Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and the Politics of Incorporation: Ethnicity, Exception, or Exit

Extract

Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and the Politics of Incorporation: Ethnicity, Exception, or Exit. By Reuel R. Rogers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 318p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

How is the process of political incorporation of immigrants and minorities in the United States changing amid the arrival in recent decades of unprecedented numbers of nonwhite new immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean? In this probing case study of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in New York City, Reuel R. Rogers draws on extensive field interviews with elites and immigrants, study of census data and voting statistics, and analysis of historical episodes, and he argues that contemporary immigrant political incorporation resembles neither a pluralist model based on earlier European-origin ethnic experience nor a minority model based on earlier African American migrant experience. Rather, race continues to shape the process as Afro-Caribbean newcomers confront issues of discrimination and exclusion in America. Because Afro-Caribbeans are rooted in a cognitive frame shaped by their status as immigrants and by their ethnic ties and home country attachments, they navigate politics differently from African Americans.