Transforming Politics, Transforming America: The Political and Civic Incorporation of Immigrants in the United States

The Political Assimilation of the Fourth Wave

The Political Assimilation of the Fourth Wave Kathryn Pearson and Jack Citrin As a nation of immigrants, the United States has always confronted the challenge of balancing unity and diversity. By bringing strangers into one’s land, to use John Higham’s evocative phrase (1985), largescale immigration poses a potential threat to the sense of shared identity that is the foundation of nationhood. When America faced this challenge as a result of European immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, intense political conflicts arose over how many and what sort of immigrants to allow into the country and how to absorb the cultural outsiders who had already arrived. By abolishing the racist national origins system and greatly increasing the level of immigration, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and subsequent legislation have transformed the ethnic composition of American society. These demographic changes renewed the normative and empirical debates about the consequences of immigration, both for the American political system and for immigrants themselves. Will ongoing immigration result in cultural balkanization and the fragmentation of the national interest (Schlesinger 1991; Brimelow 1995; Huntington 2000, 2004a)? Will the Hispanic and Asian immigrants blend into the “melting pot” as their European predecessors ultimately did (Alba 1990)? Or will changes in the legal and political climate beginning in the 1960s facilitate the maintenance of native customs and values in a multiethnic society? And what are the processes that encourage the involvement of immigrants in political life through naturalization, voting , and participation in civic organizations (Jones-Correa 2002, Citrin and Highton 2002, Ramakrishnan 2005)? As indicated by the editors’ introduction to this volume, assimilation is a unifying theme in these questions about contemporary immigration . Assimilation as a scholarly concept and government policy 218 Kathryn Pearson and Jack Citrin emerged in the nineteenth century as one model for managing ethnic relations in the United States. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language defines “to assimilate” as “to make similar to.” This definition leaves open the question of who is being made similar to whom with regard to what. Nonetheless, the phrase “to make” implies agency, and the following dictionary entry for the term “assimilationism ” is “the policy of completely absorbing minority cultural groups into the main cultural body.” It is this meaning of assimilation that evokes intense controversies in American politics. On a normative level, is assimilation a desirable process that creates a sense of community and national purpose in a diverse society or a coercive policy that tears people emotionally, socially, and intellectually from their cultural origins? And on an empirical level, are the new immigrants blending into the mainstream and is the process of assimilation the same across immigrant groups and in all regions of the country? By any definition, assimilation refers to change over time. Ethnic differences erode as immigrants and their offspring are exposed to and absorb the dominant habits of their new country (Portes and Rumbaut 2001, Jones-Correa 2002). The standard “straight-line” hypothesis thus predicts that successive immigrant generations, whatever their national origins, increasingly will resemble each other, socially and culturally. On the assumption that native-born Americans of European origin are the carriers of these mainstream values, this would mean that third-generation Latinos should be more similar to nativeborn whites than are recent Latino immigrants. The same should be true for immigrants from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and so forth. Both the melting as cleansing and melting as blending models of assimilation assume the gradual homogenization of ethnic groups through socioeconomic integration and acculturation. But there are two alternative possibilities derived from an interpretation of American identity that rejects the notion of a single mainstream culture. According to multiculturalist thinkers (Lukes and Joppke 1999), the persistence of distinct ethnic subcultures imported by immigrants is what makes America unique. New immigrants gradually adopt the norms of the native-born members of their own ethnicity rather than an overarching national outlook. In other words, the “assimilation to what” question is answered differently, depending on one’s ethnic origin. This hypothesis of several parallel assimilatory tracks would be consistent with the emergence of a distinctive pan-ethnic Asian-American viewpoint; the absorption of West Indian immigrants into the larger, native-born African American commu- The Political Assimilation of the Fourth Wave 219 nity (Rogers 2000a); and the integration of diverse Spanish-speaking groups into a common Latino collectivity (Abramson 1980...