EpiCenter

The International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship's Quarterly Newsletter

In the new millennium, it will be increasingly difficult for an American to tell what "a Christian" or "a Buddhist" looks like. Christians and Buddhists come in all colors. Race, ethnicity, and religion are no longer, if they ever were, hard-linked to one another. Moreover, places of worship decreasingly fit old cultural molds: a small-town Protestant church-red brick walls, high pitched roof, and white steeple-may be packed with Asians, and those who sit for meditation at a Buddhist temple today are quite likely to be white Americans. Much of this racial-religious uncoupling is due to the new immigration, a huge, little researched topic.

I will develop five general principles about new immigrant religion and will illustrate them with some specific examples. My thesis is that those of us who track the ramifications of new immi-grant religion in the U.S. must be mindful of both difference and similarity. Thus we should neither blandly assume that, for religious purposes, the new immigrants are just like those who came at the turn of the last century, but at the same time we should not accept the facile view that they bear nothing in common with their predecessors.

Principle I: Religion Is (typically) Salient for Migrants. This for several reasons: A. Migration is a "theologizing expe-rience." Reflective people among im-migrants ask of their presence in the U.S. "Why are we here?"

B. Religious institutions are "free social spaces" under the American system of religious disestablishment. Homesick immigrants find in religious institutions a place that feels a bit like home, a little piece of Zion in the midst of Babylon.

C. As their children enter school, immigrants often find that religion is a key to cultural reproduction, a vehicle through which to inculcate the children into their cultural heritage, to give them reasons to ground the differences they experience between themselves and their classmates, differences that at some stages of their upbringing they often wish they could forget. Religion, especially the religious specialists they find in their churches, mosques, et c., help parents answertheir children's pained "why?" questions.

D. For many immigrants who suffer indignities in the work that they are forced to accept in the new country, social roles that are made available to them in their religious communities-for example, holding church office-can help them reclaim honor denied in the host society.

E. For those experiencing demands for adjustment to new circumstances, a new religion or newly understood religion may facilitate personal transformation. For example, born-again Christianity smoothes the breaks from their parents' culture that the mobility aspirations of Korean-American youth demand.
Generally, in U.S. history, religion has mediated difference. Religious difference in the U.S. is the most significant group difference our society allows.

Thus for immigrants religion is a public space, not just a psychological fact. Hence there are thousands of new immigrant churches and other religious institutions and worship centers in the U.S. To give a few widely cited counts and estimates there are about 3000 Korean Protestant congregations, 700 Chinese Christian churches, and perhaps 7000 Latino Protestant churches (most of the last named very small) now in the U.S. About 3500, or 1/6 of all Catholic parishes in the U.S., offer the mass said in Spanish (and more in other languages, like Vietnamese, Kannada, Tagalog, Polish, and Lithuanian); most of these parishes are very large. There are some1200-1500 Islamic centers in the U.S. and Muslim Student Associations on scores of college campuses, as well as hundreds of Buddhist and Hindu temples and centers. There home altars and house meetings for the practice of Hinduism, folk Catholicism, Vodoun, and Santeria. Of course not all of these are new immigrant institutions, but most are, and very few have received the scholarly attention that is their due.

