American Immigration After 1996: The Shifting Ground of Political Inclusion

Chapter 1. Contemporary Assimilation in the United States

1 contemporary assimilation in the united states In this chapter, I explore presuppositions about assimilation norms expressed in recent literature, public policy, and public debate. This discussion will be schematic, ignoring the complexities of some authors’ arguments, but will point to largely unexamined preconceptions in all these areas. The literature I am broadly referring to includes the work of conservatives like Lawrence Auster, Samuel Huntington, Peter Skerry, and George Borjas; moderates like Rogers Brubaker, Victor Nee, and Richard Alba; and accounts that still rely on conventional categories but can be classified as either alternative or more progressive, such as those of Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut . These scholarly accounts have many differences but are well within the discourse of the general public, students of immigration, and mainstream political debates.1 In contrast, truly alternative accounts, like those of Saskia Sassen and Yasemin Soysal, may have received high scholarly praise but certainly stand outside conventional understandings of the immigration debates, both public and academic.2 These two authors look at integration or assimilation (words that are used interchangeably in the literature but arguably mean different things)3 not only in terms of a domestic, liberal, “social contract” framework, but also in terms of dynamics of the nationstate , including how the strengthening of borders and concepts of the nation 18 american immigration after 1996 have shaped the immigrant experience in the post–World War II era. Rather than taking the nation-state for granted, they examine how the logic of the nation-state plays an important role in assimilation norms and yet how this primacy is obscured in the more conventional accounts. Even more important, they both consider how nation-states’ power is challenged by global capital and increased migration flows, on the one hand, and how the nation-state has increasingly closed its borders to poorer migrants since the mid-1990s, thereby strengthening state sovereignty.4 Both authors contend that nongovernmental organizations and human rights institutions mediate between domestic and international spheres, allowing for new types of citizenship. Sassen and Soysal are not the only commentators to analyze the issue in a complex and interdisciplinary manner, but what is notable among the authors who do examine this issue in a more multifaceted way is their own recognition that these efforts do not reflect the norm. Rather, the conventional literature on immigration and assimilation gives a different picture of the immigration process and its political possibilities. Rogers Brubaker argues that assimilation in the United States was once conceived around a core set of values that were coercive and “Angloconformist .” By the 1960s these ideas were discredited, and by the 1980s notions of difference (a “differentialist turn”) became popular.5 Brubaker is referring to the increasing use of multicultural perspectives and poststructuralism as well as (what he argues are) immigrant studies that focused solely on the value of ethnic communities but ignored what happened to individuals who left those communities. By the 1990s, these ideas were justly attacked and today, he claims, we are experiencing a “return” of assimilation norms minus their coercive and ethnocentric character. To Brubaker, today’s assimilation norms are not as “organic,” Anglo-centric, or coercive as they have been in the past; rather, they allow for mutual interaction and respect for other cultures, traditions, habits, and even languages. To Brubaker, Richard Alba and Victor Nee’s work is an example of this more benign and fair-minded model of assimilation. Nee and Alba argue that “as a state-imposed normative program aimed at eradicating minority cultures, assimilation has been justifiably repudiated. But as a social process that occurs spontaneously and often unintendedly in the course of interaction between majority and minority groups, assimilation remains a key concept for the study of intergroup relations.”6 Their intentions are certainly not prejudiced (e.g., racist or class based), and their main argument is that controversial immigrants are assimilating, despite the perception that they 19 contemporary assimilation in the united states are not. But they do argue that the canonical model of assimilation, developed by the Chicago School, still largely holds (if factors like length of time, generational change, and race are accounted for).7 Their more conservative counterparts, such as Huntington and Borjas, often interpret the same conceptual categories and data sets but draw far more negative interpretations. Although I will be ignoring certain nuances in these authors’ work, I would like to suggest that a lack...