrants disproportionately drain resources from the health care system.
    Through the examination of demographic and labor market trends, the opportunities and performance of immigrants in the educational system, and the implications of recent legislative changes on health and well-being in New York City, the essays in this volume help to provide a better understanding of immigrant incorporation at the end of the 20th century. We are at the beginning of a new decade in which economic and security concerns are likely to disproportionately affect recent immigrants. It is our hope that, these studies can help researchers better design and policymakers better craft appropriate public responses that can benefit all our communities.