Nice NY Times article on Queens’ immigrants, the 4th of July, and all their other national holidays:
Independence Day is celebrated once a year in most of America. In Queens, the most ethnically diverse county in the nation, where an estimated 44 percent of the 2.2 million residents are foreign born, it is celebrated again and again and again.
The article is pro-immigrant, of course, like all NYT articles (I consider myself fairly pro-immigration, but the Times is too typical of mainstream press organs in treating the issue as wholly one-sided). In fact, one could read the ode to diversity here as making another point less palatable to the Times: that places in the Southwest where the immigrants all come from the same place are not so easy to assimilate.