Assimilation's Bumpy Road

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND THE PURSUIT OF EQUALITY

Merlin Chowkwanyunand Randa Serhan

Paradigm PublishersBoulder • London

For Herbert J. Gansand his extraordinary example.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1 Merlin Chowkwanyun and Randa Serhan

The Social Scientist as a Human Being

1 On Getting People to Tell You More Than They Want To 5 Todd Gitlin

2 Fact and Fiction: Sociology and the Novel 12 Peter Marris

Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life

3 What is an American City? 20 Michael B. Katz

4 American Community in Transition 43 William Kornblum

5 Building the American Way: Public Subsidy, Private Space 60 Dolores Hayden

6 Towards an “Active Socioplastics” 73 Denise Scott Brown

People, Plans, and Policies

7 The Right Hand and the Left Hand: Contradictory Social Policies in the Lives of the Working Poor 99 Katherine S. Newman and Margaret M. Chin

8 Understanding the Emergence and Persistence of Concentrated Urban Poverty 117 William Julius Wilson

9 Ignoring Justice in Disaster Planning: An Agenda for Research on 9/11, Katrina, and Social Policy 132 Peter Marcuse

viii Contents

The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America

10 The Battle over Assimilation 163 Richard Alba

11 Assimilation’s Bumpy Road 184 Rubén G. Rumbaut

Democracy and the News

12 The Concept of Politics in Contemporary United States Journalism 220 Michael Schudson

13 Convergence: News Production in a Digital Age 234 Eric Klinenberg

More Equality

14 Movements and Reform in Twentieth-Century America 250 Frances Fox Piven

Contributor Biographies 277

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11

ASSIMILATION’S BUMPY ROAD

Rubén G. Rumbaut

“It is not always clear, however, what assimilation means.” —Robert E. Park1

“The time has come to assert a higher ideal than the ‘melting-pot’… We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed… What we emphatically do not want is that [the immigrants’] distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity.”

—Randolph Bourne2

“Yankee City illustrates much of what has happened and is happening to the ‘minority groups’ all over America. Each group enters the city at the bottom of the social heap (lower-lower class) and through the several generations makes its desperate climb upwards… new ethnics will go through the same metamor-phosis… The mobile ethnic is much more likely to be assimilated than the non-mobile one.”

—W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole3

“To what does one assimilate in modern America? The ‘American’ in the ab-stract does not exist… The point about the melting pot is that it did not hap-pen… The notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and reli-gious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end prod-uct has outlived its usefulness, and also its credibility. The persistent facts of ethnicity demand attention, understanding, and accommodation.”

—Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan4

“My essential thesis is that the sense of ethnicity has proved to be hardy… the sense of ethnic belonging has survived… In the careful distinction between

Assimilation’s Bumpy Road 185

cultural behavior and social structure lies one of the major keys to the under-standing of what the assimilation process has actually been like… American society has come to be composed of a number of ‘pots,’ or subsocieties… The entire picture may be called a ‘multiple melting pot.’”

—Milton M. Gordon5

“Despite predictions to the contrary, the 20th century turned out to be an ethnic century.”

—Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann6

“The culinary metaphor is an Anglo-Protestant tomato soup to which immigra-tion adds celery, croutons, spices, parsley, and other ingredients that enrich and diversify the taste, but which are absorbed into what remains fundamentally tomato soup.”

—Samuel P. Huntington7

“Assimilation,” a protean concept with an American pedigree and a checkered past, is back in vogue. An Internet search of “immigrant assimilation” yields 2.8 million results in a fraction of a second. A bar graph displaying a timeline of relevant references since the 1850s shows a noticeable increase after 1880 and then a sharp increase after 1900, peaking in 1924, followed by a decline and a long plateau until the late 1980s, when references to “immigrant assimilation” increased sharply again, especially after 1993, peaking in 2006. An examination of a sample of periodicals and other publications across those decades shows that the meaning of “assimilation” has changed over time.

In academic and colloquial usage, in social science, public policy and popu-lar culture, the idea and the ideal of “assimilation” have had a bumpy history. Over time the term has conflated various empirical descriptions and normative prescriptions to make sense of the incorporation of “ethnic” difference in American life. After more than a century of use and misuse the term itself re-mains confusing and contentious. For a “canonical” concept, there remains sur-prising ambiguity as to its meaning, measurement and applicability. Some scholars have suggested using different concepts for empirical and normative purposes—a solution “for which it is probably too late,” in Herbert Gans’s words—or considered dropping the term altogether. And yet, in a new era of mass immigration marked by an unprecedented diversity of national and class origins, with old questions being raised about the future of new American ethnic groups, the concept has reemerged, enlivened by intriguing and innovative re-formulations, if still burdened by its malleability and imprecision.

A leading economist has summarized the conventional wisdom as follows:

The traditional view of the social mobility of immigrant households across generations is vividly encapsulated by the melting pot metaphor. In that view, immigrants from an array of diverse countries blend into a homoge-neous native population relatively quickly, perhaps in two generations. Al-though many analysts have questioned the relevance of the melting pot

186 Rubén G. Rumbaut

image to the experience of many ethnic groups in the United States, it seems to have a magnetic and intuitive appeal that often confounds its de-tractors. As a result, the “assimilationist” perspective has long dominated the thinking of many observers of the immigrant experience.8

The author adds (as is done de rigueur in the literature) that “classic exposi-tions of the melting pot hypothesis are given by Robert Park… and Milton Gordon.”9 This pithy statement captures different dimensions that are typically conflated by the term (cultural adaptations, economic mobility, social accep-tance into a native mainstream), although in fact neither Park’s nor Gordon’s conceptualizations of “assimilation” focused on socioeconomic mobility (or “Progress”), let alone on melting-pot homogeneity.

Perennial debates about the incorporation (or excorporation, in some egre-gious cases) of immigrants and ethno-racial minorities in American society have not shed their well-worn feel of familiarity. In sociology, two general perspec-tives have grappled with that central theme—and dilemma—of American his-tory: assimilation and pluralism. The metaphor of the “melting pot” has typically been used to dramatize, legitimize and celebrate the first of these—the accul-turation and integration of immigrants and their descendants—while distracting critical attention away from the actualities, inequalities, conflicts and potentiali-ties of the second. For all of its vaunted “melting,” there has been never been a single American “pot”; that singular image will remain a deeply flawed one—sociologically as well as ideologically—unless it can be applied inclusively, across social classes, interethnically and interracially. Yet inasmuch as the pos-sibilities of social and cultural interminglings are greater than ever, a critical reassessment of processes and outcomes of “assimilation” in American life is worth undertaking, along with—especially given its perennial ambiguity—a reconsideration of the concept itself.10 In what follows I explore aspects of the history of the idea in American society and social science, of the ideology of the “melting pot” as a master frame and of the teleology of Progress underlying it; consider cultural, socioeconomic and identificational indicators of intergenera-tional change among contemporary ethnic groups; and raise questions about the limitations and paradoxes of the concept itself in the study of ethnicity and ine-quality in American life.

