International Migration in a Global Context: Recent Approaches to Migration Theory

Diaspora 7:3 1998 International Migration in a Global Context: Recent Approaches to Migration Theory Ramón Grosfoguel Boston College Héctor Cordero-Guzmán New School for Social Research Introduction Traditional sociological paradigms about immigrants in the United States have been based on approaches that privilege the concept of ethnicity: the assimilation school (Gordon; Park) and the cultural pluralist school (Glazer and Moynihan). Both were based on the migration experience of Europeans at the turn of the century. According to the assimilation school, all immigrant groups pass through several stages in the process of assimilation to the host society. First, they become acculturated to the values, norms, and culture ofthe host society. Usually it takes two or three generations to lose values, language, and culture of origin. Second, once assimilated to "Anglo-American" culture, which eliminates any discriminatory obstacles that could affect their successful incorporation to the labor market, they are able to assimilate structurally to the mainstream American economy. The cultural pluralist school depends upon a similar teleological stagism, but with one main difference. Though it assumes that ethnic groups eventually assimilate, it does not claim that the new identity is a "melted" identity that belongs to a homogeneous "American" culture. Instead, it argues that while groups lose their language and customs, their ethnicity continues to be recreated as a new form of identity that is not a simple repetition of what existed in their communities of origin. It is a new, hyphenated identity (e.g., Irish-American, Italian-American, Polish-American) that emerges out of shared political interests. The new ethnicities are interest groups that deliver political power, which in turn is eventually translated into economic gains, leading to "upward mobility" for the whole community. 352 Diaspora 7:3 1998 In sum, the "cultural pluralist" and the "assimilation" schools share two basic assumptions: first, that the longer an ethnic group is in the United States, the more structurally assimilated or integrated itbecomes to the mainstream American economy; and second, that once equal opportunity legislation begins to be enforced, blacks, Hispanics, or Asians will experience the same processes of integration as any other ethnic group in the United States. In this analysis, the timing of the migration as well as the racial discrimination suffered by immigrants of color are erased as persistent factors. The assumption is of a unilinear process ofintegration into the host society. Moreover, the cultural pluralist school recognizes the ethnicity of all the "White" groups, but subsumes "Blacks," "Hispanics," and "Asians" under reductionist racial categories (Omi and Winant 20-3). The diverse ethnic groups among the Black, Latino, and Asian populations are not recognized within this racialized paradigm. The more sophisticated versions of these schools recognize that their model needs to take into account institutional barriers to integration, such as discriminatory laws and residential segregation against blacks in the United States (Glazer and Moynihan; Gordon). They acknowledge that unlike European ethnics and despite their cultural "assimilation," black people experience discriminatory obstacles that have affected their integration to the mainstream of the American economy. Furthermore, they assume that once legal and institutional barriers are overcome, if an ethnic group continues to experience difficulties in attaining upward mobility in the labor market, it will be because some negative feature or features in its "cultural values" create an obstacle to successful incorporation . The term "culture ofpoverty" was coined by these perspectives. The Moynihan Report, documenting the "pathologies" ofblack families (Rainwater and Yancey), along with social science work on Puerto Rican poverty (Glazer and Moynihan; Lewis) ended by blaming the "culture" ofthe communities that are discriminated against. This article is divided into three parts that will address more recent theoretical models of international migration, such as the "new economic sociology" approach, the "context of reception" approach, and the "transnational" approach. These recent approaches to international migration attempt to overcome some of the reductionist assumptions of the assimilation school and the cultural pluralist school. The first part ofthe article will argue that some (not all) of the "new economic sociology" approaches to international migration reproduce some of the "culture of poverty" assumptions ofthe old sociological paradigms, largely because ofthe reductionist and insufficiently materialist interpretation of social networks as equivalent to...