New York City is in the midst of a profound transformation as a result of the massive immigration of the last four decades. More than two and a half million immigrants have arrived since 1965, and, by the late 1990s, the foreign born constituted over a third of the city’s population. The new immigrants are affecting the city’s institutions -- the schools and colleges, the hospitals, the social services. Whole neighborhoods are undergoing dramatic changes. In this context, the commentators and analysts, popular and academic, in the press and in the journals, are comparing the new immigration with the old. There is hardly an article about the present influx that doesn’t mention, even if only in passing, the earlier great wave of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century.
    This is not surprising. Few events loom larger in the history of New York City than the wave of immigration which peaked in the first decade of the twentieth century. Between 1880 and 1920 close to a million and a half immigrants arrived and settled in the city so that by 1910 fully 41 percent of all New Yorkers were foreign-born. The immigrants, mostly eastern European Jews and southern Italians, left an indelible imprint on the city -- indeed, a large and influential part of New York’s current citizens are their descendants.
    A whole mythology has grown up about the immigration a century ago, and perceptions of that earlier migration deeply color how the newest wave is seen. For many New Yorkers, their Jewish and Italian immigrant forebears have become folk heroes of a sort -- and represent a baseline against which present-day arrivals are compared. A series of strongly held, if contradictory images, have come to characterize the earlier immigrants. They worked hard; they strove to become assimilated; they pulled themselves up by the dint of their own Herculean efforts; they were, in the case of Jews, the people of the book; they had strong family values and colorful roots.
    Against this image of immigrant giants of the past, present-day arrivals often seem a pale imitation. A common popular image is that they will have trouble fitting in, that they come here for government handouts rather than to work, and that their origins in non-Western cultures are poor preparation for American life.
    This essay attempts to set the record straight, looking behind the myths to show what happened then and what is happening now.  Specifically, I critically examine three myths or popular images about New York immigrants in the two eras: about immigrant quality; about racial differences; and about immigrants’ educational success. A comparative-historical perspective that examines immigrant New Yorkers in the two great waves not only dispels some popular misconceptions but also brings into sharper focus important aspects of today’s immigration. As Reinhard Bendix has observed in another context, a comparison increases "the ‘visibility’ of one structure by contrasting it with another. " Moreover, by setting the present against the past, we can better understand what is really "new" about the new immigration. As the historian David Kennedy has put it, "The only way we can know with certainty as we move along time’s path that we have come to a genuinely new place is to know something of where we have been." Although there are striking continuities in the experiences of immigrants in the two eras, there are also dramatic contrasts in patterns of incorporation, partly due to characteristics of the immigrants themselves and partly due to the very different social, economic, and political contexts in New York in the two periods.

Immigrant "Quality"

    We’ve heard Emma Lazarus’s words the " huddled masses" and "the wretched refuse of your teeming shore" so often that it is hard not to think of immigrants in these terms.  This characterization was overdrawn for the past, and it is even less appropriate today. Because most immigrants now come from relatively poor and developing nations doesn’t mean that the immigrants themselves are uniformly poor and uneducated.
    Who were the immigrants a hundred years ago?  Overwhelmingly, they were Italians and eastern European Jews.  Just before the mass migration began, in 1880, about 14,000 Russian Jewish and 12,000 Italian immigrants lived in New York City. Forty years later, the figure for Russians was nearly half a million, for Italians about 400,000. With their children, New York City’s Italian Americans numbered over 800,000; the Jewish population had soared to over 1.6 million -- altogether, about 43 percent of the city’s population.
    The Italian and Jewish newcomers did not come from the depths of their societies. Admittedly, the Italian immigration was primarily a peasant migration of farm or common laborers from the agricultural regions of the south.1  Even so, the Italians most likely to leave for America were in the middle or lower-middle levels of the peasantry rather than day laborers with no land at all. As for eastern European Jews, an exceptionally high proportion -- fully two-thirds of the Jewish immigrants arriving in the U.S. between 1899 and 1910 reporting an occupation -- had worked in skilled trades before they emigrated (Kessner 1977).
    Although yesterday’s newcomers were more skilled than may be recalled, professionals were scarce. Of those arriving in the United States between 1899 and 1910, less than one percent of the Italians and only 1.3 percent of previously employed Jewish immigrants were professionals. Literacy rates among Jewish immigrants were fairly high -- three out of four who arrived in the U.S. between 1899 and 1910 could read and write -- but they were extraordinarily low among Italians, about 50 percent. Neither group knew English. Nor did Jews or Italians arrive with much money (see Foner 2000, chapter 3).
