Immigrant Crossroads

Globalization, Incorporation, and Placemaking in Queens, New York

" (T)his book represents an important contribution to the limited literature on how immigrants are changing the face of America’s cities."
—Journal of Urban Affairs

" This comprehensive edited volume is a timely and welcome addition to scholarly discussions about immigration-generated diversity in contemporary urban settings. It offers important food for thought for those interested in immigration studies, urban sociology and anthropology, social movements and multi-racial coalition building, urban planning and development, and labour studies.... The volume’s breadth of topics, inclusion of both qualitative and quantitative research, accessible prose, and helpful tables, graphs, and pictures make it highly recommended." ≈

"The book is a data-rich exploration of New York City’s Queens borough.... (T)here are equally vibrant descriptions, historical narratives and organizing stories throughout that bring the borough to life.... By featuring Queens and immigrant communities in such detail, the book becomes a useful tool to understand the place, and for comparison and inspiration rather than a blueprint for how development should happen elsewhere."
—Progressive City

“ The editors of and contributors to Immigrant Crossroads have done us all a huge favor by putting together this excellent and comprehensive book on the most interesting county in the United States. With chapters covering demographics, party politics, health access, community organizing, and much more, the breadth of this work is impressive. Importantly, all of the chapters locate Queens in much larger frameworks, and therefore the book is not just about Queens but about the forces shaping how all urban places and spaces are constructed in a globalizing world.”—James DeFilippis, Professor of Urban Planning at Rutgers University

“ A book dedicated to Queens is long overdue, and like the borough itself, this rich, edited volume is hyperdiverse. It not only gives readers a sense of dramatic demographic changes in the borough over the past few decades but also shows the financialization of our real estate landscape and the ways in which new and second-generation immigrants have both perpetuated and resisted established models of political incorporation and machine politics. Immigrant Crossroads illustrates how Queens defies facile platitudes and instead embodies key contradictions of American policy. The borough is thriving not because of but despite American neoliberal economic policies, and in today's political landscape, electing racially and ethnically diverse politicians to office is no guarantee of substantive representation. This book thus shows how Queens’ most significant dynamics and current tensions are a distillation and microcosm of issues we should consider and confront nationwide.”—Celina Su, Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies at City University of New York Graduate Center and Brooklyn College

"Immigrant Crossroads uses the fascinating case of Queens to make a tremendous contribution to the understanding of hyper-diversity in contemporary urban settings. It raises critical questions in the immediate aftermath of the Trump era. This place-bound research demonstrates that the Queens example teaches us much about the potential of, and challenges to, developing grassroots influence in the West and Global North."
—Metropolitics