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Inheriting the City The Children of Immigrants Come of Age: Authors, Philip Kasinitz John H. Mollenkopf Mary C. Waters Jennifer Holdaway

published by Harvard Press: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/KASINH.html

Behind the contentious politics of immigration lies the question of how well new immigrants are becoming part of American society. To address this question, Inheriting the City draws on the results of a ground-breaking study of young adults of immigrant parents in metropolitan New York to provide a comprehensive look at their social, economic, cultural, and political lives.

(Excerpt On English Speaking Caribbean Immigrants)

West Indians English-speaking West Indians have a long history in New York City. In 1920, 41,000 Caribbean born blacks lived in New York City, making up a quarter of its black population (Kasinitz 1992). For many years these immigrants and their descendants remained “invisible” because society saw them only as blacks (Bryce-Laporte 1972). Yet they played prominent roles in the political, cultural, and intellectual life of New York, producing such luminaries as nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, poet Claude McKay, psychologist Kenneth Clarke, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

These figures were clearly part of black New York, however. While rigid segregation and discrimination circumscribed some of the achievements of West Indian politicians, professionals, and intellectuals, the growth of New York’s black population provided many of them with a base of constituents. The West Indian share of New York’s black population fell during and after World War II as black migration from the South burgeoned, but the perennial economic stagnation and unemployment of the Caribbean, the region’s historical links with New York, and British refusal to accept further West Indian migration after 1962 set the scene for renewed large scale migration to the United States. Though centered on New York, the post-1965 immigration also spread to the suburbs and other parts of the United States. Over time this group has developed an identity that is partly, though by no means entirely, distinct from that of native African Americans (Vickerman 1999; Waters 1999).

The former slave plantation societies of the English-speaking Caribbean are not as desperately poor as Haiti or the Dominican Republic, but they suffer from high unemployment, uneven development, and scant opportunities for advancement. Their educational systems are better than those of many other poor countries, yet opportunities for high school graduates are scarce, leading many to seek employment or higher education in the United States. Jamaica and Guyana also experienced sharp rises in crime and political violence during the 1970s, prompting a middle class emigration. The Jamaican dollar, which traded at parity with the U.S. dollar in the late 1960s, was worth less than two U.S. pennies in the 1990s. Since Jamaica imports most of its daily necessities, its families have grown heavily dependent on remittances. Migration thus became an expected part of the adult life course throughout the region (Kasinitz 1992; Richardson 1992).

By 2000 the ten county study area contained 660,000 members of West Indian households, making this group about as large as the Dominicans. (Haitians, who are not included in our West Indian category, would add several hundred thousand more.) Though they come from poor islands, many West Indians do arrive with real resources. Most members of the parental generation have a high school degree, and about one in five has a college degree. The parental generation of West Indians also has a high rate of labor force participation, particularly the women. The number of married couples is low: a quarter of the West Indian parental generation are divorced, separated, or widowed; another 16 percent never married. More than half of our respondents grew up without both biological parents in the home. Yet this did not seem to have as negative an impact on them as it did among native blacks and Puerto Ricans, perhaps because of the presence of extended family members. West Indian families are more likely than black or Puerto Rican families to contain an elder, and many West Indian respondents spoke of grandmothers playing the role of “second mother” in their lives.

West Indians also have strong transnational connections, and many respondents had visited their parents’ homelands several times. However, this was mostly for short stays to visit relatives and take a vacation. While high, remittance rates were lower than among Dominicans and placed less of a strain on the higher West Indian family incomes. Although many West Indian parents talked of returning home on retirement, this did not prevent them from acquiring property in New York. Their rate of home ownership was significantly higher than that of the other immigrant groups or native minorities. Many West Indian respondents told us that they had experienced prejudice or discrimination from the police. At the same time, they had some advantages over other immigrant groups. They spoke English on arrival, and members of the parental generation were almost as likely to have graduated from high school as native blacks and considerably more likely to do so than the Hispanic groups. Some New York employers may prefer West Indians to native blacks or Hispanics (Waters 1999).

As New York City’s labor market has become feminized, the long West Indian tradition of female labor force participation, sharply different from the Latin American tradition, has served West Indians well. West Indian women developed ethnic niches in nursing and health care, clerical and administrative work, teaching, and child care, while West Indian men found blue collar jobs, particularly in construction (Kasinitz and Vickerman 2001). The relative prosperity of West Indian parents came at a price. Despite colonialism, blacks have long held positions of wealth and power on the sending islands. Being black in America thus often came as a deep shock to them (Vickerman 1999). Less affluent West Indian parents living in racially segregated neighborhoods with inferior schools were deeply worried that they would lose their children to “the streets” (Waters 1999). This sometimes prompted parents to send their children “back home” for a time, even though doing so might trigger feelings of abandonment in their children and lead to difficulties in their readjusting to life in the United States upon return.

Although the first generation parents see themselves as distinct from native blacks, the distinction has a “now you see it, now you don’t” quality within the second generation, as young Caribbean Americans insist that they are both African American and West Indian (Butterfield 2004). The West Indian first generation had established distinctively West Indian neighborhoods near those of African Americans. Its members avoided older African American neighborhoods like Harlem and also did not live in public housing. They concentrated in working and middle class areas like Crown Heights, Flatbush, East Flatbush, and more recently Canarsie in Brooklyn, the Northeast Bronx and Laurelton, Queens Village, and Cambria Heights in Southeast Queens.

Their relatively high levels of household income and home ownership, together with their facility in English and long family histories in New York City, enabled community members to produce a strong political leadership cadre. Shirley Chisholm, in 1968 the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, was a second generation West Indian, partially raised in Barbados. In 2006 Brooklyn sent Yvette Clarke, a second generation Jamaican American, to Capitol Hill.