Nearly half the 2.3 million residents of Queens, New York are foreign-born. Immigrants in Queens hail from more than 120 countries and speak more than 135 languages. As an epicenter of immigrant diversity, Queens is an urban gateway that exemplifies opportunities and challenges in shaping a multi-racial democracy. 

The editors and contributors to Immigrant Crossroads examine the social, spatial, economic, and political dynamics that stem from this fast-growing urbanization. The interdisciplinary chapters examine residential patterns and neighborhood identities, immigrant incorporation and mobilizations, and community building and activism.

Essays combine qualitative and quantitative research methods to address globalization and the unprecedented racial and ethnic diversity as a result of international migration. Chapters on incorporation focus on immigrant participation and representation in electoral politics, and advocacy for immigrant inclusion in urban governance and service provision. A section of Immigrant Crossroads concerns placemaking, focusing on the production of neighborhood spaces and identities as well as immigrant activism and community development and control.

Based on engaged and robust analysis, Immigrant Crossroads highlights the dynamics of this urban gateway.

Based on more than a decade of research, Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood charts the evolution of Sunset Park--with a densely concentrated working-poor and racially diverse immigrant population--from the late 1960s to its current status as one of New York City's most vibrant neighborhoods. 

Tarry Hum shows how processes of globalization, such as shifts in low-wage labor markets and immigration patterns, shaped the neighborhood. She explains why Sunset Park's future now depends on Asian and Latino immigrant collaborations in advancing common interests in community building, civic engagement, entrepreneurialism, and sustainability planning. She shows, too, how residents' responses to urban development policies and projects and the capital represented by local institutions and banks foster community activism. 

Hum pays close attention to the complex social, political, and spatial dynamics that forge a community and create new models of leadership as well as coalitions. The evolution of Sunset Park so astutely depicted in this book suggests new avenues for studying urban change and community development.