The election of John Fitzgerald in 1910 had significant impacts on the city and its politics. Fitzgerald’s term in office was focused on growth and building. The suburb of Hyde Park was incorporated into the city, the last major expansion of its geographic footprint. He built the Parkman Bandstand on Boston Common, the City Hall Annex, and the Franklin Park Zoo. Determined to provide better education for the children of the city’s immigrant community, Mayor Fitzgerald built several trade schools for both boys and girls, including a Girl’s School of Practical Arts, and a School for Bookbinding and Printing. This focus on teaching children a useful trade was critical in preparing these sons and daughters of immigrants for decent jobs – the beginning of a pathway to their version of the American dream.

Politically, Fitzgerald’s election marked the end of Yankee political dominance in the city. It was the beginning of a long era of Irish leadership, dominated by the legendary James Michael Curley but inhabited by several talented political leaders. The Irish ascended to mayoral power and remained there for most of the last century. There were many other immigrants in Boston in the first half of the 20th century, but they were marginal political players. Jewish and Italian immigrants made up a considerable number of newcomers, and there was an increasing African-American population. They were segregated into neighborhoods – Italians in the North End and East Boston, Jews near Grove Hall, blacks in Roxbury – and in Boston in those days, the neighborhoods voted with predictable loyalty for candidates who shared their heritage.

People still vote in significant numbers for candidates who share a common ethnic or racial heritage. I suspect that when the votes are counted for the September mayoral preliminary election, Felix Arroyo will receive a lion’s share of votes from Latinos, Cape Verdeans will vote in force for John Barros, and Rob Consalvo will garner more votes than other candidates from the Italian-American community. This is nothing more than a reflection of the human condition – we are wired to be clannish, and to express a measure of ethnic pride for those who offer themselves as high-profile political leaders.

The questions come: who are today’s immigrants in Boston, have they become a potent voting force, and, like their Irish immigrant predecessors, do they vote in ethnic lockstep?

Writing in Commonwealth earlier this year, Larry DiCara and Jim Sutherland analyzed recent voting patterns and concluded that “black, Hispanic, and Asian voters, while increasing in number, do not yet represent a significant percentage of Boston’s voting electorate because many of them are immigrants or under the age of 18. Instead, the real changes in the Boston electorate are occurring within the Caucasian community, where a vast collection of younger and educated white people, mostly born elsewhere, have the potential to determine the city’s political future.” If this observation is correct, and I believe that it is, then Boston in 2013 may be more like Boston in the 19th century than Boston in the 20th. There were many Irish residents in Boston in the mid-to-late 19th century, but they had not fully reached a level of political maturity to command the kind of voting power they did in later years. As a result, they were largely either outvoted by nativist Boston Brahmins, or they became sufficiently assimilationist so as not to threaten the ruling class. So too today, although Boston is a minority-majority city, it appears that the new cohort of immigrants have not matured politically in sufficient numbers to carry the day in this year’s mayoral election.

Today about 27 percent of Boston’s citizens are foreign born, immigrants largely from non-European lands, primarily from Central and South America, the Far East, and the Middle East. Haiti has been the largest single place of origin for the most recent wave of immigration to Boston. Many others who have come to Boston in the last decade – Somalis and Iraqis – are refugees from lands that have been torn apart by war and ethnic and religious intolerance. Like most immigrants before them, today’s newcomers arrive seeking freedom of some sort – freedom of economic opportunity, freedom of religion, freedom to be themselves – but participation in that most basic attribute of freedom, electoral politics, may not be a priority for them. They come to Boston from countries and cultures that are not often congenial to our American system of choosing political leaders, causing them to approach participation in politics with a larger measure of caution than their Irish predecessors.

In Boston in 2013, there does not appear to be the kind of ethnic hegemony that marked the political battles of the 20th century. And that is because our contemporary patterns of immigration and our contemporary attitudes toward immigration make it less urgent, less necessary, for newcomers to turn to politics for support or personal advancement. Boston in 2013 appears more comfortable with diversity, more welcoming of differences. While a sometimes confrontational debate about immigration plays out nationally, today’s Boston has generally embraced new residents from many lands and cultures.