Principle II: Migration Is Not Random with Respect to Religion. Although lack of census data makes it difficult to estimate religious demography, we do have some information to the effect that the immigrants who come to the U.S. from any particular country often represent a religiously (as well as socio-economically) skewed sample of its population. For example, (South) Korea now is approximately 25% Christian, but 50% of emigrants from that country to the U.S. are Christian and half of the remainder join Christian churches as they settle into the U.S. The result is that approximately 75% of Korean immigrants in the U.S. are Christian. India is about 2
Christian, 12% Muslim, and perhaps 85% Hindu, but it is very doubtful that the Indian population in the U.S. mirrors these percentages. Raymond Williams estimates that 10% of Indians in the U.S. are Christian, and it is clear in places like Chicago that Indian Muslims are a major presence in the U.S. For understandable if regrettable reasons, immigrants from the Levant-Lebanese, Jordanians, and Palestinians-are also disproportionately Christian, just as those from the former Soviet Union are disproportionately Jewish and those from Iran are disproportionately Christian and Baha'i as well as Jewish. Because a disproportionate share of Asians in the U.S. (almost all Filipinos, half of Koreans, many Vietnamese, some Indians) as well as almost all Latin Americans immigrate as Christians, the great majority of new immigrants are at least nominally Christian. The new immigration is bringing about not the de-Christiaruzation of the United States, but the de-Europeanization of American Christianity.
Both in regard to "pull" factors in migration-the presence of welcoming co-religionists and co-ethnics as well as jobs in the U.S.-and "push" factors-targeted persecution and discrimination as well as poverty-religion is one of many variables that must be taken into account if we are to understand who comes to the U.S. and why.

Principle III: Identities-Individual and Collective-Aren't Primordially Given But "Negotiated." Religious identities, to use other language, is "constructed," or "transmuted" (in Will Herberg's term) on the basis of home country materials and group alignments in the receiving country.

As was true a century ago of "Italians" and "Poles," so today "Asian Indian," "Indo-Pakistani," "Soviet Jew" (as a religious category), "Afro Caribbean," "African American," "Asian," and "Hispanic" (or "Latino") are identities "made in the U.S.A." I think and hope that we have gone beyond sterile either/ or debates over "assimilation" versus "the persistence of difference" and can now look dispassionately at the way such changes are going on today among new immigrants.

As between religious, national-origin, and language identities, some become more salient than others in the new country, and, for example many second-generation Korean-Americans seem more eager to be known as "Christian" than "Korean." Muslim Pakistanis and Indians in the U.S. seem more interested in centering their collective life in Islamic Centers than are Muslim Arabs, at least in Chicago. Evidently, some Indians feel torn between cross-cutting loyalties to their language group-Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam-and their religion-Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Muslim, and Christian, and it is not clear which identity will prevail. Nonetheless, Indians in the U.S. seem concerned to project a religious identity rather than one where they take a place in the American racial hierarchy corresponding to the color of their skin. Thus "race" is both a conditioning factor in these negotiations and is itself conditioned by them. American Jews expect Jews from Russia to join synagogues, but the Russian emigres do not tend to experience their Jewishness as a religious identity and they may wind up abandoning it. By contrast, according to Shoshanah Feher, the longer the Islamist regime in Iran persists, the more willing Persian Jews in Los Angeles are to abandon their Persian identity in favor of their Jewish one.

The study of "segmented assimilation" is a research frontier, especially in ethnic studies fields, where it is usually employed to look at race-and class-conditioned identities ("black," "Chicano") but not at religious ones. Except for certain scholars this literature has mostly ignored the role of religion in the process of segmented assimilation.

For understanding the negotiation of identity, the role of religion-both as an identity immigrants bring from the home country and a mode of social participation in the host country-cannot be neglected without distorting the processes under study. In the United States, a society of chronic social change, religion has to be worked at. It can't be taken for granted. That is something that immigrants discover, especially when their children start: school. Religion may be thought of as a form of cultural capital, but capital is the result of investments. This leads to the fourth principle.

Principle IV: Religion in the United States Is Subject To Processes of Institutional Isomorphism Toward Congregationalism. However the religious group is organized in the home country, there is a tendency for religious institutions in the U.S. to assume a congregational form. The religion may have been temple-centered in the old country, where families came at times special or convenient to them to receive the ministrations of monks or priests. But temples do not spontaneously dot the U.S. landscape. Someone has to build them. But U.S. immigration law is biased toward nuclear families, not extended ones, and grandmothers are in short supply.

