[Immigration, Incorporation, Assimilation, and the Limits of Transnationalism]: Introduction

Abstract

ON JULY 5,2005, four young men from Leeds, England, three of whom were born to middle-class Pakistani parents in Britain and the fourth from Jamaica, went to London and blew themselves up on three trains and a double-decker bus.Asked his reaction, a twenty-two-year-old Muslim in Leeds commented, "I don't approve of what [they] did, but I under stand it.You get driven to something like this; it doesn't just happen."A sparked by the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), and much later on in the 1992 Los Angeles Riot.America all along has been largely iden tified with opportunity and yet there have been episodes of disaffection and alienation resulting in such actions, or in the formation of gangs, or, as Nina Bernstein reported, second-generation Muslims, who also feel "vic timized, resentful, and alienated" as well as politically excluded.Clearly, they felt bypassed by the forces and opportunities for entry into mainstream opportunity or, in other words, incorporation.And yet, observed Bernstein, in Jersey City, New Jersey, "more than a third" were foreign-born but "there are no hard edge ethnic enclaves.""Hard edge"?as in boundaries markedly defining ethnic turf.Gangs de fine boundaries; whites long demarcated boundaries setting apart African Americans from whites and, in places, Chinese and Mexicans from whites.In contrast, most (European) immigrant groups have encountered borders rather than boundaries, separations that eventually blurred, giving way to those who crossed those less rigid lines for economic, cultural, social, and then political motives.With so many peoples and communities in the United States, boundaries and borders have varied considerably in their permeability, durability, and origins, whether they were of the group's

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