The demographic changes in the city have had significant political consequences: the old Italian bastion of East Boston is now a largely immigrant Latino community; historically Irish South Boston is increasingly gentrified, and the once predominantly black South End is perhaps the city’s youngest and most gentrified neighborhood, where the voting on Election Day often exceeds most other wards. East Boston’s electoral preferences will be interesting to observe as a window on voting behavior. Felix Arroyo may have a significant leg up because that neighborhood is so overwhelmingly Latino. The Latino community has been determined to enroll a target of 5,000 new voters in Boston this year. Will that happen? And will those people vote in ethnic lockstep? Rob Consalvo is betting on East Boston’s aging Italian-American population to come out for him in an expression of ethnic fealty, but those numbers have diminished to a point where they are nearly inconsequential. Many East Boston progressives, who are also Latino or Italian-American, have been drawn to the candidacy of Bill Walczak because of his strong anti-casino position. Will issues trump ethnic pride for those voters?

In contrast to the early 20th century, today’s immigrants have the benefit of support and guidance from groups and organizations that provide assistance in many ways – securing affordable housing, education and training, and English as a second language. These organizations – groups like East Boston’s NOAH and Ecumenical Community Council, Jamaica Plain’s City Life/Vida Urbana, Dorchester’s Cape Verdean UNIDO, the Boston Foundation’s English Works – offer people both basic assistance and the opportunity to empower themselves in meaningful ways. Groups like Oiste Boston and the Greater Boston Citizen Initiative have taken the place of ward bosses like Martin Lomasney. Unlike Lomasney, who traded jobs for votes (but who never traded or shared power), these organizations are focused on empowering immigrants through citizenship and voting.

Empowerment is important because Boston’s immigrants today face not just the same challenges as their predecessors, challenges arising naturally from the process of integrating into a new land with a different language, but other new challenges that are byproducts of the harsh impacts of an economy that is more global and technology-enabled. In the early 20th century, the immigrant community could secure manufacturing jobs where, despite grueling conditions, they were at least able to perform work and bring home a paycheck. In the 21st century, the shift to more technology-driven systems (electronic checkout at CVS, Home Depot, Stop & Shop, and other stores), and the outsourcing of jobs to less expensive labor across the globe means fewer entry-level jobs to sustain people who need a start. In today’s innovation economy the only real currency is a solid education and an aptitude for innovative and creative thinking. Many immigrants who are challenged by a new language, and who may lack basic education and training, have to compete for a limited number of entry-level jobs in areas like building and ground cleaning/maintenance, health care support, and retail and food industry environments. One critical difference from the 20th century – there is today a significant cohort of immigrants who have the benefit of a higher education (in Massachusetts about 17 percent of immigrants) and these men and women do have access to good jobs in the life sciences and technology sectors.

The next mayor will be faced with important issues that directly impact many of Boston’s newcomers. There is a belief among some in the Boston immigrant community that the schools their children attend need more attention, that more highly trained teachers, a more tailored curriculum, and more funds are needed to improve underperforming schools. The drop-out rate in largely Latino East Boston High School, for example, is one of the highest in the city. Disparities in funding are taken as evidence that the city still has a way to go in equalizing educational opportunities for all of its children.

Another critical issue for immigrants is the lack of equal, affordable, and meaningful mobility choices. This inequity has an impact on access to jobs, health care, education, and recreation. Our chronic legacy of disinvestment in transit – a problem that persists even today as we have witnessed yet another weak response from the state Legislature to fund public transportation robustly and equitably – exacerbates the problem. A recent study by the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy describes the inequities faced by the largely Latino population of East Boston, where a significant number of people have no automobiles or access to automobiles. Although East Boston has Blue Line transit service, the report notes that this service “is not seen as efficiently transporting people to some vital destinations” – like grocery stores, for example, or health care. The report concluded that low-income Latino residents “lack adequate transportation options and must often choose between expensive dependence on automobiles and unreliable, time-consuming public transit.” The next mayor of Boston will, like his or her predecessors, not have a direct say in the policies that inform MBTA decision making, but a new mayor can lead by using the power of the office to draw more attention to the inequities, and to develop coalitions throughout the Commonwealth with other mayors to demand greater investment and attention to the urgent needs of urban mobility.

Boston has a long relationship with immigration, one that has matured over time to be more tolerant and mindful of the importance of diversity. The question now is whether and how a new mayor will adopt effective strategies to close the gaps, create more opportunities for good jobs and affordable housing, improve meaningful and affordable mobility choices, and position Boston as a place where newcomers can grow roots, thrive, and contribute to the city’s growth.

Jim Aloisi is a former state secretary of transportation. His most recent book is The Vidal Lecture.