Still Believing in the Dream

Still the Promised City?:
African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York
by Roger Waldinger.
Harvard University Press: 1996. 374 pp. $35.00.

Last January a report by New York’s Department of City Planning verified what most New Yorkers already knew: immigrants from an extraordinary variety of nations continue to pour into the city in numbers not seen since early in the century. Marking the occasion with a ceremony on Ellis Island, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani made it clear that he considers this to be very good news, something it is hard to imagine a Republican mayor doing in any other city. That day a reporter from one of the television networks called me with some now familiar questions: how...