Abstract
The stated aim of Iceland’s book is to explore the ways that shifting immigrant residential patterns since the 1970s have reshaped American inner-city neighbourhoods. It is supremely well researched, drawing on an impressive selection of studies to make modest though concrete conclusions about the effects of immigration on residential segregation and/or assimilation. It draws on the latest numerical measures and theoretical models of residential trends, and wisely critiques their relevance in elucidating residential patterns.
The relative success of this book will depend largely on how this aim is interpreted, and what expectations are borne in mind from it. This book is almost entirely quantitative in nature, engaging with numerical studies, utilizing graphs, charts and tables to illustrate clear and precise patterns, and making conclusions about relative assimilation based on statistical significance. Its overall conclusions are that, generally, immigrants are becoming residentially assimilated in inner cities; this assimilation is occurring on multiple levels; and, undercurrents of racial discrimination still persist to influence the relative success of residential assimilation between groups.
One of the most interesting points made early on, proposed as an explanation for the continuing residential segregation between blacks and whites, is continuing discrimination within the housing market and broad real-estate industry. Iceland implicates the 1900–1920 race riots in his assessment of explicit racial segregation during this time, as well as the white ‘improvement associations’ that deliberately kept black families out of many neighbourhoods, and the ‘restrictive covenants’ that contractually obliged whites to sell or rent to other whites only. He goes on to bring this into a more current context, by noting the emergence of more covert discrimination practices, such as realtors showing fewer properties to blacks, and steering them more toward ‘black’ neighbourhoods. Set in this historical context, this section brings to light a fascinating combined set of processes that shed light on the continuing segregation of blacks in residential settings. Frankly, however, these sections are too few and too brief. The historical context needed substantial elaboration throughout the book in order to explain such trends from a shifting social and/or cultural perspective.
There is an abundance of qualitative research in sociology and social history that has examined and provided very digestible ‘thick description’ of the day-to-day lives of immigrant populations, but unfortunately much of this is ignored. Its greater inclusion would have given weight to Iceland’s overall arguments. As it stands, we can discern very little about what ‘life’ is like for an immigrant in the US today, and perhaps this makes the book’s title and aim slightly misleading. There are too few descriptions or suitably grounded explanations of how neighbourhoods are being ‘reshaped’ by the patterns of immigration that are described. Statistics only say so much, and do little to bring to life collective experiences of particular populations. This is buttressed by Iceland’s own admission that discussions of neighbourhood quality (he terms this ‘location attainment’) would have helped to provide information about the experiences of immigrants compared to native-born residents. Had this limitation been the focus for analysis, and more space in the book given over to a discussion of the plethora of qualitative research available in this area, this text would be more relevant, appealing and readable.
In terms of structure, the chapters are not organized along a timeline or grouped according to distinct subjects, though perhaps this might have helped. The author’s historical overview of immigration patterns in Chapter 2 is too brief, and is usurped by the powerful discussion of the relative merits of leading immigrant residential assimilation models. The application of relevant social theories is referred to quite unsystematically however. Putnam’s work on social capital, most pertinently, is not introduced until the end of the second-to-last chapter. Its use is encouraging, but it simply comes too late. If utilized earlier, the scope of this analysis would have broadened, principally because the concept underpins the relative success of residential assimilation among disparate groups.
Readers may also be disappointed to discover that 80 pages – that’s over a third of the book – is occupied by appendices, notes, references and an index, leaving a miserly 140 or so pages of actual analysis. Reducing this final section would have provided space to incorporate some of the changes suggested above.
Notwithstanding these weaknesses, the book provides a comprehensive review of literature in this area. It is impressively wide ranging, dealing not only with black and Hispanic populations in the US, both of which have received considerable attention already, but also minority non-white and immigrant populations. It is fair in its analysis of distinct black and non-white Hispanic sub-groups, showing care not to treat them homogenously. For these reasons, its relevance to social policy makers would be considerable, and it is with members of this group that the book should find recognition.