Newcomers, Outsiders, and Insiders: Immigrants and American Racial Politics in the Early Twenty-first Century

2. Analytical Framework for Studying Political Incorporation

2 | Analytical Framework for Studying Political Incorporation Chapter 1 described the extent to which immigration has transformed the demographic composition of ethnoracial minority communities in the United States. In this chapter, we come to the central question with which this book is concerned: how is this demographic transformation affecting the politics of ethnoracial minority groups in the United States? What patterns might we expect to see in the future political development of the three primary panethnic communities, given the large-scale in›ux of immigrants in the past four decades? Here we sketch out four alternative futures for U.S. ethnoracial politics that have been suggested most often by other scholars, and we describe the organization of the book’s inquiry in the chapters that follow. Immigrants and Ethnoracial Politics in the United States: Four Possible Directions What are the most likely trajectories for the future development of ethnoracial politics in the United States, and how will recent immigrants affect those trajectories? Given the importance of race in American society and public life, it should occasion no surprise that many scholars have weighed in on these questions, generating lively controversy. Drawing on the writings of the most prominent social and political scientists involved in this discourse, here we outline four major possibilities, each of which has been hypothesized as the most likely scenario for the future of ethnoracial identities in U.S. society and public life: individual assimilation, pluralism, biracial hierarchy, and multiracial hierarchy. The ‹rst two scenarios, individual assimilation and pluralism, both suggest that racial barriers—which we term racial hierarchy—have been suf‹ciently diminished and altered in the United States that they will not 37 prevent Blacks, Latinos, or Asian Americans from being incorporated into the political and governmental structures of American politics as equal members of the political order. Accordingly, these scenarios also predict a rather straightforward integration of most immigrants into the existing political system, individually and/or via ethnic political groups. In the language of social science, these scenarios depict a relatively high level of agency for ethnoracial minority groups, and relatively low levels of structure . Put differently, these scenarios depict relatively ›uid social and political structures in the United States, structures relatively accessible to upward and inside mobility on the part of groups and individuals beginning from outside and/or at the bottom in relation to political in›uence. In contrast, the other two hypotheses—biracial hierarchy and multiracial hierarchy—depict less ›exible, relatively rigid structures and social formations generating relatively impervious constraints on the efforts of outsider groups for greater political in›uence or a redistribution of political power. Thus, implicitly or explicitly, each scenario gives an account of how social and political power is structured in the U.S. polity, and posits a preferred way to understand the processes by which outsider and newcomer groups typically come to terms with those structures and the meanings of membership in the polity. In addition to outlining these four alternative futures for ethnoracial politics in the United States during and after a new age of immigration, we will also discuss the relationship of these alternative political futures to another potential development, transnationalism. A number of scholars have articulated the possibility that under new conditions of transnational mobility and communications, and a legal order altered to facilitate dual nationality, many of the new immigrants will retain important political, social, and economic ties with their homelands, even beyond the ‹rst generation in the United States, and even after they have been incorporated into U.S. politics. Our query here will concern whether this phenomenon should be considered a ‹fth possible scenario for the future of U.S. ethnoracial politics. In the end, however, we do not see transnationalism as a ‹fth alternative future, but rather as a potential development that might alter the course of each of our four scenarios in varying ways. Nevertheless , we do try to assess the ways in which transnational political behavior affects the incorporation of newcomers and outsiders into the political life of the United States. In developing the scenarios, we draw upon and integrate the writings of social scientists focusing primarily on the role of ethnoracial identities in U.S. politics, as well as the writings of those who have focused mainly 38 | Newcomers, Outsiders, and Insiders on immigrant incorporation into U.S. society. Our discussion, moreover, also draws upon models developed by political scientists for understanding the...