In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

7 Rethinking Assimilation TheoJ.Y for a New Era of Immigration Richard Alba and Victor Nee AsSIMILATION HAS FALLEN into disrepute. In an essay tellingly entitled "Is Assimilation Dead?" Nathan Glazer (1993,122) summarizes pithily the contemporary view: "Assimilation today is not a popular term." Glazer writes that he asked some Harvard students what they thought of the term and discovered that "the large majority had a negative reaction to it." The rejection of assimilation is not limited to students. While it was once the unquestioned organizing concept in sociological studies ofethnic relations, in recent decades assimilation has come to be viewed by social scientists as a worn-out theory that imposes ethnocentric and patronizing demands on minority peoples struggling to retain their cultural and ethnic integrity. Without question, earlier social scientists in this field committed what are now regarded as intellectual sins. For instance, W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole (1945, 285ff.), in their classic account of assimilation among ethnic groups in New Haven, describe ethnic groups as "unlearning" their "inferior " cultural traits (inferior, that is, from the standpoint of the host society) in order to "successfully learn the new way of life necessary for full acceptance." Warner and Srole also correlated the potential for assimilation with a hierarchy of racial and cultural acceptability, ranging from Englishspeaking Protestants at the top to "Negroes and all Negroid mixtures" at the bottom. The depiction of the ethnocentric tendency in classical American assimilation could hardly be clearer. Yet, whatever the deficiencies of earlier formulations and applications of assimilation, we hold that this social science concept offers the best way to understand and describe the integration into the mainstream experienced across generations by many individuals and ethnic groups, even if it cannot be regarded as a universal outcome of American life. In this essay, we attempt to rehabilitate assimilation in order to render it useful in the study of the new immigration. (We are not alone in this attempt; see, for instance, Barkan 1995; Kazal 1995; Morawska 1994.) Our reformulation of assimilation emphasizes its utility for understanding the social dynamics of ethnicity in American society, as opposed to its past normative or ideological applications. 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 unintentionally in the course of interaction between majority and minority groups, assimilation remains a key concept for the study of intergroup relations. In what follows, we review the sociological literature on assimilation with an eye to assessing its strengths and weaknesses; assay the validity of arguments for rejecting assimilation in understanding the new immigration; and sift through recent studies for clues concerning assimilation 's course among the new immigrant groups. THE CANONICAL ACCOUNT Whatever the precise words, conceptions ofassimilation have been central to understanding the American experience at least since colonial times. The centrality ofassimilation for the scientific understanding ofimmigration is more recent, traceable to the Chicago School ofthe early twentieth century and especially to the work of Robert E. Park, W. I. Thomas, and their collaborators and students (McKee 1993). The social science use ofassimilation thus emerged at the high point of a previous era of immigration and by means ofobservations in a city where the first and second generations then constituted the great majority ofresidents. Park and E. W. Burgess (1921/1969, 735) provided an early definition of assimilation: "a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons and groups and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life." When 138 The Handbook ofInternational Migration read closely, this definition does not appear to require what many critics assume is a necessary condition of assimilation-namely, the erasure of all signs of ethnic origins. Instead, it equates assimilation with the social processes that bring ethnic minorities into the mainstream of American life. The limited extent of the assimilation Park envisioned was made even clearer by another definition he later created for the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1930, 281): "social" assimilation was "the name given to the process or processes by which peoples of diverse racial origins and different cultural heritages, occupying a common territory, achieve a cultural solidarity sufficient at least to sustain a national existence." Park's legacy is closely identified with the notion of assimilation as the end-stage of a "race relations cycle" of "contact, competition, accommodation , and eventual assimilation...

Share