The "congregation" is a form of religious organization indigenous to Baptists and Jews, as a tried-and-true way of concentrating religious energies in a society that approves of religion in general but doesn't provide it as a public service. So the "congregational" form is increasingly adopted "de-facto" by other groups, where the religious community becomes (1) a voluntary membership association, whose identity is (2) defined more by the people who form it than by the territory they inhabit (cf. the "parish" form of organization). Therefore it is common, though not universal, that immigrant families drive long distances to their places of worship. This is particularly true of Hindus and East Asian Protestants (although less true of Latinos and Muslims). A congregation typically features (3) lay leadership (a board of elders, directors, deacons, etc.) and (4) systematic fund-raising and a system of trustees (who may overlap with the leadership board) with eventual incorporation for tax purposes as a non-profit entity, which is often, though not always, independent of any larger "denomination." Because of its lay leadership and voluntary funding, there is (5) a tendency for clergy to be professionals hired as employees. Because of its voluntary, self-determined, nature, it also has (6) a tendency to ethnic exclusiveness. Because the people who establish the congregation have multiple needs, there is (7) a tendency for it to be multi-functional (featuring more than religious "worship," including educational, cultural, social, political, and social service activities). Because families tend to have the day off on Sunday, there is (8) a tendency for these activities to be brought together under the roof of the institution on Sunday, whatever the particular sacred day of that tradition. There are many examples of this...

Of course, in theological terms, a house of worship belongs to God, not to this or that group, and for that reason congregationalism is offensive to many deeply religious people. Islam and Christianity in particular make much of their principled universalism, the fact that people of all races, languages and nationalities are welcome. Many mosques in the U.S., including the Islamic Mission (Brooklyn) approximate this ideal on Friday, when the congregation, those gathered for jum'ah prayer from their nearby places of work, tend to be multi-ethnic, but things are different on Sunday, when the gathering tends to be an ethnically distinct one of families taking the day off.

Principle V: Congregations and other religious institutions become vehicles for or venues of intragroup dynamics, places where relations between generations, genders, and immigrant cohorts are worked out. 1 will mention three such dynamics:

A. There Is an Immigrant Generational Gap. Despite cultural flows from the home county, the American-raised and American-born second generation of most new immigrant groups are for the most part acculturating very rapidly, becoming English-dominant and losing fluency in their parents' native tongues. We can expect generational conflict, because the first generation typically wants the religious institution to be a reminder of what they left behind in the country of origin, a reminder their children don't need in the same way and often don't want.

I would like to see the study of second generation religion become a research frontier, but that is unlikely to happen until immigrant religion begins to be studied by immigrant communities themselves (especially by members of their own second generation), rather than being monopolized by white anthropologists or expatriate scholars, who have an investment in "difference."

B. Gender Relations Change. One way that second-generation-led religious groups typically differ from those of the first generation is the higher status assigned to women in formal religious roles: women are likely to serve on boards of directors and even to be worship leaders. But the elevation of women's status happens even among the first generation. For example, women are more of a presence in many American mosques than they are in the countries of origin. That makes the story told by NEICP fellow Sheba George all that more remarkable. George's site was an Indian Orthodox Christian church, peopled primarily by families of nurses from Kerala who came to the U.S. under occupational preference provisions of the 1965 immigration law. These women got good jobs in the U.S., securely establishing themselves before bringing their husbands and children over some years later. The husbands sought what work they could find, but they often remained underemployed in comparison to the positions they had held in India. It was the husbands who then found in the church a space to reassert their patriarchal authority in the face of the diminution of status they experienced in both the workplace and their homes in the U.S. Thus, the renegotiations of gender roles in the immigrant religious community are
not always to the advantage of women.

That brings me to the third and last occasion for intragroup conflict that I will speak of, that...

C. Relations Between Older and Newer Cohorts of Immigrants May Occasion Conflict in religious communities. Fenggang Yang, in his remarkable study of a Chinese Christian church in an east coast city, shows how this evidently typical Chinese church renews its ethnicity by successfully incorporating wave after wave of immigrants from an astonishingly diverse array of diasporic Chinese communities, speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka and other dialects, nationals of the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and other countries; fierce anticommunists and those who before coming to the U.S. had never known a political system other than communism. According to Yang, this diverse array was kept together both by Christian and Confucian ideals of unity and a frequently adjusted system of smaller "fellowship groups" to facilitate the ethnically distinct social relations members wanted.