    This is a far cry from today when the new immigrants include a much higher proportion of professionals -- and when they are more diverse in nearly every way. No two groups dominate today. Most immigrants come, not from Europe, but from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean -- and there are substantial numbers from an extraordinarily wide variety of countries. The top ten groups in New York City in the late 1990s, according to Current Population Survey estimates were, in descending order, immigrants from the Dominican Republic, the former Soviet Union, China, Jamaica, Mexico, Guyana, Ecuador, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and Italy (Kraly and Miyares forthcoming).
    The remarkable ethnic diversity of today’s immigrants is matched by the variety of their occupational and class backgrounds -- from poor farmers and factory workers to physicians, engineers, and lawyers. As before, large numbers of low-skilled and poorly-educated newcomers continue to arrive. In 1990, almost a fifth of working-age immigrants in New York City had less than a ninth grade education -- and another 20 percent had not graduated from high school. At the same time, a significant proportion of the new arrivals are highly educated and highly skilled. Enormous changes in educational and occupational structures throughout the world have produced growing numbers of professional, technical, and white-collar workers -- and a substantial number who move to New York come from their ranks.  According to the 1990 census, 10 percent of the working age immigrants living in New York City were college graduates; an additional 6 percent had a master’s degree or more (Cordero-Guzman and Grosfoguel 1998).  Of the working-age immigrants entering New York City in the early 1990s who reported an occupation to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, more than a quarter of the males and a third of the females were professionals, executives, and managers (Lobo, Salvo, and Virgin 1996).
    Although most current immigrants have a language problem to contend with, today, unlike the past, many arrive speaking fluent English -- which is not surprising since a good number come from countries like Jamaica, Guyana, India, and the Philippines where English is the official language or the language of educated discourse.  Moreover, some new arrivals, most notably among certain Asian groups, bring sizable amounts of financial capital.
    As one would expect, immigrants who lack skills, capital, and English-speaking ability end up now, as they did before, in low-paid and low-level jobs, often the very same ones that immigrants occupied a century ago. The needle trades, for example, remain an immigrant speciality as the industry continues to rely on the cheap labor of low-skilled arrivals. The faces in today’s garment factories are often Chinese and, increasingly, Mexican and Ecuadorian, just as a hundred years ago they were Jewish and Italian.  Whereas turn-of-the-century Italians  dug tunnels and ditches in New York’s construction projects, contemporary Mexicans often wash dishes -- indeed, many immigrants now work in a variety of menial service jobs.
    Yet because  they bring a good deal more human and financial capital than their turn of the century predecessors -- and also because the city’s occupational structure is more tilted toward white-collar and professional work than it was in the past -- many of today’s arrivals have been able to move, right from the start, into mid- and upper-level jobs in the mainstream economy. According to the 1990 census, a fifth of New York City’s working age foreign born adults had managerial or professional jobs. Turn back to the beginning of the century, and previous few Italians and Russian Jews were professionals.  In Kessner’s (1977) analysis of 1905 census data, 2 percent of Italian immigrant household heads and 15 percent of Russian Jewish immigrant household heads in New York City held upper white-collar jobs, though nearly all were self-employed businessmen.
    And something else is new, as well. Contemporary immigrants are much more likely to experience downward mobility when they arrive. Not that this didn’t happen before. A Hebrew teacher or religious scholar from Minsk might have ended up peddling goods or sewing garments in a sweatshop, but this kind of decline was unusual at the time. It’s not today. Lack of English, U.S. job experience, and network ties that connect them to the mainstream economy often prevent immigrants who held professional or highly-regarded jobs in their home country from getting work of comparable status here. Many cannot meet U.S. licensing requirements.; others, who arrive without green cards, are forced to work in lower-level jobs in the informal economy. In my research, I met Jamaican accountants and policemen who drove cabs in New York, former secretaries in Guyana who became child-care workers, and Haitian nurses who were now nursing aides.  A report on the Chinese community in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park mentions a drafting technician who became a dishwasher in New York, a linguistic professor turned housekeeper, and a physics engineer who found work as a shoe store clerk.  Granted, immigrants typically earn more money and enjoy better living standards in New York than they would in their homeland even when they suffer a decline in occupational status. Some eventually manage to recover their former occupational position -- or at least to make some gains. For the immigrants, the decline in prestige can be a bitter experience; for employers, it’s often a boon, for they can hire workers with middle-class backgrounds, at low cost, for working-class jobs.
