Tyler Anbinder is a professor of history at George Washington University and the author of City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York. – See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164262

Irish, German, Italian, Slavic, Scandinavian, and eastern European Jewish immigrants were just as isolated in their ethnic enclaves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as today’s immigrants are in theirs. New York’s Kleindeutschland was so German, bragged one of its immigrant residents in the 1850s, that one could hardly tell it apart from Stuttgart. Half a century later, adult Italian immigrants rarely learned much English. “I didn’t need it,” one New Yorker explained. “Everywhere I lived, or worked, or fooled around there were only Italians…. I had to learn some Sicilian, though.” When pundits complain that today’s immigrants don’t assimilate like those from the past, they are harking back to a golden era of assimilation that never actually existed.