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Assimilation is reemerging as a core concept for comprehending the long-run consequences of immigration, both for the immigrants and their descendants and for the society that receives them.
This new phase could be described as a second life for a troubled concept. In its first life, assimilation was enthroned as the reigning idea in the study of ethnicity and race. In the USA, where the theoretical development of assimilation mainly took place, this period began with the studies of the Chicago School in the early twentieth century and ended not long after the canonical statement of assimilation theory, Milton Gordon’s Assimilation in American Life, appeared in the mid-1960s. In this first phase, assimilation did double duty – on the one hand, as popular ideology for interpreting the American experience and, correlatively, an ideal expressing the direction in which ethnic and racial divisions were evolving in the USA; and, on the other, as the foundational concept for the social scientific understanding of processes of change undergone by immigrants and, even more, the ensuing generations.
One profound alteration to the social scientific apparatus for studying immigrant-group incorporation is that it is no longer exclusively based on assimilation. Very abstractly, three patterns describe today how immigrants and their descendants become ”incorporated into,” that is, a recognized part of, an immigration society: the pattern of assimilation involves a progressive, typically multi-generational, process of socioeconomic, cultural, and social integration into the ”mainstream,” that part of the society where racial and ethnic origins have at most minor effects on the life chances of individuals; a second pattern entails racial exclusion, absorption into a racial minority status, which implies persistent and substantial disadvantages vis-a-vis the members of the mainstream; a third pattern is that of a pluralism in which individuals and groups are able to draw social and economic advantages by keeping some aspects of their lives within the confines of an ethnic matrix (e.g., ethnic economic niches, ethnic communities).
Bibliography:
- Alba, R. & Nee, V. (2003) Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
- Gordon, M. (1964) Assimilation in American Life. Oxford University Press, New York.
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