THE EVOLUTION OF POPULAR MEANING: FROM TRANSITIVE TO INTRANSITIVE VERB

The earliest uses of “immigrant assimilation” confirm Park’s observation that it was a metaphor derived from physiology to describe, as in a process of digestion and nutrition, how “alien peoples come to be incorporated… with a community or state.”11 As originally used, assimilation was a transitive verb, entailing the “swallowing and digesting” (by the incorporating community or state, the sub-ject of the action) of alien peoples (the object). Thus, a May 19, 1852 article in the newly founded New York Times observed that “the population of the United States is supplied by the world… Assimilation in America, thanks to a healthy


and useful digestion, is equal to the largest supplies of aliment… Politically, the influx of life is only pernicious where the assimilative functions of labor and compensation are quiescent or disordered.” A generation later, at the start of a new immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, the Times editorialized on May 15, 1880: “There is a limit to our powers of assimilation and when it is exceeded the country suffers from something very like indigestion… We know how stubbornly conservative of his dirt and ignorance is the average immigrant who settles in New York… these wretched beings change their abode, but not their habits in coming to New York.” On November 27, 1892, the year that Ellis Island opened, a Times editorial asserted that “whereas the immigration we re-ceived up to 1880 was for the most part easy of assimilation to the American body politic, a very large part of that which has come to us since that date is inveterately alien… It is not the Teutonic but the Slavic and the Latin elements in our new immigration of which we have reason to be afraid, and this even more upon social and political than upon economic grounds… We cannot dis-criminate against nationalities, and yet we must discriminate among immi-grants.” In the Times of April 8, 1899, a letter to the editor entitled “Anglo-Saxon Assimilation” asserted:

It is a characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race that it can assimilate large foreign infusions without having its own race character essentially changed. It always preserves its identity… But the assimilated races lose theirs. We do not compel or invite foreigners to come here and be assimilated. But if they do come, as-similated they must be. We shall certainly not allow them to assimilate us.

By August 9, 1903, another editorial in the Times noted that “little more than one half of the people of the country at the opening of the twentieth century are of American parentage… Obviously the task of assimilation imposed on the American people is considerable.” It was the “American people” who did the assimilating; it was up to the “Anglo-Saxon race” to absorb the foreigners. That was the meaning that Senator Alan Simpson, the ranking minority member of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Affairs, had in mind many decades later at a 1987 hearing when he referred to Hmong refugees from Laos as “the most indigestible group in society.”12

By then Simpson’s comment was jarring, for that usage had long since changed, as “assimilation” came increasingly if almost imperceptibly to be used as an intransitive verb—reversing the focal subject and modifying the meaning of the predicate. It was now the aliens who were the subject of the action of adapting and changing themselves to American cultural standards—“acculturating,” as the process would later be called—and thereby embracing (or expected to embrace) a common national loyalty and identity.13 Thus in Chicago in 1914, with immigration unabated and the large majority of it residents con-sisting of immigrants and their children, Park (who saw the modern construction of national identities as entailing both the incorporative and the acculturative modes of intergroup change) could write that:

In America it has become proverbial that a Pole, Lithuanian, or Norwegian cannot be distinguished, in the second generation, from an American born of


native parents… As a matter of fact, the ease and rapidity with which aliens, under existing conditions in the United States, have been able to assimilate themselves to the customs and manners of American life have enabled this country to swallow and digest every sort of normal human difference, except the purely external ones, like color of the skin.14

“Americanization” became the synonym of assimilation—all the more dur-ing the national mobilizations for “100 percent Americanism” spurred by World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and their aftermath.15 Popular usage reflected the dominant currents of thought of the times. Thus, in an era that saw the apo-gee of scientific racism and the eugenics movement, the headline of a major news story in the New York Times of December 17, 1909, declared: “Immigra-tion Commission Reports that Even Head Forms Assimilate in One Generation; Aliens Soon Get American Physique; Children of Long-Headed Sicilians and Round-Headed Jews Approach a Type Between the Two.” It reported the find-ings of an investigation led by Franz Boas, founder of American anthropology, measuring thousands of heads in New York City, indicating that not only the habits of living and ways of thinking but even the physical form of the children of foreigners “tend toward assimilation.” The article quoted the Commission’s official synopsis: “If the American environment can bring about an assimilation of the head forms in the first generation, may it not be that other characteristics may be as easily modified, and that there may be a rapid assimilation of widely varying nationalities and races to something that may well be called an Ameri-can type?” A week later, the Times Sunday magazine followed up with a major feature, filled with diagrams, entitled “What America is Doing for the Children of the Immigrants; Professor Boas Gives Startling Results of Inquiry.” Boas sought to show the influence of environment on physique at a time when bio-logical differences between races were seen as innate and immutable, but in an interview he added: “This talk about the American type is nonsense, because in a country this size there are probably many types. I do not anticipate finding anything like one type... There are of course differences, but who gives us the right to establish our present type as the standard of all others?” Albeit with quite different foci, questions about what it is that immigrants are “assimilating to” are still being debated today.

THE RHETORIC OF THE UNUM, THE PLURIBUS, AND THE MELTING POT

“What happens ‘when peoples meet’?” was the question with which Milton Gordon opened his seminal chapter on “The Nature of Assimilation,” referring to the “processes and results… of ethnic meetings in the modern world” which take place in a wide range of contexts, from colonial conquest and military oc-cupation, to the displacement of indigenous peoples, to large-scale voluntary immigration.16 He identified seven “variables” (or “stages or subprocesses”) of a complex “assimilation process” to describe, in the American context, what hap-pens to the “sense of peoplehood” of ethnic groups, that is, of “groups defined


by race, religion, and national origin, or some combination of these catego-ries.”17 E pluribus, what?

International migration produces profound and unanticipated social changes in both sending and receiving societies, in intergroup relations within receiving societies, and among the immigrants themselves and their descendants. In vary-ing contexts of exit and reception, immigration is followed predictably not only by acculturative processes on the part of the immigrants, but also by varying degrees of acceptance, intolerance or xenophobia about the alien newcomers on the part of the natives, which in turn shape the immigrants’ own modes of adap-tive response and sense of belonging.18 And quintessentially, immigration en-genders ethnicity—collectivities who perceive themselves and are perceived by others to differ in language, religion, “race,” national origin or ancestral home-land, cultural heritage, and memories of a shared historical past. Their modes of incorporation across generations may take a variety of forms—some leading to greater homogenization and solidarity within the society (or within segments of the society), others to greater ethnic differentiation and heterogeneity.19

In the United States, at different points in the national experience and going back to colonial times, both of these poles of homogeneity and heterogeneity, or “assimilation and ethnic retention,” have been sites of sharp ideological strug-gles, vying to define the nation’s identity and ideals and the meaning of the na-tional narrative.20 Historically, in times of heightened in-group consensus (espe-cially during wars, when the premium for national unity is highest), the debate about assimilation versus variety in American life has been different than at other times (especially during periods of peace and prosperity when heightened demands for foreign labor as a result of an expanding economy have been molli-fied by the aliens not being perceived as a threat, whether to the dominant na-tional culture or its putative ethnic purity). Put differently, both the discourse of the “melting pot” and “assimilation,” and the rhetorical uses of the synonyms of variety and diversity, reflect specific contexts and interests. Thus, for example, “variety” was the term used by Stephen Douglas in his famous 1858 debates with Abraham Lincoln to argue on behalf of states’ rights and white suprem-acy.21 That usage and defense of diversity would be inconceivable to a contem-porary multiculturalist.

