Introduction New York and Amsterdam: Immigration and the New Urban Landscape Jan Rath, Nancy Foner, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Rogier van Reekum Immigration is dramatically changing major cities throughout the world. Nowhere is this more true than in Amsterdam and New York City, which, after decades of large-scale immigration, now have popu- lations that are about a third foreign born. Amsterdam and New York City have had to deal with incorporating hundreds of thousands of immigrants whose ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds differ from those of many long-established residents, and who display a variety of different languages, religions, cultures, and lifestyles. How have the specific urban contexts of Amsterdam and New York shaped the fates of these newcomers? And—conversely—how has the massive recent immigration transformed New York City and Amsterdam? These are the central questions that will be addressed in this book. A Transatlantic Comparison of Immigrant Cities Amsterdam and New York City share more than a high proportion of foreign born. That the immigrants arriving there in the last half century have mostly come from outside of Europe is a new development in both cities. Newcomers have had to face a wide array of challenges of adjust- ment and accommodation, and these processes show remarkable simi- larities in the two cities. Immigrants have sometimes gotten a cold or >> 1 9780814738092_foner text.indd 1 10/10/13 1:09 PM 2 << Rath, foner, duyvendak, and van reekum even hostile shoulder, but at other times received a warm welcome. By the standards of their respective countries, Amsterdam and New York are relatively liberal cities with progressive elites. Thedifferences between the cities, however, overshadow the parallels. Among other things, Amsterdam lacks a large native minority presence, which is so significant in New York, as well as a continuous history as an immigrant city and the institutional legacy that this involves. New York, for its part, lacks (in American eyes) the generous welfare protections and services that are provided in Amsterdam.1 The cities have different political and economic institutions. The immigrant flows also diverge dramatically. Owing to recent immigration, Amsterdam is now home to a large number of Muslims2 while New York’s nonwhite populations— Latino, West Indian, and Asian—have mushroomed. About 13 percent of the foreign-born population in the Netherlands lives in Amster- dam;3 New York City has slightly less than 8 percent of the U.S. foreign- born population.4 The naturalness of the way in which these migratory flows are commonly characterized and in which labels are attached to them—“Muslims” in Amsterdam, “nonwhites” in New York—also point to remarkable social, political, and discursive differences. And, finally, there are profound differences in scale. The population of Amsterdam’s municipality proper as of 2012 was 790,044 and that of the agglomera- tion about one million,5 whereas New York City’s population was 8.2 million according to the 2010 census and the 31-county metropolitan region’s about 22.1 million.6 The surface area of New York City is six times that of Amsterdam and the population density three times as high. Notwithstanding the fact that Amsterdam is considered a “big city” in the Dutch context, Amsterdam compared to New York City sometimes seems barely more than a small picturesque European place. Starting from the observation that Amsterdam and New York City simultaneously display similarities and local differences, this book explores the immigrant experience so as to be better able to describe, understand, and explain the nexus of immigrant incorporation and urban form and structure. Although the book focuses on two specific cases, old and “new” Amsterdam, we think it has implications that go beyond these cities. Comparative studies on the immigration experience in cities, let alone transatlantic comparisons, are still quite rare. There is nonetheless 9780814738092_foner text.indd 2 10/10/13 1:09 PM Introduction >> 3 a growing interest in comparisons of immigration in European and American cities. Within Europe, there have been some attempts to look at the effects of immigration in cities in the same or different countries (e.g., Alexander 2007; Body-Gendrot and Martiniello 2000, Garbaye 2006; Penninx et al. 2004); within the United States, comparisons of different gateway cities have risen on the research agenda, especially in light of large-scale immigration to new or emerging urban destinations (e.g., Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell 2008).7 A central question has been understanding how cities differ as contexts of reception depending on the way geographic and historical particularities have shaped immi- grant flows—including their skill levels, national origin composition, and timing of arrival—and the effects of particular social, economic, and political institutions and structures on the options available to new- comers from abroad (Brettell 2003; Foner 2005; Price and Benton-Short 2008; Waldinger 2001). New York has loomed