Immigration in New York City: Taking the Long View

On Tuesday evening –- in fact, at the very moment Gov. Eliot Spitzer was abandoning his plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants –- a panel of experts on immigration gathered at the Center for Jewish History on East 16th Street for a wide-ranging discussion about immigration to New York City, past and present.

The timing couldn’t be more appropriate. The discussion, co-sponsored by the American Jewish Historical Society and Wagner College, was a reminder that debates about immigration are not at all new. In fact, they go back all the way to the founding of the 17th-century Dutch colony that became New York.

Joseph Berger, a metropolitan reporter and education columnist for The Times and author of a new book, “The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York,” moderated the panel.”*

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