Sociologically, assimilation has been defined as a multidimensional process of boundary reduction which blurs or dissolves an ethnic distinction and the social and cultural differences and identities associated with it.22 At its hypothe-sized terminus, formerly distinguishable ethno-cultural groups become effec-tively blended into one. At the group level, assimilation may involve the absorp-tion of one or more minority groups into the majority, or the merging of minor-ity groups—such as the case of second-generation West Indians “becoming black Americans.”23 At the individual level, assimilation denotes the cumulative changes that make individuals of one ethnic group more acculturated, inte-grated, and identified with the members of another.

Ideologically, the term has been used to justify selective state-imposed poli-cies aimed at the eradication of minority cultures and the “benevolent” conquest of other peoples. Two notorious examples—which could be called a “melting plot”—are the campaigns, encouraged by the Dawes Act of 1887, to Americanize,


Christianize and “civilize” American Indian children by removing them from their families and immediate environments and into boarding schools like the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania; and the 1898 “Benevolent Assimilation” policy of the United States to colonize and pacify the Philippines and quash its struggle for independence, pursuing an imperial interest under the guise of ideal-ized purpose and beneficent intent.24

More popular—and ideologically charged—has been the metaphor of the “Melting Pot” (the title of Israel Zangwill’s popular Broadway play in 1908, when record numbers of immigrants were being admitted through Ellis Island). Metaphors have their politics; they have “the capacity to shape a narrative of moral validation in the service of power.”25 To a self-professed nation of immi-grants, “melting pot” projects an inclusionary image of the mechanism by which an unum is forged from the pluribus—legitimizing the nation as a beacon to the world. The metaphor also evokes the difficult transformations that take place among immigrants who undergo acculturative changes in the heat and pressure of the American cauldron. Effectively, the focus of studies of immigrants’ adap-tations to American society (of “assimilation” as an intransitive verb) has typi-cally been on their rate of melting, of their acculturation and “Americanization”; indeed, when we apply our math and our methods to the metaphor, we can even measure their “melting points.” But the Pot is taken for granted; it is just there, “God’s own fiery Crucible” (as Zangwill called it) that will dissolve ancestral hatreds and attachments and make “Americans” out of a motley crew: the “fifty barbarian tribes of Europe.”

“Assimilation” connotes a non-violent, uncoerced, more or less unconscious form of “ethnic cleansing,” a fading into what Richard Alba called “the twilight of ethnicity” and later a “vanishing act,” and what Florian Znaniecki much ear-lier had termed “the euthanasia of memories,” referring to the way in which Old World origins and identities were extinguished in the American crucible.26 The United States has also been accurately described as a “language graveyard,” underscoring the rapidity with which immigrant languages are lost and with which the switch to monolingual English takes place—typically within two to three generations, from the immigrant grandparent to the thoroughly American-ized grandchild.27 In a way, assimilation is realized through an unwitting kind of seduction. Thus Ari Shavit can point to the paradox that as American Jews find acceptance and success, they become “an endangered species”: “Curiously, it is precisely America’s virtues—its generosity, freedom and tolerance—that are now softly killing the last of the great Diasporas. It is because of its very virtues that America is in danger of becoming the most luxurious burial ground ever of Jewish cultural existence.”28 It takes two to tango—and to assimilate.

What is euphemistically called “diversity” today refers less to cultural ele-ments such as bilingualism or cuisine or music or forms of dress or worship—or to what William James (1909) called a “pluralistic universe” in his blueprint for modern pluralism, or what his former student Horace Kallen (1915) conceived as a “democracy of nationalities”—than to more essentialized and ascribed no-tions of difference (“purely external,” as Park had put it).29 If “race” is, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., put it decades later in 1986, “a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference”—unmeltable, one might add—then “melting pot” is a trope of fusion


and ultimate union, the great dissolver of difference.30 Long before Zangwill’s play, before the Constitution itself had been ratified, the first usage of “melting” as a metaphor came from the pen of a French immigrant, whose name was itself a changed (“melted”) one. J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur’s “What Is an American?” (an essay in his Letters From an American Farmer, published in 1782), put the matter presciently in an oft-cited passage, although just as often forgotten is the preface to his presage—namely, his emphasis on the weak bonds that connected the European emigrants to their origins in the first place, and the “invisible power” of an auspicious new-world reception bound to change their attachments and sense of belonging and thus produce “this surprising metamorphosis”:

What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country where he had nothing? The knowledge of the language, the love a few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that tied him: his country is now that which gives him land, bread, protection, and consequence: Ubi panis ibi patria, is the motto of all emigrants. What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country… Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world… Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?31

Still, as a master trope, there is rhetorical mischief in equating the melting with the pot: the emphasis is placed on the acculturative processes of “melting” while distracting attention away from a critical analysis of structural “pots” and socio-historical conditions (not least fundamental differences in the manner of entry into the society, from voluntary migrations to enslavement and conquest, and their cumulative consequences).

It takes more than melting to unum-ize the pluribus. It is a commonplace to observe that human beings adapt to their environments, but while everyone “melts” to one degree or another within their social surroundings, especially children who are like palimpsests and chameleons, those surroundings can differ profoundly. Thus the “pots” of different castes and segregated ghettoes and in-stitutions in a de facto (and for much of its history de jure) American apartheid cannot, by definition, conduce to a common melting, a sense of sharing a com-mon fate and common narrative, an interpenetration (in Park’s definition of as-similation), let alone intermarriage. The native-born children of today’s immi-grants from Haiti and Mexico and China and Iran quickly become acculturated to the English language and to a homogenized consumer and popular culture but also simultaneously fitted into an American racial-ethnic hierarchy not of their parents’ making—literally “put in their place,” in ascribed Procrustean catego-ries. “Becoming American” for them may come to mean that they “assimilate” (acculturate, integrate, and identify, “become similar”) within particular seg-ments of American society, melting in racialized pan-ethnic crucibles (a black pot, a white pot, a Latin pot, an Asian pot?), much as the descendants of the Europeans, not so long ago, mixed within a “triple melting pot” bounded by religion—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish.32 It remains a pervasive national bad


habit—and part of an interminable, irredeemable process of racialization—to insist on putting people into an official “ethno-racial pentagon,” in Hollinger’s words, of one-size-fits-all official categories (“Asians,” “Hispanics/Latinos,” “blacks,” “whites,” “American Indians”). The national motto might more accu-rately proclaim E Pluribus Quinque.

