From Ellis Island to JFK—An Economist's Perspective

CARMEL U. CHISWICK

NANCY FONER'S BOOK From Ellis Island to JFK is a pleasure to read. Bringing together a wealth of information, it compares and contrasts the experience of today's immigrant population in the New York metropolitan area with that of the Russian Jews and Italians who arrived in New York nearly a century earlier. The focus is on the circumstances surrounding their economic assimilation into the American labor force, but the marvelously presented evidence comes primarily from the history literature and from social sciences other than economics. The result is a richly detailed description of the process that economists usually describe in analytical terms as a series of graphs, tables and regression equations, a book that will make excellent collateral reading for students of the economics of immigration and immigrant absorption.