    What about undocumented immigrants?  After all, much of the concern about today’s immigrant "quality" concerns the "illegal aliens" in our midst.  A hundred years ago, the number of illegal immigrant New Yorkers was minuscule due to the nature of immigration restrictions and immigrant travel. Until the 1920s, there were no numerical limits on European immigration
 -- and no immigrant visas or special papers that had to be secured from the United States. Europeans were excluded only on qualitative grounds; criminals, prostitutes, and the physically and mentally ill were prohibited entry, as were those likely to become public charges and, after legislative changes in 1917, the illiterate were added to the list. Since nearly all newcomers to New York came by boat and were processed through Ellis Island, they had no way to avoid immigration inspections intended to weed out the unhealthy and undesirable. Even before this, steamship companies had their own examinations at the port of origin since, after 1991, they were responsible for returning deportees to their homeland and providing food and lodging while they were detained in the United States.
    Today, limits on the number of available immigrant visas, combined with the continuing desire of so many people in other countries to move to the United States, have created a climate in which undocumented immigration flourishes. Nonetheless, fears about the numbers involved are exaggerated. Illegal aliens are not flooding the New York area. At any one time, a relatively small proportion of New York City’s immigrant population is undocumented. A widely accepted figure from the Immigration and Naturalization Service put the number in New York State at about 540,000 in 1996 -- an estimated 80 percent of whom live in New York City. California has the lion’s share -- some 40 percent of the nation’s illegal immigrants, compared to 11 percent in the entire state of New York. Most undocumented immigrants in New York, it should be noted, have not been smuggled across borders or on ships. The vast majority -- an estimated nine out of ten of New York State’s illegal residents in 1996 -- had entered on  temporary visas and become illegal immigrants by failing to leave when their visas expire.
    Available evidence, though admittedly limited, suggests that undocumented immigrants in New York City  are not inevitably of "lower quality" than their compatriots who are legal residents (see Grasmuck and Pessar 1991: 171-72; Papademetriou and DiMarzio 1986). The undocumented rarely come from the ranks of the poorest in their home countries. Indeed, as a number of researchers have shown, the various scams and schemes to get into the United States do not come cheap.  Like their legal counterparts, unauthorized immigrants are self-selected in terms of ambition and willingness to work. They tend to have above-average levels of education and occupational skills in comparison with their homeland populations (Portes and Rumbaut 1996: 10).
    Whatever the human capital they bring with them, undocumented immigrants are particularly vulnerable in the labor market.  Although having a green card is hardly a recipe for success, without one an immigrant has more trouble getting a good job and making a living wage in the formal economy. Undocumented immigrants  depend on employers who do not check their papers too carefully (if at all), a step that closes off opportunities in large firms and government bureaucracies in the regulated portion of the labor market. When immigrants without green cards get jobs, they fear deportation if they exercise their legal rights to state protection. In general, according to a recent study, undocumented immigrants earn less than their legal counterparts; in New York State, in 1995, the average annual per capita income of the legal foreign-born was almost six thousand dollars more than that of undocumented immigrants   (Passel and Clark 1998: 7).

Race

    If it is wrong to dismiss today’s immigrants as being of worse "quality" than those who came before, another set of misperceptions has to do with race. It’s often pointed out that a major difference between immigrants of the two eras is that today’s arrivals are mostly nonwhite whereas European immigrants in the past were white. This seems like an obvious fact. But, in truth, it’s not a fact at all. Race is a changeable perception -- a social and cultural construction -- and views of race have changed enormously in the last hundred years. Although we think of European immigrants of the past as being white, they didn’t look that way to commentators at the turn of the twentieth century. There was considerable prejudice against Jews and Italians and, to a surprising degree, it was put in racial terms.
    A century ago, the difference between a "swarthy" Italian and a "white" German was every bit as visible as the difference today between an "Asian American" and a "European American." At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews and Italians were thought to belong to different races than people from northern and western Europe. They looked different to most New Yorkers, and they were believed to have distinct biological features, mental abilities,  and innate character traits. The courts recognized them as white, and they were seen as superior to black and Asian groups, yet they were not the equals of northern and western Europeans. Jews and Italians were, to use the terms coined by historians, "in-between peoples," or "probationary whites," or not-yet-white ethnics."