In intergroup relations, assimilation and oppression don’t mix. On the con-trary, assimilation breeds under conditions of intimacy and mutual acceptance, as indexed by the warmth of the welcome and ultimately by intermarriage and the adoption of American self-identities. In Old World Traits Transplanted(1921) a volume in a series on Americanization Studies, Park, Herbert Miller and W.I. Thomas argued that:

If we give the immigrants a favorable milieu, if we tolerate their strangeness during their period of adjustment, if we give them freedom to make their own connections between old and new experiences, if we help them to find points of contact, then we hasten their assimilation. This is a process of growth as against the “ordering and forbidding” policy and the demand that the assimilation of the immigrant shall be “sudden, complete, and bitter” … [W]e cannot have a political democracy unless we have a social democracy also.33

And in Italian or American? (1943), a study of second-generation Italian immigrants written when the United States was at war with Italy, Irvin Child saw the likelihood of their assimilation vs. ethnic retentiveness as a function of inclusionary vs. exclusionary contexts of reception and terms of membership. Against the background of World War II, he compared two main modes of reac-tion—the “rebel” (who assimilated into the American milieu) and the “in-group” type (who retained an Italian ethnicity):

If during the present period, the general American population encourages peo-ple of Italian origin to regard themselves as Americans and really offers them the full rewards of membership in American society, the rebel reaction should be by far the most frequent, and adoption of American culture traits should therefore proceed at a tremendous rate. [But] if during this period of war, the non-Italian members of the population uniformly suspect Italian-Americans of treasonable activity and do not offer them the full rewards of membership in American society… the in-group reaction will be very frequent and a revival of Italian culture will therefore appear.34

By contrast, under a regime of ethno-racial oppression, segregation, and stigmatization, the process boomerangs—not into the euthanasia of memories, but into what Czeslaw Milosz has called “the memory of wounds”; not into the twilight but into the high noon of “reactive ethnicity,” not into thinned but thick-ened boundaries and identities.35

No Americans have been so thoroughly left out of the discourse of the Melt-ing Pot as African-Americans. In the narrow narrative of a “nation of immi-grants,” it is often forgotten that in 1915, seven years after Zangwill’s “The Melting Pot” opened on Broadway and half a century after the end of the American Civil War, D.W. Griffith’s epic film The Birth of a Nation premiered in New York and drew millions nationwide—an estimated three million tickets


were sold in its first 11 months in New York City alone—becoming the most profitable film ever made (until the late 1930s), as well as a major recruitment vehicle for the Ku Klux Klan. Based on the play “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” it told the tale of the devastation wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction, depicting radical Republicans and empowered blacks as the cause of all postwar social, political, and economic problems and, in a rousing climax, crediting a glorious Ku Klux Klan for the suppression of the black threat to white society. The newly created National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other black political groups strenuously protested the film’s vicious and blatant racism, but could not dent its runaway box-office success—though it rallied African-Americans around a common cause. President Woodrow Wilson, a former his-tory and political science professor and president of Princeton University, saw it at a private screening in the White House and was quoted as saying, “It is like writing history with lightning… my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Just two years before, on the Fourth of July, 1913, President Wilson had ad-dressed an extraordinary gathering of Union and Confederate veterans at the site of the nation’s bloodiest battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where on July 1-3, 1863, over 51,000 had been killed in three days of unremitting carnage. Wilson assured them: “We have found one another again as brothers… enemies no longer, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten—except that we shall not forget the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each others’ eyes. How com-plete the union has become and how dear to all of us…!” Not a mention of race, slavery, the cause of the war or the Jim Crow system established in its wake was made by Wilson in his Gettysburg address. In white supremacist memory, the reunion at the semicentennial was of the blue and the gray, with the black ex-cluded even from the commemoration of the defining national tragedy.36

For all its “magnetic and intuitive appeal,” then—indeed, when it is taken at face value as a nationally inclusive metaphor—the “melting pot” does not, can-not, square with the seamy side of the country’s history and the collective mem-ory of those who must locate themselves in a narrative of wounds: from DredScott to Plessy vs. Ferguson to the era of lynchings and Jim Crow, from the Trail of Tears to Wounded Knee, from the Mexican War to the Spanish-American War to the forced repatriations of Mexican Americans in the 1930s, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Japanese internment, a nation whose founding declaration of freedom was signed by slaveholders, whose Constitution counted certain members as three-fifths of a human being, whose territory was taken from indigenous peoples, and which until 1952 excluded immigrants from naturalization (and others from entry altogether) on the basis of “race.” Nor does the metaphor—or, by definition, the term “assimilation”—fit today’s contexts of widening inequalities and official persecution of millions of undocumented im-migrants who form an outcaste population on the margins of society, subject to detention and deportation regardless of their level of acculturation.37 Recently, after stepped-up workplace raids and the passage of hundreds of laws and local ordinances restricting access to higher education, employment, housing, driver’s licenses, even library cards, the 2007 National Survey of Latinos found that 53


percent of all Latino adults in the United States (about a quarter of whom are undocumented immigrants) feared that they, a family member or close friend would be deported.38

“PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT”

The concept of “assimilation” was honed during an era of rapid industrialization, urbanization and a mass “new immigration” from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So was American sociology, especially in Chicago, which became a natural laboratory for the study of the immigrant and the city. Grand narratives, such as Durkheim’s depiction of the shift from “mechanical” to “organic solidarity” in The Division of Labor in So-ciety, sought to grasp the transition from pre-modern folk to modern industrial society. Progressive reforms, rooted in a belief in the human ability to improve social conditions, especially with the aid of experts and rational efficiency, sought to grapple with the attendant problems of large-scale social integration. The teleological notion of an endlessly improving future and positivist assump-tions of linear progress—of humanity’s ability to realize the promise of the Enlightenment—were made credible by the rapid expansion of science, technol-ogy and economic innovation. The idea of Progress came to dominate the worldview of the entire culture.39 Even in 1933, in the middle of the Great De-pression and with the butchery of World War I scarcely a generation removed, the Chicago World’s Fair billed itself as “The Century of Progress.” General Electric’s successful slogan after World War II, “Progress is our most important product,” captured a renewed optimistic confidence in the idea of progress as a universal law. So does the ideal of assimilation.

