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

Conclusions

This volume starts with a simple observation. The study of immigrant adaptation has, until now, been dominated more by questions of economic , social, and cultural adjustment than of civic and political incorporation . This volume aims to bring us closer to an understanding of the political life of Latinos, Asian Americans, and other new immigrants to the United States. Its contributors have examined the shifting boundaries of ethnoracial classification and citizenship status; questioned the links from collective identity to group politics; analyzed the multiple dimensions of dual citizenship and transnational politics; brought new data, methods, and frameworks to bear on the adaptation of immigrants, the role of civic and political institutions, and the partisan and nonpartisan mobilization of immigrants; and taken stock of how the current dynamics of immigrant political incorporation are likely to evolve in the coming years. That said, scholarship in the social sciences ebbs and flows with the shifting tides of current events and scholarly paradigms, and it is no different in the case of immigrant adaptation. Thus, research on immigrants constituted some of the earliest and most foundational works in American sociology, such as the pioneering works of the “Chicago school,” Robert Park’s Race and Culture (1950) and W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1928). By the 1960s, however, the discipline had all but turned its academic gaze away, in no small part because the Immigration Act of 1924 and other restrictionist immigration policies had pulled the reins on large-scale migration to the United States. In addition, the assimilationist views of Milton Gordon (1964) and others had become suf- ficiently dominant in sociology that the focus on immigration per se gave way to focus acutely on race and ethnicity, especially with the Conclusions Taeku Lee, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Ricardo Ramírez ascendance of the civil rights movement in the 1950s (see Pedraza 2000, Portes 1978). Inch closer to the present day and we see yet another turn with the renewed interest in immigration by the 1970s. This rebirth was sown out of the post–civil rights political and intellectual Zeitgeist. In the political arena, this “fourth wave” of immigration (Muller and Espenshade 1985, Pedraza and Rumbaut 1996) was punctuated by the 1965 Hart-Cellar amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Significantly, however, this single legislative moment arose out of a broader historical context wrought by the Second World War, the subsequent role of the United States as a globally engaged superpower in the cold war, and a civil rights movement at home that was closely conjoined ideologically and economically with the cold war struggle over democracy, liberty, and equal citizenship. In the intellectual arena, scholars began to pull apart the seams of assimilation theory (see, e.g., Glazer and Moynihan 1963, Gans 1979, Portes and Zhou 1993). Israel Zangwill’s vision of an Anglo-conformist “melting pot” seemed not to materialize. Nor did Milton Gordon’s (1964) painstakingly elaborated slog through seven stages of assimilation—cultural, structural , marital, identificational, attitude receptional, behavioral receptional , and civic. Today, we are seemingly at the crest of yet another sea change in immigration and immigrant incorporation. The warm afterglow of a post–civil rights era open-door policy is slowly shifting to a palpably chillier climate of restrictions on immigrant services and bene- fits, fueled in part by economic recessions, the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector, and the gradual but systematic dismantling of affirmative action programs, racial redistricting, and other hard-won successes of the Great Society. Most recently, the real and perceived threats to the security of the nation and the safety of its people after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have led to a curtailing of immigrants’ political rights, the absorption of the Immigration and Naturalization Services under the administrative aegis of the new Department of Homeland Security, and a generally pervasive jingoistic milieu—witness the emergence of the vigilante Minuteman Project in the U.S. Southwest border with Mexico and congressional legislation pushing states to link drivers licenses with proof of legal status in the United States. At the same time, the closing of America’s borders (both literal and figurative) is by no means inevitable. As the various essays in this volume demonstrate, changes in the rules and the players of the political 262 Taeku Lee, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Ricardo Ramírez game are...