    Full blown theories about the racial inferiority of eastern European Jews and southern Italians were propounded by respected scholars and given the stamp of approval by public intellectuals, opinion leaders, and the press. Madison Grant, a patrician New Yorker and founder of the New York Zoological Society, wrote in his influential book, The Passing of the Great Race, of Europeans of inferior breeding who were overrunning the country and polluting the nation’s Nordic stock. This theme was picked up in speeches by figures of the stature of Calvin Coolidge who wrote, in a popular magazine in 1921, that "America must be kept American. Biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races" (quoted in Lind 1995: 198).
    Articles with titles like "Are the Jews an Inferior Race?" and "Will the Jews Ever Lose Their Racial Identity?" appeared in the most frequently read periodicals.  The "marks of their race" said Harper’s of Lower East Side Jews, "appear in the formation of the jaw and mouth and in the general facial aspect." Jewish racial features, the New York Sun argued, made them unassimilable:
 The Jewish face and character remain the same as they were in the days of the Pharaoh. .... Usually a Jew is recognizable as such by sight...After a few generations other   immigrants to this country lose their race identity and become Americans only. Generally the Jews retain theirs, undiminished, so that it is observable by all men (quoted in Jacobson 1998: 178). The Dillingham Commission’s Report on Immigration, A Dictionary of Races or Peoples, had this to say about Jews: "The Jewish nose and to a lesser degree other facial characteristics are found well nigh everywhere throughout the race" (Ibid: 79).
    In everyday life, there was a racial vocabulary to describe -- and abuse-- the new immigrants. Italians were often described as "swarthy," and a common epithet for them, guinea, connected them to Africa. As late as the 1930s, an American history textbook asked whether it would be possible to absorb the "millions of olive-skinned Italians and swarthy black-haired Slavs and dark-eyed Hebrews into the body of the American people" (Barker, Dodd, and Commager, cited in Fitzgerald 1979: 79-80). Eventually, of course, Jews and Italians became unquestionably accepted as white.
    It was a complex and multi-faceted process. The dramatic decrease in the flow of new arrivals after restrictive legislation in the 1920s reduced the fears of old-stock Americans about the deluge of "racial inferiors;" it also facilitated assimilation by depriving Italians and Jews of constant large-scale reinforcements. The Nazi genocide made anti-Semitism less respectable and, in the scientific world, theories of nurture and culture eclipsed theories of nature and biology. A spate of books in the 1930s and 1940s challenged the view, championed by earlier advocates of eugenics and scientific racism, that race determined character, customs and behavior; new views that argued for the primary role of environment and culture became dominant in intellectual circles. At the same time, the massive migration of African Americans from the rural South to New York from World War I on altered New York City’s racial composition, adding large numbers of people who were below Jews and Italians in the racial hierarchy. Indeed, Jews and Italians stressed their "whiteness" as a way to distance themselves from African Americans.
    In addition, the economic successes of Jews and Italians, and their increased intermingling with other European groups, helped to erode the once salient racial differences among New Yorkers of European origin. As the groups climbed the socioeconomic ladder and mixed residentially with people of northern and western European descent, Richard Alba and Victor Nee note, "their perceived distinctiveness from the majority faded... Intermarriage both marked the shift and accelerated it" (1997: 846). That the law declared southern and eastern Europeans white was a powerful symbolic argument in their favor. As Stanley Lieberson (1980) has pointed out, they physically resembled members of older European groups so that it was often possible for children of Italian and Jewish immigrants to blend into the majority population ("to pass") if they shed their distinctive dialects, dress, and other cultural features.
    Today’s immigrant racial dynamics are much more complicated than they were a century ago, if only because of sheer diversity. European immigrants, whether from Ireland or Poland, Israel or Russia, are fully and unquestionably white. Although most of the latest immigrants are "nonwhite" or "people of color," what this means in New York today is staggeringly complex. As people of African descent, most West Indians are considered black; Hispanics are generally considered nonwhite, although they include people of extraordinary racial diversity, ranging from dark-skinned Dominicans to white-skinned Latin Americans who claim a strong European heritage; and Asians, neither black or white, are in a category of their own.
    New York also now has a huge population of African Americans and Puerto Ricans. A hundred years ago, before the mass internal migration from the Southern states and Puerto Rico, blacks and Hispanics made up less than three percent of the city’s population. Jewish and Italian newcomers, moreover, were thought of as separate (and inferior to) the Irish and non-Jewish Germans in the previous migrant wave. Today, something different is going on. Because so many immigrants are black and/or Hispanic, they are often identified with native-born blacks and Puerto Ricans -- who not only still comprise a significant chunk of the population but are also the city’s two most stigmatized minorities. One reason many of today’s immigrants emphasize their ethnic identity is to set themselves apart from African Americans. This is the case for West Indians, many Latino newcomers, and even some dark-skinned Indians who run the risk of being confused with African Americans (see Foner 2000a; 2000b).