The metaphor of the melting pot and the dominant paradigm of progress met in policies and programs of “Americanization.” A fascinating case in point was the Ford Motor Company’s Americanization Program to adapt immigrant workers to its new system of mass production, which became the model for a Detroit-wide Americanization campaign and for a prewar national campaign for the assimilation of immigrants.40 Detroit’s population had doubled from 1900 to 1910, and again from 1910 to 1920, leapfrogging from 13th to 4th in the coun-try’s urban hierarchy. Ford’s Highland Park plant expanded in the 1910s to meet the growing demand for its Model T Ford. The overwhelming majority of its nearly 13,000 workers were unskilled immigrants coming from the least indus-trialized areas of Europe—Poles, Russians, Italians and Sicilians, Romanians, Austro-Hungarians—rated low in their “racial efficiency” by factory managers for poor work habits, high absenteeism and labor turnover. Ford launched its “Five Dollar Day” to induce these workers to change their habits and attitudes—both to adapt the immigrant to a continuously moving assembly line and meet mass production requirements, and to fit the worker to a preconceived mold of the ideal American. About half the daily income paid “wages” for work done in the factory; the other half consisted of “profits” earned when specific standards of both productivity and domestic life were met. The “Ford Sociological


Department” was established to elevate the worker and his family to a proper “American way of living”; it spent the “profits” for the worker on such items as rent and soap, made home visits, focused on health and cleanliness and on the children of the immigrants (to keep them out of trouble), and printed Horatio Alger-like stories to show the way to the Five Dollar Day. The “Ford English School” extended the Americanization program into the classroom for language and cultural instruction (36 percent of the Ford workforce did not speak English in 1914, cut to 12 percent by 1917). Its mass ritual of graduation was a spectacu-lar pageant with a giant “melting pot” representing the Ford English School. Entering the pot from one side were workers of many nationalities dressed in their foreign clothes and singing songs in their foreign languages; then, after the pot began to boil while being stirred vigorously with 10-foot ladles by the teach-ers, out the other side came the students dressed in their best American clothes, waving American flags and singing the Star Spangled Banner. After this they heard speeches praising the virtues of American citizenship, and went to a park to play American games with their teachers for the rest of the day.

In the end, however, the Ford experiment in welfare capitalism and benevo-lent paternalism failed. Ford lost key advantages over its competitors, and a se-vere war-induced inflation undermined the incentive of the Five Dollar Day; in 1919 Ford established the Six Dollar Day, but it would have needed a Ten Dol-lar Day to provide the same incentive as in 1914. Workers were learning the rules of the game on the shop floor, and management could not use Americani-zation to ensure a fully malleable workforce. A recession and financial crisis in 1920-21 led to massive cost-cutting at Ford and the termination of its Sociologi-cal and Americanization programs, paralleling a larger societal transition from the reform-minded Progressive Era. Already in 1916, prior to the U.S. entry into the war, President Wilson had warned of “Hyphenated Americans [who] have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed out.”41 The Red Scares and Palmer Raids of 1919-21 intensified government repression of per-ceived immigrant radicals. Restrictive national origins quota laws in 1921 and 1924 reduced new immigrant flows and thereby the commensurate problem of assimilation, and its priority in social science. But belief in Progress endured.

ASSIMILATION IN AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY: THREE INFLUENTIAL FORMULATIONS

The concept of assimilation seeks to grasp a contextual and not solely an indi-vidual reality that is complex, relational and multidimensional, qualities that over the years have more often than not been lost in its operationalization and application in empirical research or neglected by a penchant for formulaic defi-nitions. In what became arguably the most influential text ever published in the history of American sociology, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess gave the con-cept of assimilation its first classic definition: “a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and atti-


tudes of other persons and groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life.”42 They distinguished sys-tematically between “four great types of interaction”—competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation—which they related respectively to economic, political, social, and cultural institutions. Competition and conflict sharpen eth-nic boundaries and the consciousness of intergroup difference. An accommoda-tion (of a conflict, or to a new situation) may take place quickly, and the person or group is typically a highly conscious protagonist of the process of accommo-dating those circumstances. In assimilation, by contrast, the changes are more subtle and the process is typically unconscious, so that the person is incorpo-rated into the common life of the group largely unaware of how it happened. Assimilation is very unlikely to occur among immigrants who arrive as adults. Instead, accommodation most closely reflects the modal adaptation of first-generation adult immigrants, while assimilation can become a modal outcome ultimately only for the malleable young and for the second generation, and then only if and when permitted by structural conditions of inclusion at the primary group level. Indeed, the research literature on the adaptation of twentieth-century European immigrant groups in the United States suggests that evidence of assimilation was not manifestly observed at the group level until the third or even fourth generations—and then, it should be underscored, in the wake of historic transformations induced by the Great Depression and the cessation of mass migration from Europe, World War II and the economic and “baby booms” that followed, and the large-scale effects on both structural and individ-ual upward social mobility of the postwar era, facilitated by the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (known as the “GI Bill of Rights” and dubbed a “Magic Carpet to the Middle Class”), effects most notably seen among white veterans although not among blacks in the South.43

Assimilation thus defined takes place most rapidly and completely in pri-mary—intimate and intense—social contacts, including intermarriage; accom-modation may be facilitated through secondary contacts, but they are too distant and remote to promote assimilation. Since the nature (especially the interper-sonal intimacy, “the great moral solvent”) of the social contacts is what is deci-sive, it follows that “a common language is indispensable for the most intimate associations of the members of the group,” and its absence is “an insurmount-able barrier to assimilation,” since it is through communication that gradual and unconscious changes of the attitudes and sentiments of the members of the group are produced. But—crucially—language and acculturation alone cannot ensure assimilation if a group is categorically segregated, racially classified, and “regarded as in some sense a stranger, a representative of an alien race.” That is why, Park emphasized in a later encyclopedia article, the English-speaking Prot-estant “Negro, during his three hundred years in this country, has not been as-similated … not because he has preserved in America a foreign culture and an alien tradition, for with the exception of the Indian … no man in America is so entirely native to the soil.”44 Race and place (racial discrimination and residential segregation) become critical structural determinants of the degree of assimila-tion or dissimilation precisely insofar as they delimit possible forms of primary social contact and heighten social conflict. To be considered assimilated it is not


enough to acquire “the language and social ritual of the native community”—to be acculturated—but also to be able to “participate, without encountering preju-dice, in the common life, economic and political.”45

The “melting pot” metaphor had been dismissed by Park and Burgess as a “‘magic crucible’ notion of assimilation” where “the ideal of assimilation was conceived to be that of feeling, thinking, and acting alike.”46 The end result of assimilation is not “like-mindedness,” but rather “a unity of experience and ori-entation, out of which may develop a community of purpose and action… The extent and importance of the kind of homogeneity and ‘like-mindedness’ that individuals of the same nationality exhibit has been greatly exaggerated. Like-mindedness ... contributes little or nothing to national solidarity.”47 Park and Burgess would have advised a different approach:

Not by the suppression of old memories, but by their incorporation in his new life is assimilation achieved... Assimilation cannot be promoted directly, but only indirectly, that is, by supplying the conditions that make for participation. There is no process but life itself that can effectually wipe out the immigrant’s memory of his past. The inclusion of the immigrant in our common life may perhaps best be reached, therefore, in cooperation that looks not so much to the past as to the future. The second generation of the immigrant may share fully in our memories, but practically all that we can ask of the foreign-born is partici-pation in our ideals, our wishes, and our common enterprises.48

