Why do we always talk about immigrants with a language of “difference”? Neighborhood change and conflicts in Queens, New York

Abstract

ABSTRACT The literature on planning in immigrant communities has been one based on the premise that immigrants are different from native-born people, and therefore planning for immigrant communities must therefore also be different. In this article, we challenge that premise through a discussion of a set of neighborhood developments and conflicts in Queens, New York, the most diverse county in the United States. We root those conflicts not in different cultural practices, but in the working of racial capitalism. The stories in Queens are stories not of conflicts of identity, they are conflicts of class; even if those class conflicts are inherently racialized.