    The big question is whether, and how, current racial perceptions and categories will change in the years ahead. Just as Jews and Italians became fully white, so, too, there is speculation that at least some of the immigrants now viewed as "nonwhite" will come to be thought of as white. Already the centrality of the black-white divide, which dominated New York race relations for much of the twentieth century, is being challenged and changed by the growing numbers of Asians and Hispanics who do not fit clearly into either category. By 1998, census estimates put Hispanics at 31 percent of New York’s population and Asians at 8 percent --  given high Hispanic birthrates and continued immigration, these proportions will surely rise.  High rates of intermarriage and the growing number of "multiracial" offspring are also an indication that we are moving toward a new kind of racial order.
    According to one scenario for the future, increased intermarriage and intermingling will expand the category "white" to include Asians as well as lighter-skinned Hispanics.  In another scenario, the very category "white" will cease to be salient, and the current white/nonwhite division will give way to a new black/non-black dichotomy -- with a white-Asian-Hispanic melting pot offset by a minority consisting of those with African ancestry. Still another, more optimistic, forecast sees black-white relations evolving in a different way: increasing intermarriage and social mixing, in this forecast, will reduce the salience of current racial/ethnic boundaries, including the black-white divide. A hundred years from now, Stanley Crouch predicts, "Americans... will find themselves surrounded in every direction by people who are part Asian, part African, part European, part Indian.... The sweep of body type, combination of facial features, hair textures, eye colors, and what are now unexpected skin tones will be far more common" (1996: 170). Just which scenario will triumph is hard to day, and it may well be that something altogether different will come to pass, including an amalgam of some of these three forecasts. It’s a safe bet, however, that the racial order will look very different in forty or fifty years from the way it looks now.
 
Education

    A third set of myths has to do with immigrants and education. In looking back to the past, Jewish immigrants are commonly viewed as the archetypal success story, pictured as making a miraculous rise through education.  Jews are commonly remembered as a "people of the book" who embraced learning on their climb up the social ladder. Against this image, there’s a fear that today’s immigrants are not taking advantage of the educational system the way newcomers did in the past. If my grandparents and great-grandparents could succeed in New York City’s schools a hundred years ago, without special programs to help them adjust, why -- many people say -- can’t today’s immigrants and their children do well when they get so much more assistance?
    Once again, the realities are very different from the popular images. Inspirational tales about eastern European Jews’ rise through education and their success in New York’s schools in the so-called golden immigrant age do not stand up against hard facts of the time. In the years before World War I, most eastern European Jews did not make the leap from poverty into the middle class through education. Those who made substantial moves up the occupational ladder in this period generally did so through business -- in the garment fur, shoe, and retail trades and in real estate. It was only in later decades that large numbers of eastern European Jewish children used secondary and higher education as a means of advancement.
    In the beginning of the twentieth century, school was a short term affair for most immigrant children. Most Jewish immigrant children left school with at best an eighth grade education; few went to high school, even fewer graduated. In 1908, well below five percent of the Russian Jewish children in the city graduated from high school (Perlmann 1988: 123). As for college, in the first decade of the twentieth century, less than one percent of Russian Jewish young people of college age ever reached the first year of college ( Gorelick 1982: 123).  The City College of New York (CCNY) may have already become a largely Jewish school -- in 1908, three-quarters of its all-male students were listed as Jews, mainly of eastern European background -- but Jewish undergraduates at CCNY and other New York colleges were a select few. Only a tiny number made it to graduation. For example, City College’s entire graduating class in 1913 had only 209 students. The 25 percent of Hunter college graduates were who eastern European Jews in 1916 included only fifty eight women. This was at a time when the Jewish population of New York City was almost a million! (Ibid)  It was not until the 1930s that there were big graduating classes at City College that contained large numbers of Jews of Russian and Polish origin.
    One reason  that so few Russian and Jewish children made it to high school and college is that there weren’t many high schools, or colleges, at the time. (After a decade of expansion, in 1911, the city had 19 high schools with an enrollment of 54,000, but the high school body was still only about a quarter of the size of the four preceding elementary school grades. In 1908, CCNY and Hunter, the only two public colleges, had about 1400 students.) In any case, a high school degree wasn’t necessary for the jobs employing most New Yorkers. Indeed, job opportunities were abundant for young people with little schooling. Even the eighth grade graduate could get a white-collar job. A business career didn’t require four years of college nor did teaching or the law.