Difference, even antagonism, between cohorts of immigrants is an old story in American immigration history, from the reaction of settled German Reform Jews to the arrival of Eastern European Jews at the end of the 19th century to the grudging welcome extended to new Polish and Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago by those long settled here who fled Soviet regimes after World War II. Religious institutions are one important place that. these dramas are played out. In providing themselves a religious space, new immigrants may address one set of problems only to open up new ones.

Last February, the Henry Luce Foundation formally approved a proposal by ICMEC for a two-year project of original and applied research on the nature and effects of recent immigration on New York City. The project is co-directed by David Howell (Milano Graduate School) and Ari Zolberg (The Graduate Faculty and ICMEC) and managed by Peter Benda (ICMEC).

The "New Immigrants in New York City" project is designed to examine the impact that the substantial increase in less educated immigrants since the 1970s has had for the City. In particular, it aims to examine the implications of this wave of immigration for the city's labor market, communities, and community organizations; for the delivery of health and social services; and for the public education system. The project is also concerned with how well or poorly the City and other service providers are responding to immigrant's most important needs.

Although New York City has always been a city of immigrants, the size and demographic composition of immigrant flows since the 1970s have been remarkable. In the 1970s, 18.1 percent of all (legal) immigrants to the U.S. settled in New York. This share was nearly as high in the 1980s, 14.3 percent. In 1990 the City ranked fifth among the nation's cities in the share of foreign-born residents (28.4 percent) and fully one-third of these arrived in the 1980s. The foreign-born share of the employed male workers strongly attached to the labor market (those working 20 or more weeks in the previous year) in the New York metropolitan area increased from 23.4 percent in 1980 to 36.2 percent in 1990. For female workers the increase was almost as large, from 22.4 to 32.1 percent.

Equally striking are the national origin and skill levels of this new immigration. Half of all immigrants to New York City between 1982 and 1989 were from just five developing nations: the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, China, Guyana, and Haiti. Not surprisingly, nearly all of the new arrivals from these leading senders came with low levels of education. For example, among those at least 25 years old, 17.5 percent of Chinese immigrants had a college degree, while 11 percent of Jamaican immigrants and only 6.3 percent of Dominican immigrants held this degree.

A substantial increase in the population of low-skilled foreign-born workers that extends over several decades can have a variety of important economic and social impacts. This study will focus on four areas in which this demographic shift toward the less skilled foreign-born is of particular concern to public policy.

The first two commissioned papers will provide the historical and demographic context for the project. Nancy Foner, professor of Anthropology at SUNY-Purchase will outline the historical context for this project, drawing on her forthcoming book on the two great waves of immigration to New York City. Professor Foner's paper will be complemented by another prepared by Kathy Hempstead, a demographer at New York University, providing a general analysis of migration to and from (out of) the City, and the role of the foreign-born in these movements.

We then turn to the labor market. David Howell (Chair, Urban Policy Program, Milano Graduate School, New School University) and Kimberly Gester (Ph.D. candidate, Milano School) will explore which native- and foreign-born workers by race and gender are employed in what kinds of jobs, and how this has changed over the last twenty years. They will also describe trends in the distribution of earnings by native/foreign born by gender and ethnicity/race, analyzing (e.g.) in which jobs, if any, foreign-born workers have an earnings profile that looks like white native-born workers, and whether wage differentials between groups are growing or declining.

This overview paper will be followed by two others focusing on what impact reform of the welfare system has had on immigrants in New York City. Robert Kaestner (Baruch College) will use Census statistics to examine the changes in labor market earnings and labor force participation of immigrants in the New York metropolitan area between 1992 and 1998. Professor Kaestner's quantitative study will be complemented by a qualitative analysis by Ajay Chandry (Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University) on how recent changes in social policy, particularly welfare reform, has affected recent lower-skilled immigrants and their children.The labor market part of the project also includes two case studies. Lynn McCormick (Hunter College) will focus on the foreign-born black workers in the health care sector, inquiring how these workers established and maintained this niche, and the nature and role of informal networks in this process.
Professor McCormick will also co-author a paper with Tarry Hum (Queens College) on the role that protective institutions, like labor unions, play in the formation and maintenance of ethnic niches by focusing on Chinese workers in New York City's garment industry.

