New York’s Population
The Newcomers.
by Oscar Handlin.
Harvard University Press. 171 pp. $4.00.
Wages in the Metropolis.
by Martin Segal.
Harvard University Press. 211 pp. $4.75.
These are the third and fourth volumes of the New York Metropolitan Region Study, of which two volumes (Anatomy of a Metropolis, by Edgar M. Hoover and Raymond Vernon, and Made in New York, by Roy B. Helfgott and others) have already been published, and which will run to nine volumes in all. The over-all aim of the New York Metropolitan Region Study (to quote the jacket of the books) is to “[analyze] the present economic condition, the indicated course of development, and the probable future of the New York Metropolitan Region.” In such a study we expect to find an analysis of the flow of jobs in and out of the metropolitan region, and the factors—wage rates, transportation facilities, availability of skilled and unskilled labor, presence of markets, impact of government policies, availability of space and other necessary facilities—which affect the movement of business enterprises. What we do not ordinarily expect to find is an account of the ethnic composition of the city. For does it matter to the central aim of a study like this that the labor force of New York is in large part Negro and Puerto Rican, that the market is in part a Negro and Puerto Rican market, that the governments which make many decisions important for business enterprises may be affected by Negro and Puerto Rican votes, that the urban facilities which business will help support are (to some extent) for Negro and Puerto Rican families? Apparently the directors of the study thought it did. The two books under review—one entirely devoted to the Puerto Rican and Negro groups, and the other dealing mainly with the role of wages in New York—suggest what the ethnic character of a metropolis may mean for its over-all economic development.
As a sketch of the ethnic history of New York, and a detailed description of the characteristics of the latest immigrant groups, Professor Handling book is superb. Those of his admirers who have regretted the somewhat looser approach (looser in the sense of light documentation—not in thinking or control of the material) that has characterized some of his recent work will be happy to find here a heavily and solidly documented study which must in future serve as fundamental to any thinking about the significance of the peculiar social composition of New York.
Since all the great cities of the world are likely to be called (and in some sense are) “cosmopolitan,” it takes a certain effort to realize how special New York is. Paris is almost entirely French, London almost entirely English, Tokyo almost entirely Japanese, but New York is a different story. In 1860, Professor Handlin tells us, three-eighths of the city’s inhabitants had been born either in Ireland or Germany, So that (with their children born here) these two ethnic elements certainly formed a majority of the population. In the 1920’s and 30’s the Jews (three-tenths of the population) and the Italians together formed close to a majority. Today, perhaps one-seventh of the population is white Protestant—and this includes many people who must be of German, Scandinavian, Hungarian, and other origins. It is believed that one-half of the total white population of this country is of Anglo-Saxon origin, but it is hard to see how more than one-tenth of the white population of New York can be composed of this element.
Two by two, then, different ethnic groups have come into the city, grown to very large size, and been supplemented by new elements: the Irish and the Germans between the 1840’s and the 1870’s, Jews and Italians between the 1880’s and the 1930’s, and now Negroes and Puerto Ricans. In 1957, these newest arrivals already formed a fifth of the city’s enormous population.
There is no point in making too much of sheer dimensions, and yet one must get a sense of the order of magnitude of the phenomena one discusses. In 1957, about 20 per cent of New York’s population was Negro and Puerto Rican, about 26 per cent of the children in the public schools came from these groups, as did about 52 per cent of the occupants of 90,000 public housing units; the percentages of those who use public hospitals, get in trouble with the police, etc., are probably similar. All these figures will undoubtedly go much higher—if for no other reason than that most American Negroes still live in the South, and that the population of Puerto Rico, where unemployment is high and shows little tendency to decline, increases by 35,000 to 50,000 a year. But even aside from the huge pools of impoverished people which can still be drawn on to increase these groups, there is the fact that their rate of natural increase is much higher than that of the white population. When one-quarter of the children in New York are Negro and Puerto Rican, it is reasonable to expect that at least one-quarter of the population will soon be Negro and Puerto Rican, but the final figure will certainly be larger than that.
The “final figure”—one naturally assumes that this process will some day come to an end as previous waves of migration came to an end, that those already settled here will recover from the shocks of uprooting and transplantation, get better jobs, develop a stabler family life, achieve higher incomes. This is not an implausible perspective. Yet there is no “natural” history of migration and adjustment. To say, as some people do, that the Irish and Germans, and then the Italians and Jews, once created the same problems for the city, and “look at them now”—is to ignore how various the processes of adjustment have actually been. To come into New York at a time when the chief forms of employment for new groups are unskilled labor and artisan trades (as was the case when the Irish and Germans arrived) is a very different matter from coming at a time when the chief kinds of work available to immigrants are found in the growing needle trades (Jews and Italians) or when the main jobs are unskilled work in small factories, in commercial laundries, in hotels and restaurants (Negroes and Puerto Ricans). For example: the German artisans had a valuable property in their skills, and could organize powerful unions and make relatively good wages; the Jewish needle-trade workers were able to set up in business for themselves because of the tiny scale of operations in the needle trades and the small amounts of capital involved; but where can a Negro or Puerto Rican go who is now assembling electronic equipment, or working in the kitchen of a huge hotel? The paths to higher income and independent entrepreneurial activity from such beginnings are not at all obvious. This sketch is, of course, both incomplete and exaggerated. But there is no question that it contains a large measure of perplexing truth.