    Extended schooling was a luxury beyond the means of most newly-arrived immigrant families, who needed their children’s contributions to the family income. Even those who managed it, rarely saw all their children go to high school. Furthermore, New York’s elementary schools did a poor job of educating Russian Jewish immigrants’ children so that many were not prepared or motivated to continue beyond the elementary school level. The schools were severely overcrowded as a result of the enormous immigrant influx and the inability of school construction to keep up with demand. From enrollments of less than 250,000 in 1881, the public school population nearly doubled by 1898; by 1914, it had grown to almost 800,000 students. The Lower East Side, Brownsville and Williamsburg -- all Jewish areas -- were among the most overcrowded districts in the city. In Brownsville, the most congested district in 1910, there were classes with as many as 82 students. One student later recalled having to sit in the same seat with another girl and put her arm around her seatmate’s waist "so that I shouldn’t fall off on the other side"  (Berrol 1978: 42).  Educators of the time joked that teachers should have prior experience in a sardine factory before being hired to work in the New York schools (Tyack 1974: 230) .
    There’s a nostalgia for the "sink or swim" approach to learning English, but unfortunately, many in the past "sank" rather than "swam." Most non-English speaking children were placed in the lowest grade regardless of their age.  (The special "steamer" classes introduced in 1904  -- in which students were totally immersed in English for a few months -- could only cater to a tiny fraction of the students who would have benefited from them. In 1908, for example, there were only enough classes for 1500 students throughout the city. See Berrol 1978) Teachers were the ones who decided whether a child should be promoted or not, and many children who could do the work were left back to repeat the grade. In 1908, according to U.S. Immigration Commission study, over a third of the Russian Jewish elementary school pupils in New York City were two or more years over age for their grade.
     f Russian Jewish children at the beginning of the twentieth century were not the education exemplars often remembered, they did do much better than Italians, the other greenhorns at the time. Undoubtedly, this favorable comparison is one reason Jewish academic achievements have stood out and received so much attention. Compared to native white New Yorkers , however, Russian Jewish students’ progress was fairly similar at the elementary school level -- and higher up the educational hierarchy, Russian Jews did much less well than native whites in making it to high school and college. 2
    What about today? It is difficult to compare immigrant children’s educational achievements today with those in the past because the context in which education is a path to mobility is now so radically different: formal education, and a more extended education, is now more important in getting a job as a consequence of educational upgrading and transformations in the world of work.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, high schools were just starting to become mass institutions. Now, getting a high school diploma is the norm, achieved by more than 70 percent of New York City’s adult population.3  Whereas one hundred years ago an eighth grade education would do for most manual jobs, now a high school degree is a must for many low-skilled positions. College is no longer an institution for a tiny elite -- in 1990, a quarter of New Yorkers twenty-five and older had completed a college education (Rivera-Batiz 1994: 57). Today, college graduates find themselves competing for positions that immigrants with a high school diploma could have obtained a century ago. Graduating from college -- and beyond -- has become essential for the growing number of professional, technical, and managerial positions.
 How are immigrant children doing? Admittedly, there are many dropouts and failures --something more serious today when more education is needed to get a decent job. Immigrants attend schools in New York City that are plagued by overwhelming problems. Once again, the surge of immigrants has led to soaring public school enrollments -- now over the million mark -- and serious overcrowding.  New language problems are not adequate to meet the enormous need. Whereas a hundred years ago, New York schools mainly had to cope with Yiddish and Italian speaking children, today they confront a bewildering array of languages; a count by the Board of Education indicates that more than a hundred languages are spoken by students from over two hundred countries. When high schools were institutions for a minority of the better and more motivated students, violence, crime, and student indifference -- and hostility -- were not issues the way they are today.
    Despite all these problems, a substantial number of students are making it, and some are doing remarkably well. Partly it’s a matter of new opportunities and programs. There has been an  enormous expansion, and wider availability, of higher education; the creation of a host of programs for teaching students English; and even special immigrant schools designed specifically for newcomer children. Also, large numbers of immigrant children have highly educated parents, and some immigrant children themselves have previous experience in fine schools in their home country. This has translated into academic success for many newcomers.
