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48 chapter four Lost in Translation? A Critical Reappraisal of the Concept of Immigrant Political Incorporation Lorraine C. Minnite The return to high levels of immigration to the United States over the last forty years has generated a familiar concern for how immigrants are changing U.S. society. Sometimes this concern is motivated by a prickly nativism, a lingering anxiety about what “they” are doing to “us” and how much we might have to change to include, accommodate, or simply tolerate “them” (Huntington 2004). More broadminded people who retain their faith in the power of democratic institutions to “make citizens” nevertheless worry that these institutions may not be up to the task of integrating so many more newcomers from so many different places (Benhabib 2004; Putnam 2007). Interestingly, compared to research on the economic and social impacts of immigration on host societies, scholars of the new immigration have paid less attention to the politicaldimensionsof immigrantintegration.Thisisespeciallysurprisinggiventhenational state’s monopoly over the flow of people across borders and in regulating those people once they arrive.1 Analysts of the U.S. case have addressed this question when they have employed the metaphor of incorporation, by which they usually mean the extent to which immigrants have become citizens and mobilized their interests within the political system. The dominant notion of immigrant political incorporation, which looks for evidence in electoral politics, representation, and policy responsiveness, is largely borrowed from older research on minority groups in U.S. urban politics. Is this research paradigm suitable for understanding immigrant politics today? Before we go too far down this road, it is worth reappraising the concept of political incorporation, as some analysts of immigrant political behavior have already begun to do. For example, Michael Jones-Correa describes how scholars using this concept meander from a notion of pathways to integration shaped by local contexts to one of end states resulting from“events”such as naturalization or electoral participation .“What is striking,”he comments,“is that we know so little about the variation along any one of these dimensions, much less how variation in one dimension might affect outcomes in other dimensions” (Jones-Correa 2002, 2). Lost in Translation? 49 Similarly, Janelle Wong argues that the concept is so diffuse that the resulting research agenda lacks coherence. Some analysts look at mechanisms of immigrant political participation, others at rates of participation, and still others at measures of a political system’s openness to new groups. “Maybe all of these activities and concepts should count as political incorporation,” she notes, “but should they all count in exactly the same way?” (Wong 2002, 1). The lack of conceptual cohesion, she argues, makes it difficult to specify the directions of causality among these different indicators. Is membership in a civic organization a determinant or only an indicator of political incorporation? These are sound criticisms, but the usefulness of the incorporation paradigm can be challenged further. To do so, we need a deeper examination of the ways the incorporation metaphor’s assumptions and values shape the research questions we ask about immigration and politics. Let us consider, then, three basic issues: (1) that the many divergent meanings that scholars have attached to political incorporation render it a conceptual muddle, (2) that theories of incorporation borrowed from U.S. ethnic and urban politics may not be suitable for explaining immigrant political behavior, and (3) that we might do a better job by paying more attention to what is missing from incorporation theories. The conclusion to this chapter argues that the incoherence of the concept of political incorporation limits its utility and highlights the need for theoretical development. We need a more careful, contingent, and grounded approach to the study of how immigration and immigrants are changing U.S. society and, especially, urban politics. What Is Political Incorporation? Martin Shefter argues that political incorporation, viewed as the study of how new social forces enter the political system, is a central theme in the study of U.S. political development. As a theory of emergent groups in the polity, it is at the center of longstanding investigations of party systems and partisan realignment and of analyses of ethnic succession in urban politics (Shefter 1986). As such, most theories of political incorporation generally fit into two groups, one emphasizing inclusion and the other stressing absorption. The differences between these categories are not large, but it is still useful to make the distinction. To include is to embrace, comprise, or contain, sometimes as a subordinate element...

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