Where We Live Now: Immigration and Race in the United States (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Where We Live Now: Immigration and Race in the United States Carl L. Bankston III Where We Live Now: Immigration and Race in the United States. By John Iceland. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2009. Sociologist and demographer John Iceland has examined the residential assimilation of immigrants in a number of journal articles published in the American Sociological [End Page 255] Review, Social Science Research, Demography, and other major journals. His new book draws heavily on those articles in an investigation of the residential segregation patterns of immigrants. Relying primarily on 1990 and 2000 census long-form data, Iceland looks at whether immigrants are assimilating residentially, whether the assimilation process differs for immigrants of varying racial and ethnic backgrounds, how characteristics such as English ability and socioeconomic level affect residential assimilation or segregation, how immigration may be re-shaping the segregation patterns of native-born blacks and whites, and at how diversity affects the stability of neighborhoods and the quality of relationships within neighborhoods. Iceland finds indications of the growing residential assimilation of immigrants. The residential segregation from whites of native born Asians, Hispanics, and Blacks is less than the segregation of foreign born members of those groups. As members of minority groups achieve upward mobility, moreover, they tend to become less segregated from whites. Nevertheless, he finds that there are multiple forms of residential assimilation. Hispanics are drawing closer in their housing to both non-Hispanic whites and to African Americans and the segregation of native from foreign born Hispanics and of Hispanics across racial groups remains low. Finally, Iceland finds that race and ethnicity continue to shape the rate and extent of assimilation, despite the general trends of lessening segregation. Based on these findings, he suggests that immigration may be contributing to a general blurring of the color line in the United States. He recommends some caution about predicting the future, though, since the economic and social situation of the U.S. may change. To that caveat one may add that speculating about long-term trends requires long-term data. Still, none of the findings are surprising or counterintuitive, so Iceland's observations and predictions may be fairly safe. Although Iceland identifies some of the major theories of immigrant incorporation and offers some remarks on how his findings may fit those theories, the work is mainly empirical. Readers looking for new theoretical insights into immigration and residential segregation or for original critical discussions of existing theories will not find them here. The work is probably also not appropriate for most undergraduate classes, since it tends to be rather dry and technical, despite the author's efforts to turn findings from journal articles into a book by including occasional anecdotes from newspapers and other sources. The chapters do not simply reproduce the author's earlier journal pieces, but the collection as a whole still gives the impression of a collection of separate articles that consider residential segregation from different angles. However, the volume will be useful to specialists in the study of immigration, race, and ethnicity because it brings together a great deal of solid evidence on contemporary residential patterns. Carl L. Bankston III Tulane University Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association