    Although the data available on immigrant students in New York City are woefully inadequate -- the only data the Board of Education collects on immigrants refer to "recent immigrant students" who have entered a U.S. school system for the first time in the past three years -- they show immigrants comparing favorably with other students in a number of ways.  For example, students were who recent immigrants to the public school system in middle school graduate from high school on time by a slightly greater percentage than their native-born peers. They also have lower dropout rates.4 And although recent immigrants’ median test scores in math, reading, and English are somewhat lower than those of other students, they improved their scores between 1989-1990 and 1990-91 more than the rest of the student body (DeWind 1997). In this volume, Schwartz and Gershberg report that, at the elementary school level, performance in reading and math tests increase with the percentage of immigrants in the school.
    Immigrants make up a high -- and growing -- proportion at the City University of New York. In 1997, as Tom Bailey and Elliot Weininger show in their chapter, almost 49 percent of CUNY’s first-time freshmen were foreign born.  Indeed, Bailey and Weininger report that foreign-born students at the two-year community colleges earn significantly more credits than the native born and, after eight years, were more likely to earn an associate’s degree, to enroll in a bachelor’s degree program, and to earn a bachelor’s degree after transferring.
    Two studies based on large representative samples for the nation as a whole show immigrants often outperforming their native-born peers.  Using data from a national sample of eighth graders, Grace Kao and Marta Tienda (1995) conclude that children of immigrants -- both those born abroad and those born in the United States -- earned higher grades and math scores than children of native-born parents even after the effects of race, ethnicity, and parental socioeconomic status were held constant. Another national study of more than 21,000 tenth and twelfth graders interviewed in 1980 and then followed over a six year period made two types of comparisons: between immigrants and native-born students in the aggregate as well as between immigrants and the native-born in four different ethnic-racial groups (Asian, white, black, and Hispanic). Whichever way they were compared, immigrants were more likely to follow an academic track in high school than their native-born counterparts; once graduated, immigrants were also more likely to o enroll in postsecondary education, to attend college, and to stay continuously through four years of college (Vernez and Abrahamse 1996).
    Like Jews of an earlier era, today’s educational exemplars are Asian groups (white European immigrants are also doing comparatively well). In New York City, in a variety of Board of Education studies, Asians do better than blacks and Hispanics. On reading and math tests given to students in grades three through twelve, recent immigrants from Korea, the former Soviet Union, and India did better than other students (DeWind 1997). An evaluation of bilingual programs found that elementary school students who spoke Korean, Chinese, or Russian tested out of both bilingual and English as a Second Language classes far more quickly than did Haitian Creole and Spanish speaking students.5 And, considering the foreign and native born together, Asians in the class of 1996 had much higher on time high school graduation rates -- and much lower dropout rates -- than blacks and Hispanics.6
    Asians (native as well as foreign born) are overrepresented in the city’s elite public high schools that select students on the basis of notoriously difficult entrance exams. In 1995, an astounding half of the students at the most selective high school of all, Stuyvesant, were Asian; at the Bronx High School of Science, 40 percent were Asian, and at Brooklyn Technical High School, 33 percent. This is at a time when Asians were 10 percent of the city’s high school population. So many Korean students now attend Horace Mann School -- one of New York’s most competitive private high schools -- that there is a Korean parents’ group there.
    Why are Asian students are doing so well? A comparison with the past indicates that, as among Russian Jews in the last great wave, social class factors are of primary importance; cultural background also plays a role. Today, another factor -- race -- must also be considered.
    A major reason why eastern European Jews did so much better academically than Italians in the old days was their occupational head start.  Jews were more urban and arrived with higher levels of vocational skills, which gave them a leg up in entering New York’s economy. Because the Jewish immigrant population was, from the start, better off economically than the Italian, Jewish parents could afford to keep their children in school more regularly and for longer. The poor, less skilled Italians were more in need of their children’s labor to help in the family. That Jewish children were more likely to have literate parents was also a help; the children themselves often arrived with a reading and writing knowledge of one language, making it easier to learn to read and write English than it was for southern Italian immigrant children, who generally arrived with no such skills (Cohen 1982).
    Today, educational background plays a much larger role in explaining why the children of Asian immigrants are doing so well. Asian students have an advantage in that relatively high proportions have highly-educated parents. At the time of the 1990 census, a full third of adult Asian immigrants in New York City who had arrived in the previous ten years -- and about half of the Indians and Taiwanese and almost 70 percent of the Filipinos -- were college graduates.  So were a third of Soviet immigrants, another group known for its academic success. By comparison, only 8 percent of Caribbean adult immigrants -- 6 percent of  Dominicans and 11 percent of Jamaicans -- were college graduates and the figure for Central and South Americans was 11 percent (Mollenkopf, Kasinitz, and Lindholm 1995: 154).