A second area of concern is health and social services. Two papers dealing with immigrant and health services, and one with immigrants and social services, have been commissioned. Marianne Fahs  (Director, Health Policy Research Center, Milano Graduate School), Peter Meunnig (Milano School), and Kathy Hempstead (New York University) will address the current and expected future health needs of immigrants and the costs and benefits associated with providing health services to the City's newcomers. Among other things, they will examine health outcome differences between native-born and foreign-born populations and consider the effects of changes in social policy (immigration and welfare reforms) in the mid-1990's in access to primary care for both documented and undocumented immigrants.Professor Ted Joyce (Baruch College) will narrow the focus to the effect of these policy changes on the heath care utilization and newborn health of foreign-born women and infants in New York City. His paper investigates whether prenatal care utilization is different for foreign-born groups, and if so, whether this difference is explained mainly by the availability of health insurance, family structure, or some other factors.

Professors Howard Chernick and Cordelia Reimers, both of Hunter College, will assess the fiscal impact of immigration in New York City by focusing on the relationship between patterns of immigration and spending on social services. They will address a number of issues that have been highly controversial in recent years. For example, which services are most used by immigrants and how costly are they to provide? Have these services been expanding or contracting, and to what extent have these trends been associated with immigrant use? Do immigrants matter for social services spending because they are heavier "consumers" of these services? Does political support for a particular service decline as immigrants come to represent
a larger share of the users? Have other poor groups (African-Americans) been affected by the provision of social services to immigrants?

The "New Immigrants in New York City" project is also and particularly concerned with learning more about the impact of immigration on the educational system and how immigrants are faring in public school systems at both the primary/secondary and postsecondary levels. Alec Gershberg (Milano Graduate School) and Amy Ellen Schwartz (New York University) are co-authoring a study of the impact of new immigrants on public education. They will focus on the impact on school outcomes, primarily test scores, and will investigate the distribution of impacts across neighborhoods and demographic groups. Professor Gershberg is also authoring another paper on the relationship between immigration and changes in school governance structures, asking (e.g.) whether new immigrants are likely to benefit from or be hurt by reforms such as the Charter schools movement.

The project also includes two studies of immigrants and post-secondary education. Tom Bailey (Director, Center for Education and the Economy, Teachers College, Columbia University) returns to his earlier work on immigration with a study of the performance of immigrants in the Community Colleges of CUNY (The City University of New York). He will assess the relative performance of immigrant and native-born groups in course completion and graduation, the efforts of community colleges to meet the needs of immigrant students; and the effects of the growing presence of immigrants on the educational experiences and opportunities of  native--born minority students.

John Mollenkoff, (Director, Center for Urban Research, CUNY Graduate Center) is preparing a paper that will compare and endeavor to explain higher education outcomes among second generation immigrants in NYC, looking at the role individual, familial, and group factors may play in accounting for differences across immigrant groups. One factor that most clearly distinguishes immigrant groups is English language facility. In his study, ICMEC Director Aristide Zolberg
seeks to explore to what extent English-language training programs and facilities meet the needs of younger (school age) as well as adult new immigrants in New York City. In addition, his project explores the extent to which English-language facility, or lack thereof, effects newcomers' prospects in the local labor markets as well as access to the housing market and health services. Since possession of English language skills is critical to performance in school and to the costs of providing schooling to immigrants, his study is closely linked to the other four papers concerned with education.

