Anbinder, Tyler

OUR SYNOPSIS: Tyler Anbinder tells a people-centered story of immigrants to New York City since its founding as New Amsterdam in 1624. By focusing on the most numerous migrant groups from each period while also foregrounding individual stories, he crafts a multidimensional narrative. He shows how migrants established themselves and their communities in New York, congregating in ethnic neighborhoods and forming community associations. For example, the Irish potato famine was one of the main push factors pushing migrants out of their home countries towards New York in the mid-nineteenth century. He focuses on how these particular immigrants often established themselves in the Five Points neighborhood, lived in tenements, and mostly worked as day laborers. His analysis of this Irish famine group exemplifies his approach of focusing on specific groups sizeable at a specific time to understand prominently shared experiences. In this case, “The famine Irish were the most impoverished immigrants ever to arrive in the United States and the least prepared for life in New York. Only 12 percent had a trade; only 2 percent had been merchants or professionals.” (149) When possible, he quotes directly from the immigrants to foreground their perspectives. Working through four centuries of history, he makes sure to emphasize whether major historical events greatly impacted New York immigrants. For example, he makes clear that while the Civil War is a defining event of U.S. history, it did not substantially impact New York immigrants. New York’s historically large immigrant population also directly shaped how it experienced mounting immigration restriction. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act for instance, the first comprehensive federal immigration restriction legislation, delineated quotas based on national origins. This hit New York’s large ethnic migrant communities hard.