    Although they often experience downward occupational mobility in New York, highly educated parents, as many studies show, have higher educational expectations for their children and provide family environments more conducive to educational attainment. If their children started school in the home country, they typically attended excellent -- and rigorous -- institutions.  Well-educated parents, moreover, are usually more sophisticated about the way the educational system works here and have an easier time, and more confidence in, navigating its complexities -- and steering their children into the good schools -- than those with less education.  Because many Asian immigrants come from professional and middle-class backgrounds, they are doing fairly well economically, which also has implications for their children’s achievements. A century ago, economic resources were important because they allowed immigrants to keep their children in school; now they make it possible (or easier) to send children to private schools or to move to areas in the city (and suburbs) with better schools.
    Much has been made of Jewish cultural attitudes toward education, and though they may not been as important have some have argued, clearly they did matter. That Jews placed such a high value of education -- and that southern Italians’ cultural heritage made them less oriented to and more skeptical about the value of  book learning -- helps to explain the different educational achievements of their children.  Today, most immigrant parents, in all groups, arrive with positive attitudes to education and high educational expectations for their children.  Asian immigrants have been found to have particularly high aspirations for their children, though it is hard to say how much these aspirations are due to the cultural values and resources they bring to America as opposed to social class advantages. That cultural background plays a role is supported by a number of national studies that show Asian students outperforming all other racial/ethnic groups, even after taking into account such factors as family income, household composition, and parental education (see Steinberg 1996: 83-87; Vernez and Abrahamse 1996).  It has been argued that the cultural background of Chinese parents operates in that they stress that hard work and discipline, not innate intelligence, as the keys to educational success and push their children "to work twice as hard as their American counterparts." Confucian teaching, it is said, not only puts a high value on education but also emphasizes discipline, family unity, and obedience to authority, all of which contribute to academic success. Chinese immigrant parents, Min Zhou (1997: 198-99) notes, value thrift and denounce consumption of name-brand clothes and other "too American"luxuries, but they do not hesitate to spend money on books, after-school programs, Chinese lessons, private tutors, music lessons, and other educationally oriented activities.  Chinese and Koreans also have imported after-school institutions that prepare their children for high-school admissions and college-entry exams. Called hagwon in Korean and buxiban in Chinese, these private academies are a tradition in Asia, where competition to get into the top universities is fierce. In Chinatown, where tutoring services and test preparation programs are readily available, "school after school" has, according to Zhou become an accepted norm (Ibid: 202). According to one survey, a fifth of Korean junior and senior high school students in New York City were taking lessons after school, either in a private institution or with a private tutor (Min 1995). Mollenkopf’s (this volume) study of a large sample of second-generation New Yorkers suggests that another cultural factor may help explain the strong educational performance of the Chinese second generation: family patterns, specifically, a high proportion of two-parent families in which the Chinese second generation grow up and a greater tendency among the Chinese second generation than many other groups to defer childbearing..
    Today, race is important, too. At the turn of century, race was irrelevant in explaining why Jews did better academically than Italians. Both groups were at the bottom of the city’s ethnic pecking order, considered to be inferior white races. Today, the way Asians, as opposed to black and Hispanic, immigrants fit into the racial hierarchy makes a difference in the opportunities they can provide their children. Because they are not black, Asian (and white) immigrants have greater freedom in where they can live and, in turn, send their children to schools. Asians have been able to move into heavily white neighborhoods with good schools fairly easily. Moreover, their children are less likely than black or Hispanic immigrants to feel an allegiance with native minorities and be drawn into an oppositional peer culture that emphasizes racial solidarity and opposition to school rules and authorities and sees doing well academically as "acting white."
 
Conclusion

    Whether we look at immigrant quality, race, or education, it is misleading to view  today’s immigrants against a set of myths and images rather actual realities. There is a tendency to exaggerate immigrants’ successes in the good old days and to minimize the difficulties they faced then -- just as there is a tendency to exaggerate immigrant failures and problems now.  This doesn’t mean we should pass over the continued difficulties that immigrants face in today’s New York. Certainly, as many of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the newest New Yorkers confront a host of challenges as they try to make their way and create a life in this country. But we place an added burden on recent immigrants if we compare them -- and expect them to live up to -- a set of folk heroes and heroines from a mythical golden age of immigration. As New York continues to be transformed by the current wave of immigration, and as we seek to understand the incorporation of the latest newcomers,  this is something we would do well to keep in mind.