In cities around the world the influx of migration continues to represent both positive and negative aspects of urban existence. There are many push-pull factors responsible for migration to the cities. In many developing countries, immigrants either choose to move to cities or a city in a developed country in order to secure work and provide for their families. Many immigrants move to a city to because they are following a relative who has moved before them. The lure of economic opportunities and a higher quality of life often pull many immigrants to cities. However, as witnessed from the essays in Urban Life, the reality of the cities for immigrants is often less than the promise of the lure. Social position for immigrants is directly related to socioeconomic status based on income, race, religion, national origin and other aspects of ethnicity. These combine to lend the immigrant his or her status in the city, typically at or near the lowest rung of the social ladder. As Gmelch and Zenner (2002) argue: ôIn stratified societies, people are unequal in the goods they own, the control they command over those goods and their lives, and the material and symbolic rewards which others accord them. They are also unequal in their access to strategic power within the societyö (266-267).
Because of this paradigm that controls social position and control, immigrants typically devise adaptive strategies to help them overcome barriers to improving their social position, from a lack of education or ability to speak a new language to stereotypes and prejudices. Such social mobility is often denied immigrants because the adaptive strategies they must use to survive often lead them into a catch-22 from which there is no way out (or up). Yet we see a wide variety of viewpoints about adaptive strategies of immigrants and their impact. While Lewis implies that poverty causes immigrants to make irrational choices that lead them to a dead-...