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.