John Bodnar’s Study—which I consider “the standard survey on the history of migration to the United States, which for many years will remain unsurpassed” (Hoerder, 1987)—also merits a controversial and lively discussion. A synthesis of the immigrant experience has long been called for. Beginning in the 1960s, Rudolph J. Vecoli’s penetrating critique (1964) and Victor Greene’s detailed study of east European miners (1968) dismantled Oscar Handlin’s paradigm (1951). The two decades since the end of the old paradigm witnessed the introduction of new methods, new approaches, and a new sensitivity to the roots of the migrants in their old cultures. I will first place Bodnar’s study in the context of two other recent syntheses and then raise some conceptual questions; in a third section I will take up issues related to the culture of origin and to the role of female migrants in community formation.