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.

Afro-Caribbean immigrants, Rogers reminds us, are voluntary immigrants with distinctive identities, heritages, and prior experiences. They are classified as black in the American racial order, and they face real racial obstacles that actively complicate their lives. Indeed, Rogers argues that popular views of Afro-Caribbean comparative economic success are erroneous or overstated, and that most inhabit racially segregated enclaves in central Brooklyn, the north Bronx, and southeast Queens alongside African Americans, differing only slightly in status. Most work for wages and have only modestly higher labor force participation, income, and home ownership rates. However, Afro-Caribbean immigrants also are distinctive historical subjects—not just “blacks”—in New York, and their home country experiences, ties, and orientation shape a different cognitive frame in politics. They are excluded or neglected in the normal workings of city politics. Contrary to expectations in classical pluralist theory about urban party politics, New York party politics does not work to naturalize or mobilize the newcomers. As a consequence, Afro-Caribbeans lag in participation and power relative to their potential in numbers and residential concentration. On the other hand, while neglected, they do not join in active intraracial coalition with African Americans focusing on issues of race and benefits in politics. Nor do they seek to organize outside existing party channels for racial inclusion, preferring instead to mobilize and participate in current arrangements along ethnic and panethnic lines.

Rogers defines political incorporation not merely as a set of outcomes—including naturalization, registration, and voting rates—representation successes, and policy outcomes, but also as a dynamic process of socialization, a cognitive learning process. He is highly attuned to what Afro-Caribbean leaders and immigrants think as well as do because of his interviews, although these focus narrowly in central Brooklyn only. He tells us that Afro-Caribbeans bring to politics different perceptual lenses of their situation rooted in their immigrant status and in the salience and utility of their ethnic ties, home country ties, and the possibility they have as immigrants of exit. Hence, while they are affected by race and are sharply aware of it, they nonetheless mobilize—slowly, in delayed fashion, yet deliberately—by ethnicity. Following work by Philip Kasinitz on Afro-Caribbeans in New York, Rogers helps explain the absence of a rainbow (race-based) coalition in city politics for greater black incorporation.

As a historian with some knowledge of earlier immigrant ethnic incorporation in New York City, I find Rogers's discussion of pluralist and minority models somewhat reified and think more parallels may exist between contemporary and earlier patterns of immigrant incorporation than he allows. In proposing this, I mean to develop tendencies in Rogers's own discussion rather than sharply disagree with him. Rogers notes that students of machine politics in New York, such as Steven Erie and Martin Shefter, earlier revised the classic pluralist model by Robert Dahl showing that party machines often did not mobilize immigrants beyond a certain balance relative to existing party resources. Machines preferred gate-keeping to mobilizing newcomers. Absent serious party competition or insurgency, earlier immigrant incorporation rates lagged also. Rogers draws on such “revisionist scholars” (p. 83) when he emphasizes similar outcomes and processes for Afro-Caribbeans. Moreover, earlier immigrants too adjusted to politics not in purely assimilating ways as Rogers says classical pluralist theory implies but by becoming at one and the same time more American and more ethnic, like the Irish, or later like the Italians. Also, some European groups, like East European Jews, went outside existing party channels and rules, seeking reform and redistribution in ways Rogers characterizes as fitting mainly the minority model of politics.

These quibbles with Rogers's binary theoretical frame—which straightjackets historical complexity—aside, the book represents a significant contribution to the study of immigrant (ethnic) and minority politics in New York and the United States. It draws on excellent work by Nancy Foner, Phil Kasinitz, Mary Waters, and others on Afro-Caribbean identity and adjustment in New York, but goes considerably beyond, contributing originally to understanding the broader political picture, emphasizing how institutions, group experiences, and racial and ethnic constructions and self-constructions all matter. Bottom line, Rogers says Afro-Caribbean immigrants think of themselves as temporary sojourners and maintain emotional and economic attachments to their home countries. Along with the benign neglect of party politics, this mindset delays citizenship and political incorporation and also shapes orientations and forms of participation in the emerging Afro-Caribbean politics. Afro-Caribbeans lack the same racial consciousness as African Americans, are outside institutions reinforcing racial consciousness, are not aggressively recruited to racial politics by African Americans, and embrace a transnational identity rooted in immigrant social networks that Rogers rightly thinks is also not new—as parallels exist in earlier immigrant experiences.

Rogers's book also puts the Afro-Caribbean experience in New York in conversation with other contemporary group experiences in New York and elsewhere, including studies on Latinos by Rodney Hero, Michael Jones-Correa, and Peter Skerry. The book offers several insights into issues of incorporation of new groups “living between nations,” to use Jones-Correa's phrase, and concludes by raising important questions about the future when second generation immigrants born here will mature.