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Determining whether the black experience was unique, or similar to that of earlier white immigrant groups, is central to the debate over whether blacks should be the beneficiaries of special compensatory legislation in the present. To answer this question requires interdisciplinary research that combines a comparative ethnic, an urban, and a historical perspective. Thus we observe the experience of three waves of immigrants to Philadelphia: the Irish and Germans who settled in the "Industrializing City" of the mid-tolate nineteenth century; the Italians, Poles and Russian Jews who came to the "Industrial City" at the turn of the twentieth century; and blacks who arrived in the "Post-tndustrial City" in their greatest numbers after World War II. Analysis of the city's changing opportunity structure and ecological form, and the racial discrimination encountered shows the black experience to be unique in kind and degree. Significant changes in the structures that characterized each of the "three cities" call into question our standing notion of the assimilation process.Theodore

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"In 1980, several cities and states sued the U.S. Census Bureau to correct census results. This correction would adjust for the differential undercounting of Blacks and Hispanics, especially in cities. In this article, the authors, each of whom testified for New York City and State in their joint lawsuit against the Census Bureau, describe the likely pattern of the undercount and present a method to adjust for it." The authors describe available methods for data adjustment and introduce a regression-based composite method of adjustment, which is used to estimate the undercounts for 66 areas. "As expected, we find that the highest undercount rates are in large cities, and the lowest are in states and state remainders with small percentages of Blacks and Hispanics. Next, we analyze how sensitive our estimates are to changes in data and modeling assumptions. We find that these changes do not affect the estimates very much. Our conclusion is that regardless of whether we use one of the simple methods or the composite method and regardless of how we vary the assumptions of the composite method, an adjustment reliably reduces population shares in states with few minorities and increases the shares of large cities."