The last two papers address issues of immigrant incorporation at the community level. Based on a database of some 300 community groups and in-depth interviews of key personnel at 25 of these organizations, Professor Hector Cordero-Guzman (Milano Graduate School) will examine the impacts of changes in immigration and welfare laws on immigrant groups, organizations, service providers, and immigrants themselves. On the opposite end of the qualitative research methodology continuum, Tarry Hum (Queens College) will conduct a case study of a single community-Sunset Park in Brooklyn-in order to better understand the dual nature of immigrant enclaves and ethnic labor markets, as well as the implications between the two for community development strategies.

The findings emerging from the "New Immigrants in New York City" project will be presented at a major public conference at the New School in October 2000, which will feature two round tables, one focusing on policy implications, another on future research directions.

The ICMEC will also organize briefings for particular "target audiences," e.g., officials at the New York City Board of Education working on issues relating to immigrant children in the public school system. The papers prepared for this project will be compiled into an edited volume or volumes to be published by a major university or other press sometime in 2001. For additional information please contact The International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship at 212.229.5742 or icmec@newschool.edu.

0n November 10, 1999, Doris Meissner, Commissioner of the U.S. Immigration
and Naturalization Service (INS), visited the New School to give the inaugural
guest presentation in a newinvitational ICMEC seminar series on "Critical Issues
in U.S. Immigration and Refugee Policy." In her prepared remarks, which were off the record, Commissioner Meissner (who has been head of the INS since October 1993) offered her candid perspective on and assessment of INS's current situation and prospects looking ahead to 2000 and beyond.

She began by commenting on how the politics surrounding immigration issues underwent a profound transformation from the period when Bill Clinton first assumed office to the mid-1990s, when the administration was driven to respond to Congressional proposals designed to sharply curtail legal as well as undocumented immigration to the U.S.. Commissioner Meissner went on to discuss, how more recent changes have effected (or buffeted) the INS. The Commissioner touched on the difficulties the agency has faced in its efforts to respond to and implement an enormous number of new legislative mandates, and the challenges she and other INS senior executives have faced in trying to manage a truly phenomenal growth in the agency's budget and workforce.During the lively discussion period that followed, Commissioner Meissner engaged in a series of spirited exchanges with the seminar participants on topics ranging from changes in U.S. asylum law and policy to the feasibility and desirability of the federal government's introducing a self-conscious "immigrant" (versus immigration) policy. While her interlocutors may not have always agreed with what the Commissioner had to say, they greatly appreciated her candor.

The ICMEC wishes to record its gratitude to The Ford Foundation for its support of this new workshop series, which in effect represents the reincarnation of the
Center's earlier, very successful "mapping" seminar. (This seminar ran for several years in the early and mid 90's, but subsequently fell into abeyance as our focus shifted more towards research.) Thanks to Ford funding, the ICMEC is able to be more responsive to the demonstrated interest on the part of a diverse group of professionals in and around New York in being provided a venue for reflection and debate on current issues in U.S. immigration and refugee policy. The next presentation in this series will be by Frank Sharry, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum (see "Upcoming Events" section).

On Tuesday, February 8th, the Inter-national Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship in partnership with the Graduate Faculty's Political Theory Colloquium was pleased to sponsor a guest lecture by Joseph Carers of the University of Toronto. The lecture, entitled "Culture, Citizenship and Com-munity: A Contextual Exploration of Jus-tice as Evenhandedness," was part of ICMEC's continuing series on "Immigration and Citizenship in Constitutional Democracies." Professor Carens' presentation was based on a forthcoming book of the same title, to be released this year by Oxford University Press.

In general terms, Professor Carens' lecture focused on debates surrounding issues of cultural practice and accommodation of cultural differences within liberal democratic polities. In this context, Carens' sought to steer something of a middle ground between two competing conceptions of liberal democratic justice. The first, traditional liberal conception emphasizes the idea that the state should maintain a posture of strict "neutrality" vis-a-vis the claims of particular groups for recognition or defense of their distinctive cultural practices, religious beliefs, etc. The second, competing con-ception is that the state should explicitly affirm and promote particular groups' claims, in order to rectify past wrongs done to the group(s) concerned, ensure the continuity of discrete cultural traditions or practices , etc.