large in cross-city com- parative efforts in the United States, which have often tried to explain why Los Angeles—the other major U.S. immigrant city—has provided a different, and until recently a much less welcoming, reception for mil- lions of immigrants who have moved there in the last half century (e.g., Sabagh and Bozorgmehr 2003; Foner 2005, 2007; Foner and Waldinger 2013; Mollenkopf 1999; Waldinger 1996). As Roger Waldinger (1996) has pointed out, the case of New York has been too often considered as a proxy for “the” immigrant experience in American cities. Certainly, many of the same kind of social relations and processes are found in different cities, but “the unique characteristics of each of the places and the differences in their respective immigrant flows highlight the way in which the urban context matters” (Waldinger 2001: 5). Comparisons of European and American immigrant cities are also scarce. John Mollenkopf (2000) in a thought-provoking paper explored the fate of the second generation in Amsterdam and New York. Bowen Paulle (2005) has provided a comparative ethnographic account of schools in the Bronx (New York) and Bijlmer (Amsterdam) that focuses heavily on immigrant-origin youth, and Maurice Crul and Jennifer Holdaway (2009) have examined how the different educational sys- tems in New York and Amsterdam shape the trajectories of the chil- dren of immigrants in schools. A number of edited collections—Unrav- eling the Rag Trade: Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Seven World Cities 9780814738092_foner text.indd 3 10/10/13 1:09 PM 4 << Rath, foner, duyvendak, and van reekum (Rath 2002), Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Venturing Abroad in the Age of Globalization (Kloosterman and Rath 2003), Bringing Outsiders In: Transatlantic Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation (Hoch- schild and Mollenkopf 2009), The Next Generation: Immigrant Youth in a Comparative Perspective (Alba and Waters 2011), and The Changing Face of World Cities: Young Adult Children of Immigrants in Europe and the United States (Crul and Mollenkopf 2012)—compare immigration’s effects in Europe and the United States, but they put the spotlight on one topic (ethnic entrepreneurship, political incorporation, the second- generation experience) and include wide-ranging chapters on different countries and groups. Immigrant political incorporation and immigra- tion policy in European countries and the United States have been the subject of several single-authored books—for example, Immigration and the Nation-State: The United States, Germany, and Great Britain (Joppke 1999) and The Politics of Immigration in France, Britain, and the United States: A Comparative Study (Schain 2008)—but there is, at yet, no systematic book-length analysis with an immigration focus on other topics through a transatlantic lens. In general, in U.S.-Europe compari- sons, the nation-state is the unit of study, yet cities within them vary in significant ways—so that the urban context needs to be examined and its special features taken into account. When we speak of migration to countries what we often mean is migration to cities. It is usually in these urban contexts that migrant incorporation into host societies ulti- mately takes place and shape. Therefore, comparing cities of migration allows us to be more precise in our analysis. By focusing on two urban contexts, this book represents an in-depth view of the impact of immigration as it affects particular places, with specific histories, institutions, and immigrant inflows, thereby contrib- uting to our broader understanding of the transformations wrought by immigration and the dynamics of urban change. It provides mate- rial on issues that are at the heart of debates about immigration in the United States and Europe—from economic incorporation and immi- grant access to political influence to racial and religious inequalities and barriers. And it offers new insights into how—and why—immigration’s effects differ on the two sides of the Atlantic. We strongly believe that our comparative approach will bring us further for a number of reasons. 9780814738092_foner text.indd 4 10/10/13 1:09 PM Introduction >> 5 First, as has already been said, such comparative studies are thin on the ground and this is actually quite striking in a field as global as inter- national migration to world cities. It is precisely because Amsterdam and New York are both so similar and so different that a book bring- ing together essays on them as immigrant cities is valuable. Juxtaposing essays on, and contrasting, immigration in the two cities helps to illu- minate the contextual factors shaping immigration’s effects. The transat- lantic, trans-city comparison also calls attention to dynamics that might be missed or taken for granted if we focused on only one city. Scholars of immigration in New York, for example, often downplay the role of the state, while for Dutch academics it is central; in New York, race is at the top of the agenda, in Amsterdam it is not, but “Islamophobia” is a dominant theme in academic and public discourse.