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To shift to another aspect of the “natural” history of assimilation—there is much talk as to whether the newest immigrant groups are more disorganized and present greater problems than earlier immigrant groups. Professor Handlin is particularly good on this point—he is aware that such distinctions have existed in the past. (For example, the Irish created many more problems than the Germans; conceivably there may have been a difference between the Jews and Italians in rates of criminality and disorganization, though this was in any case not as sharp.) Probably such rates are higher when the immigrants first come, then tend to taper off. But as Lester Granger, speaking of The Newcomers, points out in the Amsterdam News of February 6: “Beside the fact that color is a bigger handicap in the United States than a foreign language or a different cultural background, there is also the fact of the timing of this recent wave of migration. This is a period when family life as a whole has been drastically changed—when parental controls are weakened and effective controls have not yet been applied. This is a time when there is an unprecedented amount of foolishness and filth assiduously peddled by television and the radio, as well as the movies and newspapers that were our only communications media forty-five or fifty years ago.”
This is quite true—the early Jewish and Italian settlers were not subjected to the strains that now affect Puerto Rican and Negro families—not to mention the fact that the Negro family for the most part never overcame the disorganizing heritage of slavery.
So the “natural” history of immigration and assimilation is not so natural—it depends on specific historical patterns, and to expect an inevitably benign outcome is to misread history—and Professor Handlin is quite clear about this. Nor is it possible to speak simply of a final figure, a “natural” term to immigration. Immigration waves do not have a natural limit; they do not resemble biological organisms. The Germans stopped coming to America because the rapid economic development of Germany after 1870 made immigration to foreign cities less attractive than migrating to other cities within Germany. The Irish stopped coming only when most of them (literally) were already here. The Jews and Italians ceased coming only because they were stopped by immigration laws. For the Negroes and Puerto Ricans, these three quite different possibilities also exist—that economic development in Puerto Rico and the South will make those areas more attractive than the Northeast (this is unlikely for the Negroes, since they are effectively excluded from Southern society); that Puerto Rico will be as depopulated by emigration as Ireland once was, and most of the Negroes will eventually settle in the North and West; or that some legal means will be found to prevent American citizens from moving about to their advantage—a rather unlikely possibility.
What all this suggests to us—as Professor Handlin emphasizes—is that the future is not foreordained, and that the makers of policy cannot abdicate with the argument, “We have seen it all before, and it will work itself out just as it did before.” Even if there were no element like color in a color-conscious country, it would still be true that “it” has worked itself out in different ways and with different effects; and if we have any image of what a good city and a good life ought to be like, we will require something more than a flabby acquiescence in the free play of economic forces.
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Mr. Segal’s book offers much interesting material, some of which is directly relevant to a consideration of the impact of Negro and Puerto Rican migrants on the city. The most important conclusion one draws from Wages in the Metropolis is that no strong evidence can be found to support the idea that the heavy flow of unskilled immigrant labor into the city has served to bring wages down. It is difficult to sum up a complex and subtle argument, especially in areas like wage rates, which are affected by a multiplicity of factors. However, it is worth noting that in some lines of work in which very many of the newcomers have found jobs—the garment trades and service occupations—New York’s wages are among the highest in the country. Conceivably these wages would be even higher were it not for the immigrants—hotel employees, and most other categories of workers, make even more in San Francisco than they do in New York. As for the impact of Negro and Puerto Rican migrants on New York’s over-all economic position, it seems minor. One would think that the miscellaneous small manufacturing plants in New York that employ so many Negroes and Puerto Ricans and that also pay low wages are here only because of the availability of this cheap labor. But Mr. Segal shows that these segments of industry pay considerably higher wages in New York than they do in the South, or the depressed coal-mining towns of Pennsylvania, or the textile towns of New England. Indeed, Mr. Segal thinks that such industries, for which low-cost labor is an important consideration, will continue to leave the city and that at most, the new waves of immigration have tended to slow this movement down. The service trades, which employ large numbers of Negroes and Puerto Ricans and to which this labor is important, cannot of course move away. But again, we should not exaggerate, for while it may be hard to see how the cost of hotel rooms or restaurant meals or hospital services could be any higher than they are today, it is unrealistic to think that these industries would be unable to manage if the stream of immigrants were smaller.
Mr. Segal’s book (which contains much more than these brief comments suggest) leaves me with the impression that economic considerations need not be paramount in our thinking about the new immigrant groups. American industry did not collapse because immigration was cut off in the early 20’s, nor would New York go into eclipse if the flow of newcomers to the city were sharply reduced. We should be as skeptical of the argument that we can’t (economically) do without them as we are of the argument that we can’t afford them. And since economic considerations are not in reality the paramount factor, we are left uncomfortably free to consider other sides of the impact of new ethnic elements on the city, and uncomfortably responsible for trying to forge other ways of thinking about them.
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