Ironically, despite his wide-ranging writings on many subjects, Park may be best known for the formulaic notion that assimilation is the final stage of a natu-ral, progressive, inevitable and irreversible “race relations cycle.” As the idea of the cycle became reified and popularized, assimilation was posited as the final stage of a four-step process in international and race relations. But in a prolific career, Park only wrote about a “race relations cycle” twice: first in a single sen-tence near the end of a 1926 article, “Our Racial Frontier in the Pacific,” then a decade later in a brief introduction to a book on interracial marriage in Hawaii written by one of his former students. In the first instance he was arguing against the likelihood that a “racial barrier”—which the passage of exclusionary laws sought to establish by barring Asian migration to the United States—could be much of a match against global economic, political and cultural forces that have brought about “an existing interpenetration of peoples … so vast and irresistible that the resulting changes assume the character of a cosmic process.”49 And in his 1937 introduction, he explicitly rebutted any notion of a unilinear assimila-tive outcome to race conflict and change (“what are popularly referred to as race relations”), arguing instead that when stabilization is finally achieved, race rela-tions would assume one of three configurations: “They will take the form of a caste system, as in India; they will terminate in complete assimilation, as in China; or the unassimilated race will constitute a permanent racial minority within the limits of a national state, as in the case of the Jews in Europe.… All three types of change are involved … in what we may describe as the ‘race rela-tions cycle.’”50

What has come to be called “straight-line theory” has little basis in the theo-ries of Park or Gordon, as is often if mistakenly asserted, but gained methodo-


logical traction from W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole’s The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups, a definitive statement on the subject published in 1945.51 (The data, collected in the early 1930s, formed the basis of Srole’s 1940 doctoral dissertation, “Ethnic Groups and American Society: A Study in the Dynamics of Social Assimilation.”) They described the progressive advance of eight European-origin groups in the major status hierarchies of “Yankee City” (Newburyport, Massachusetts): the Irish, French Canadians, Jews, Italians, Ar-menians, Greeks, Poles, and Russians. In the immigrant generation, all except the Jews had come from rural backgrounds. From the first chapter (“The Melt-ing Pot,” consisting of seven illustrative personal stories) to the last (“The American Ethnic Group”), the book systematically analyzed their spatial distri-bution, economic life, class system, family, church, language and the school, and associations, and spelled out a set of innovative methods for the study of ethnic groups. Warner and Srole developed six-point linear indices to measure residential, occupational and class status; and “assimilation” and “subordina-tion” scales based on specific criteria to estimate the time for an entire group to disappear (the final result of assimilation), the proportionate number of people who drop out of a group in each generation, and the amount and kind of partici-pation permitted members of the group by the “host society.”

They explicitly linked upward social mobility to assimilation, which they saw as determined largely by the degree of ethno-cultural (religion and lan-guage) and above all racial difference from the dominant group. While “racial groups” were subordinated and excluded through caste restrictions on residen-tial, occupational, associational, and marital choice, the clash of “ethnic groups” with the dominant institutions of the host society was not much of a contest, particularly among the young. The industrial economy, the polity, the public school, popular culture, and the American family system all undercut and ab-sorbed ethnicity in various ways, so that even when “the ethnic parent tries to orient the child to an ethnic past… the child often insists on being more Ameri-can than Americans.”52 For the upwardly mobile, with socioeconomic success came intermarriage and the further dilution of ethnicity. They concluded that “it is the degree of racial difference from the white American norms which counts most heavily in the placement of the group and in the determination of its as-similation”; absent such discrimination and structural inequalities, however, “the future of American ethnic groups seems to be limited; it is likely that they will be quickly absorbed.”53

That general if decidedly qualified view of assimilation as linear progress, with sociocultural similarity and socioeconomic success marching in lock step, was significantly refined by Milton Gordon in Assimilation in American Life(1964), published ironically on the eve of the beginning of the latest era of mass immigration to the United States—and of the denouement of the concept itself in the wake of the 1960s. From the opening sentence of the book, Gordon focused on the relational and contextual character of the process: “This book is con-cerned, ultimately, with problems of prejudice and discrimination arising out of differences in race, religion, and national background among the various groups which make up the American people.”54


Although he meticulously reviewed a wide variety of definitions of “assimi-lation” in the scholarly literature, he did not explicitly provide his own. Instead he broke down the assimilation sequence into seven steps, of which “identifica-tional assimilation”—a self-image as an unhyphenated American—was the end point of a hypothetical process that began with cultural assimilation, proceeded through structural assimilation and intermarriage, and was accompanied by anabsence of prejudice, discrimination, and value conflict in the “core society.” Once structural assimilation occurred (extensive primary-level interaction with members of the “core group”), either in tandem with or subsequent to accultura-tion, “the remaining types of assimilation have all taken place like a row of ten-pins bowled over in rapid succession by a well placed strike.”55 For the children of white European immigrants, at least, the acculturation process was so “over-whelmingly triumphant” that the greater risk consisted in alienation from family ties and in role reversals of the generations that could subvert parent-child rela-tionships.

Nonetheless, in reviewing the actual evidence for the assimilation sequence in American life, Gordon reached very different conclusions than those that are habitually ascribed to him. He coined the term “ethclass” to refer to the stratified segment of social space created by the intersection of ethnicity and social class, which he saw as “fast becoming the essential form of the subsociety in Amer-ica,” and proposed a series of hypotheses about contextual variations in cultural behavior, social participation and group identity.56 He found that “the most sali-ent fact … is the maintenance of the structurally separate subsocieties of the three major religions and the racial and quasi-racial groups, and even vestiges of the nationality groupings, along with a massive trend toward acculturation of all groups—particularly their native-born—to American culture patterns.” Antici-pating what “segmented assimilation” would assert in the 1990s, he concluded that “structural pluralism is the major key to the understanding of the ethnic makeup of American society, while cultural pluralism is the minor one.”57

Gordon was aware of the ways in which the real and the rhetorical, the ideal and the ideological, get wrapped up in the idea of assimilation. “Cultural plural-ism” as an ideology did not match empirical realities, and the theory of the “Melting Pot” exhibited “a considerable degree of sociological naiveté.”58 And while “Anglo-conformity” was the most prevalent ideology of assimilation in American history, he also noted: “Structural assimilation turned out to be the rock on which the ship of Anglo-conformity foundered. And if structural assimi-lation, to a large degree, did not take place, then in similar measure amalgama-tion and identificational assimilation could not.”59

Historians have seen the apogee of the concept of assimilation in the 1950s and early 1960s as reflecting the need generated by World War II for national unity and the postwar tendency to see American history as a narrative of consen-sus rather than conflict; and the political and social upheavals of the 1960s (na-tionally and internationally) as shattering the “consensus school” and the ration-ale for studying assimilation, bringing back instead a focus on the ethnic group and ethnic resilience, and more inclusive conceptions of American society. As the notion of an Anglo American core was delegitimized amid the conflicts and ethnic reassertions of the 1960s, assimilation lost its allure.60 But by the 1990s,


once more well into a new era of mass immigration, a systematic reevaluation of the concept of assimilation emerged, with applications in contemporary scholar-ship seeking to contrast differences and similarities between the old and the new immigration. Assimilation continued along its bumpy road.

