Thereare immigrants like Pradip Menon, born into a wealthy professional familyin Poona, India, who arrived in New York with a college degree in engi-neering from a prestigious university and an M.B.A. from an equally presti-gious management school.13 And there are those like Benjamin Velasquez,a poor farmer in El Salvador who worked on his family’s parcel of landgrowing corn and beans.14 A century ago, the immigration to New Yorkwas not marked by the same extremes—or by anywhere near the currentproportion of professionals and executives.
I like how this quote highlights levels of immigration in relation to socioeconomic backgrounds. Not only does it show the extremes of immigrant socioeconomic backgrounds in current times but compares this to older immigrant patterns. Today, we see a variation of occupations from wealthy physicians to poor family farmers, yet with the Italian and Jewish immigrants there was never this extreme diversification, as most were relatively poor. What factors may have influenced this pattern change?