One of Carens' key points was that it is difficult if not impossible to resolve debates surrounding the accommodation of cultural differences by relying on abstract "models" or theories of democratic justice. Indeed, throughout the well-attended lecture and discussion period, he emphasized the importance of constantly analyzing and assessing disputes surrounding issues of community and cultural difference in a contextual framework that is attentive to the particularities of history and situation.

Rejecting the idea that a thoroughgoing posture of strict state "neutrality" vis-a-vis competing conceptions of the good life is either feasible or desirable, Carens instead sought to promote an understanding of justice as "evenhanded-ness," i.e., the idea that the state should treat similarly-situated groups (or claims) similarly. But notwithstanding that it cannot be uniformly interpreted or
applied. Carers insisted there may still be particular occasions or situations when the state should adhere to a policy of "neutrality." Again, when the state should stay "neutral" or instead pursue a policy of"even- handedness" is not a question that can be resolved in the abstract, but only by examining the particulars of the case. Playing off John Rawls' notion of "reflective equilibrium," Carers suggested that political theorists might be better advised to think in terms of "reflective disequilbrium"-this as a prompt to constantly re-examine whether previous arrangements or settlements of cultural differences remain "just."

Members of the audience, an energetic mix of students, faculty and others from the New School community and beyond, pressed Professor Carens to flesh out what it would mean to have the state pursue a policy of "evenhandedness." Some pro-fessed dissatisfaction with the absence of what one questioner referred to as a clear "methodology" in Professor Carens' scheme that would enable one to determine whether and when a policy of evenhandness, versus a stance of "neutrality," should be followed. Carens for his part insisted that the search for abstract principles or methodologies that might cover all cases, and uniformly contribute to results we would deem "just," is misguided, a quest that is apt to result in more harm than good. At the end of the evening, it was clear that not everyone had been persuaded, but that all had been greatly stimulated, by what Joseph Carers had to say.

On Friday, February 18, 2000, the ICMEC and the journal, Current Issues in
Language and Society, jointly sponsored a workshop at the New School on
"Religion and Language: Obstacles to Immigrant Incorporation?" Plans for this
workshop grew out of discussions between ICMEC Director Ari Zolberg and Sue
Wright, Department of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, U.K.,
during the latter's stay at the New School as EUCNY Short-Term Visiting Scholar
in Spring 1999.

The February 18 workshop featured presentations by Ari Zolberg, John Rex,
Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations, University of
Warwick, U.K., and Abram de Swaan, chair of the School of Social Science
Research at the University of Amsterdam. Professor Zolberg started off by providing a summary overview of an earlier paper he co-authored with Long Litt Woon entitled "Why Islam is Like Spanish: Cultural Incorporation in Europe and the United States," which appeared last year in Society and Politics (Vol. 27, no. 1, March 1999).

John Rex next presented a paper he had written in response to the earlier
Zolberg/Woon essay, not so much taking issue with the argument advanced by the latter but rather seeking to place that argument in the broader framework of a theory of interethnic relations he (Professor Rex) is in the process of elaborating.

Abram de Swaan started off the afternoon session with a presentation focusing on the role of minority languages as a form of "collective cultural capital," with specific reference to the situation of immigrants in Europe. This set the stage for Ari Zolberg's concluding presentation, in which he sought to set forth a framework for understanding the distinctive situation of Spanish as an emergent "second language" in the U.S., and the political dynamics and debates surrounding Spanish language use in the United States.

The presentations by Professors Zolberg, Rex and de Swaan will form the basis of an issue of Critical Issues and Language and Society. OILS Editor Sue Wright will also be inviting short response papers from other workshop participants, who
contributed to making the February 18 gathering an especially interesting and lively affair. The ICMEC wishes to record its gratitude to Professor Wright for the vital role she played in organizing the workshop, and to Multilingual Matters, publishers of OILS, for helping to underwrite the workshop expenses.