A TRIPTYCH OF INCORPORATION PROCESSES: ACCULTURATION, INTEGRATION, IDENTIFICATION

Combining the various emphases currently given to the term, “assimilation” involves a series of interrelated but analytically distinct cultural (acculturation), structural (integration) and psychological (identification) dimensions. Gordon referred to them as “the three crucial variables of group identity, social partici-pation, and cultural behavior as they pertain to the subsociety of the ethclass.”61

This triptych of incorporation processes may be elaborated further, with some additional consideration of contextual and group factors shaping each of these dimensions—either by promoting or precluding assimilative outcomes.62

Acculturation, which comes closest to the common sense notion of “melt-ing,” involves complex processes of cultural diffusion and changes producing greater linguistic and cultural similarity between two or more groups. Its ho-mogenizing influences are generally more extensive among members of smaller and weaker groups, and particularly (voluntary) immigrant groups—and more rapidly achieved with respect to what Gordon called “extrinsic culture traits.” Nonetheless, acculturation is never exclusively one-sided; dominant groups too are culturally influenced by their contacts with other ethno-cultural groups in the society.63 In the American experience, language shifts have been overwhelm-ingly one-sided, with the switch to monolingual English typically being accom-plished by the third generation. Acculturation proceeds more rapidly among children than adults, and linguistic and other acculturative gaps commonly de-velop in immigrant households between parents and children; Alejandro Portes and I have identified three such acculturative patterns in parent-child relation-ships, labeled dissonant, consonant, and selective acculturation.64

At the individual level, a key distinction is between subtractive (or substitu-tive) acculturation and additive acculturation. The first is essentially a zero-sum game that involves giving up some elements of a cultural repertoire (such as language and memory itself) while replacing them from another; the second does not involve losing so much as gaining to form and sustain a more complex repertoire (bilingualism and biculturalism). Available research has yet to exam-ine systematically the multiplicity of conditions and contexts yielding subtrac-tive vs. additive acculturative outcomes, although in the United States at least it has proved exceedingly difficult to sustain fluent bilingualism beyond the sec-ond generation.

The degree of acculturation, as noted earlier, is by itself not a sufficient condition for “assimilation”; the two terms are not synonymous but are often used equivalently, as Gans has pointed out.65 Structural integration was the crux of the matter for Gordon, although what he had in mind was the entrance of the


minority group into “the social cliques, clubs, and institutions of the core society at the primary group level” (not “parity” with the majority group on such indices as income or education, or “regression to the mean”—notions of standardization implicit in uses of “assimilation” as an intransitive verb). Given the many differ-ent institutions involved here—and the fact that integration into the economy, the polity, and the community at the secondary group level is ignored by that formulation—a conceptual distinction can be made between primary and secon-dary dimensions. The latter refers to a wide range of integrative processes within secondary groups, including socioeconomic and spatial (residential) inte-gration, and the acquisition of legal citizenship as a full-fledged member of the polity (contemporary evidence of which will be reviewed below). The former—extensive interaction within personal networks and primary relationships, in-cluding intermarriage—is unlikely to take place under conditions of status ine-quality. While all of these dimensions (acculturation, integration, intermarriage) are interdependent to varying degrees, the linkages between them are histori-cally contingent and will vary depending on a number of factors, notably social class and the context of reception within which different groups are incorpo-rated.

Conventional accounts of shifts in ethnic identification among the descen-dants of European immigrants, conceived as part of a linear assimilative process, have pointed to the “thinning” of their ethnic self-identities in the United States. For their descendants, at least, one outcome of widespread acculturation, social mobility and intermarriage with the native population was that identity became an optional form of “symbolic” ethnicity, as Gans first argued in 1979.66 As the boundaries of those identities become fuzzier and less salient, less relevant to everyday social life, the sense of belonging and connection to an ancestral past faded. This mode of ethnic identity formation, however, was never solely a sim-ple linear function of socioeconomic status and the degree of acculturation—that is, of the development of linguistic and other cultural similarities with the domi-nant group—but hinged also on the context of reception and the degree of dis-crimination and racialization experienced by the subordinate group.

Identity shifts, like acculturative changes, tend to be from lower to higher status groups. But where social mobility is blocked or hindered by prejudice and discrimination, members of lower status groups may react by reaffirming their shared identity. This process of forging a reactive ethnicity in the face of per-ceived threats, persecution, discrimination and exclusion is not uncommon. On the contrary, it is another mode of ethnic identity formation, accounting for the “thickening” rather than the dilution of ethnicity.

Compared to language loyalty and language shift, generational shifts in eth-nic self-identification are far more conflictual and complex. Paradoxically, de-spite the rapid acculturation of European immigrants in the United States, as reflected in the abandonment of the parental language and other ethnic patterns of behavior, the second generation remained more conscious of their ethnic identity than were their immigrant parents.67 The parents’ ethnic identity was so much taken for granted that they were scarcely explicitly aware of it, but the marginality of their children made them acutely self-conscious and sensitive to their ethnicity, especially when passing through adolescence. Moreover, as par-


ents and children acculturated at different rates, a generational gap grew so that by the time the children reached adolescence “the immigrant family had become transformed into two linguistic sub-groups segregated along generational lines.” Finally, by the third generation “the grandsons became literally outsiders to their ancestral heritage,” and their ethnic past an object of symbolic curiosity more than anything else. Although today’s new third generation is still in its infancy, some empirical examples of the complexities entailed in contemporary identity construction in the second generation are provided below, as well as indicators of language acculturation and socioeconomic integration over time among im-migrant groups and across generations among major ethnic groups.

CONTEMPORARY REALITIES, PARADOXES, AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN ETHNIC GROUPS

By the end of the twentieth century a new era of mass immigration, now over-whelmingly non-European in composition, had again raised familiar questions about the “assimilability” of the newcomers and their children, and concerns that many of them might become consigned to vast multiethnic formations on the other side of new color lines. Gans questioned the American myth of nearly automatic immigrant success and delineated six theoretical “scenarios” for the incorporation of the new second generation as they were beginning to enter the workforce, hinging on economic and other conditions.68 Three were positive scenarios, positing upward mobility driven by educational attainment, ethnic succession, or niche improvement. Three posited negative futures, projecting the reverse of the previous three (educational failure, the stalling of ethnic succes-sion in the legal economy, niche shrinkage)—a “second generation decline” potentially exacerbated by a combination of economic downturns or non-labor-intensive economic growth, the second generation’s refusal or inability to accept the jobs their parents held, and competition from successive new waves of im-migrants. Rather than experiencing upward mobility, the second generation (or segments of it, especially the children of undocumented immigrants) would join the ranks of urban poor.

