Nancy Foner compares two distinct waves of immigration to New York, from 1880 to 1920 and from 1965 to present, to illustrate how immigrants have impacted the city across time. In her comparative studies of New York immigration patterns, she highlights certain trends that immigrants have shaped throughout these two eras. For centuries, immigrants have dynamically enriched the city’s multicultural landscape and developed its commercial and industrial infrastructures. Yet, although mobility has increased for recent female arrivals of color, they still face a domestic confinement that their predecessors endured between 1880 and 1920, and immigrant marginalization continues on the basis of gender. Although immigrant women of color continue to face gender subordination as they gain econo-physical mobility, Foner argues that many immigrants have thrived while driving New York’s economic and cultural growth. Recently-arrived professionals revitalize its economy and geographically-diverse newcomers continue to embellish its cultural traditions by forming network-based ethnic enclaves, progressively making the city a more welcoming and prosperous immigrant destination. …show more content…
Earlier Italian female immigrants had less physical and economic mobility than Dominican women have today. Most husbands who arrived in America from southern Italy at that time forbade their “homeworker” wives to work outside the home for pay after marriage; only 6 percent of Italian wives worked for wages in 1905 (Foner 93, 92). Additionally, most southern Italians also experienced racial discrimination. Assertions that southern Italians had “inferior African blood” (Foner 16) made socioeconomic mobility hard for the entire group. Disadvantaged by their skin color and gender, southern Italian women experienced harsh marginalization from their relatives and from non-Italians between 1880 and