In this extraordinary and interesting book, Richard Alba and Nancy Foner, two of the leading scholars on immigration and ethnicity, have taken on the task of dealing with recent immigration and its impact upon four Western European nations and two North America countries. The Europeans include Germany, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, and across the Atlantic Ocean are the United States and Canada. The United States and Canada are obvious choices and so are the Europeans. These are the nations most impacted by immigration, and they contain the largest number of immigrants. The United States has, as they note, the largest immigrant population of any nation in the world, numbering over 40 million. They see the United States and Canada as settler societies, facing somewhat different problems than those of the Europeans. But at the same time they realize that Canada needs to be treated as a distinct case because of the selectivity of its immigration. Canada also has the highest proportion of its population who are foreign-born. The combined EU nations contain about 50 million immigrants, with these four nations accounting for the vast majority of them.

As they are interested in the long-range impact of immigration, the authors’ focus is on immigrants and their children, not immigrants alone. Alba and Foner's goal is to understand how well immigrants and their offspring integrate into the dominant societies. This is a large task; they have not considered every aspect of life, but they have hit the major themes and institutions: economics, politics (local and national), education, intermarriage, housing and segregation, and the huge issue of race and religion that stands out in their analysis. By dealing with these key aspects of integration and covering both immigrants and their children, they have produced a remarkable book.

Race and religion are extremely important factors, with race being the issue for many Americans, while the fact that so many of the newcomers to Europe are Muslims worries many Europeans. In France, for example, Muslim women wearing the scarf in public have prompted public policies, but in the United States and Canada this is not a major issue. As for racism, the American encounter with racism is not a simple matter and illustrates the difficulty of finding simple explanations. Racism against Asians has declined significantly in recent years and highly educated Asians do well economically. Of course black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa immediately encounter racism when searching for employment and finding housing. On the other hand, the children of these immigrants arriving during the civil rights era with affirmative-action programs have an advantage; the affirmative-action policies of elite private colleges and universities give them preference in admissions even though such programs were largely put in place to assist African Americans, not immigrants and their children. Affirmative action has also helped the children of Hispanic immigrants to achieve middle-class status. But, as they note, affirmative action is under attack in the United States and might change significantly.

The positive experience of children of black immigrants might be a minor matter, but Alba and Foner argue that there is no simple explanation for integration of immigrants and their children. Some nations with similar immigration policies yield different outcomes. On the other hand, different policies at times lead to the same degree of integration. The United States, a liberal market economy, and Germany, with a different social market economy, both have weak showings when it comes to the educational attainments and economic success of immigrant-origin populations. Clearly a variety of other factors must be considered, even though this makes it difficult to discover what combination of policies provides successful integration of immigrants and their offspring.

They hope that evidence of the success of the second generation bodes well for the future. The authors believe that immigration will continue to be a force in Western Europe and the United States in the future and that better policies are required to aid immigrants and their children in becoming an integrated part of their societies. This is especially important in view of the benefits they bring to the host nations, enriching their cultures and providing much-needed labor, both at the skilled level and at the lower end. Their book, a rich and nuanced view of immigration in these six countries, should be required reading for understanding how these six nations deal with immigrants and their integration into the larger society.