Book Review: Beyond the Gateway: Immigrants in a Changing America

One of the most important characteristics of US immigration during the last two decades of the 20th century has been the settlement of newcomers in parts of the country where they had not settled before in any significant numbers – in new gateway cities such as Minneapolis and Atlanta; in smaller towns in North Carolina, Virginia, Iowa, and Nebraska, and in rural areas of Arkansas and Wisconsin. This book represents the first collection to describe and analyze this important trend, and to assess the responses (“best practices”) to increasing diversity in these new settlement areas. The book begins with a very useful demographic chapter that compares “traditional” and “new” receiving states. The reader learns, for example, that the percentage of foreign-born Asians living outside traditional states is higher than that of foreign-born Latinos. The chapter also draws attention to the extremely important phenomenon of secondary migration. This chapter is followed by six case studies of new settlement areas: the North Carolina Piedmont Triad, Metropolitan Atlanta, Minnesota, the Shenandoah Valley, Utah, and Arkansas. These case studies are largely descriptive and, despite the fact that the research in each of these places was launched as part of a multiyear coordinated project under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, the chapters are structured quite differently and the unit of analysis (city, state, region) varies. It is therefore difficult to draw internal comparisons – for example, about the impact of Hispanics or of refugees; or the level of xenophobia that has emerged, particularly in the wake of 9/11; or the significance of employment or housing markets. It is also difficult to arrive at a complete understanding of the significance of place to the integration process. Finally, despite the “factoid” cited above about Asians, most of the chapters concentrate on Latinos. The authors of the chapter on North Carolina offer some constructive information on how various local institutions – the public schools, the health care system, churches, the legal system – have had to respond to newcomers. This is a topic also taken up by the authors of the chapter on the Shenandoah Valley. They explore in particular the role of an organization called Latino Connection in mediating the interface between Hispanics and other mediating institutions. Although the chapter on Atlanta is titled “Black and White and Other,” it does not offer much information on how black and white populations may have responded differentially to newcomers. The chapter on Arkansas is the only one that wrestles with the interesting question of home ownership and financial literacy. Part III contains the chapter on “best practices” in arenas such as education, health care, community development, and law enforcement. The authors caution that these are practices that worked by trial and error in particular places and are not necessarily replicable. This caution aside, practitioners, both public and private, will find this discussion, which draws on the case studies, extremely useful. The authors note that the most successful integration practices are based on partnerships that encourage interaction among different groups of stakeholders and the host society and that give immigrants agency.