The new realities also raised questions about the applicability of explana-tory models developed in connection with the experience of European ethnics, despite the fact that contemporary immigrants were being incorporated in a post-civil rights context—if also officially categorized by new pan-ethnic la-bels—characterized more by ethnic revivals and identity politics than forced Americanization campaigns. While assimilation (as indexed by acculturation, socioeconomic mobility, residential integration, naturalized citizenship) may still represent a “master trend” for many of today’s immigrants, as Alba and Nee have argued, it is subject to too many contingencies and affected by too many variables to render the notion of a relatively uniform and straightforward path convincing (aside from the swift switch to English among immigrants’ children, which cuts across all classes and nationalities). Instead, as Portes and Zhou framed it a year after Gans’s six scenarios, the present second generation


of children of immigrants can be seen as undergoing a process of “segmented assimilation” where outcomes vary across immigrant minorities, and where rapid integration and acceptance into the American mainstream represent just one possible alternative.69 Why this is so hinges on a number of factors: inter-nal characteristics, including the immigrants’ level of human capital and the structure and cohesiveness of their families, interact in complex but patterned ways with external contexts of reception—government policies and programs, the state of the economy in the areas where they settle, employer preferences in local labor markets, the extent of racial discrimination and nativist hostility, the strength of existing ethnic communities—to form the conditions within which immigrants and their children adapt to different sectors of American society.70

“Segmented assimilation” processes—adaptations that take place within varying opportunity structures and are shaped through differential associations, reference groups, experiences and attachments, especially in primary social rela-tionships stratified by race, religion, region, and class—are not new in the American experience.71 Caste restrictions based on race (extending to all aspects of social life, including citizenship), the “triple melting pot” of religion-bounded intermarriages, the structural pluralism of “ethclasses,” the persistence of ethnic groups as political interest groups, are all indicative of such adaptations. Alba and Nee, thinking about the divergent outcomes that will likely obtain in the first decades of the twenty-first century, concede the point:

The contemporary immigration scene displays complex, contradictory patterns, from rapid assimilation apparent among some professionals and their children to the new way of sojourning apparent in some transnational circuits, and to the potential among other immigrant groups for incorporation as racialized minori-ties… Clearly, assimilation will not apply to all immigrant minorities to the same extent… many in the second generation are likely to experience upward mobility into the American socioeconomic mainstream… [others] may experi-ence lateral or, at best, short-distance mobility… Children of low-wage labor migration are likelier to experience downward mobility into the urban minority underclass than children of human capital migration from the same ethnic group… There is no reason to believe that assimilation is inevitable or that it will be the master trend for all these diverse groups.72

By 2000, the first and second generations of the United States (the foreign-born and native-born children of foreign-born parents) had surpassed 60 million persons, and were growing rapidly. Focusing first on the former (four-fifths of whom hail from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia), a profile of the largest foreign-born nationalities is provided in Table 11.1, based on data from the last decennial census for adults ages 25-64. Unlike the groups studied by Warner and Srole who entered “at the bottom of the social heap,” huge class inequalities are immediately apparent among today’s immigrants; they comprise at once the most and the least educated groups in the country, with the highest and the low-est poverty rates, reflecting polar-opposite types of migrations. Overall, in 2000, about 25 percent had college degrees (the same as the native population), while



36 percent had less than a high school diploma (more than twice the U.S. average). But class differences by national origin (“natclasses,” paraphrasing Gordon) are vast. Among all nationalities from Latin America and the Caribbean, the propor-tion of those without a high school diploma significantly exceeds the proportion of those with college degrees, while among all Asians (except for the Indochinese refugees), Europeans, Canadians, and immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, the proportion of college graduates far exceeds the proportion of high school dropouts. These wide disparities extend from the Mexicans, Salvadorans and Gua-temalans (two-thirds of whom had less than a high school education, but only one in twenty had college degrees, reflecting a disproportionate component of un-documented laborers), and the Dominicans and Cambodian and Laotian refugees (half of whom lacked a high school education, a tenth or less had finished college), to the Chinese, Filipinos, and Koreans (about half of whom had college degrees, twice the U.S. average) and especially those from India (almost three-fourths of whom had college degrees). The educational attainment of British and Canadian immigrants (42 percent of whom were college graduates) was also well above the norms for the native-born (college graduation rates for non-Hispanic white and black U.S. natives were 30 and 15 percent, respectively, while their high school dropout rates were 10 and 22 percent). Cubans, Jamaicans, Haitians and Vietnam-ese fell in between these poles.

Three indicators of cultural, economic and legal integration are shown in Table 11.1: spoken fluency in English, poverty, and naturalized U.S. citizenship over time in the United States. (These are not longitudinal but cross-sectional data, so differences cannot be solely attributed to time in the United States—Cubans and Vietnamese who came before 1980 were drawn from higher status classes than those who came in or after 1980—but are still suggestive of the direction of change.) With few exceptions, familiar linear patterns of progress are apparent over time between those who arrived in the 1990s, the 1980s, and pre-1980: English fluency becomes predominant, poverty declines (though large economic discrepancies remain between groups), and naturalization (which re-quires a minimum of five years after obtaining legal permanent residency status) increases. Similar patterns are observed for homeownership (not shown in the table). Many groups now arrive with levels of education and occupational skills well above U.S. norms; others are already fluent in English pre-arrival (the Ja-maicans, Filipinos, Indians). Less obvious exceptions to the linear narrative are the cases of the Canadians and British, the most “assimilated” of immigrants by almost any measure: English speakers with very low poverty rates, they are the least likely to become naturalized U.S. citizens—along with the Mexicans, Sal-vadorans and Guatemalans, many of whom are undocumented and ineligible for naturalized citizenship.73 Or take the case of island-born Puerto Rican migrants to the mainland, the most acculturated and “assimilated” of Latin Americans: they are U.S. citizens by birthright and more fluent in English from the start, yet retain the highest poverty rates of any group over time.

Acculturation has typically been assumed to have beneficial consequences for both economic progress and psychological well-being. Just as better knowl-edge of the language and relevant occupational skills should propel immigrants and their descendants in the labor market, so should the shedding of old cultures


and fully embracing the new one eliminate much of their distress. That view is premised on an implicit deficit model: progressive improvement results when immigrants learn how to “become American,” to overcome their deficits with respect to the new language and culture, the new health care and educational systems, the new economy and society—a process more or less completed by the second generation. But recent research findings have repeatedly pointed to the opposite of such “linear progress” outcomes in diverse areas of social and cultural life over time and generation in the United States, including “epidemi-ological paradoxes” in health and pregnancy outcomes, as well as obesity, men-tal health, drug use and other risk behaviors, arrest and incarceration, divorce, school engagement, work ethic, and ethnic self-identity.74 They are “paradoxes” in that the evidence contradicts orthodox expectations—they appear paradoxical from the vantage of the prevailing theoretical paradigm or worldview and the telos of progress embedded within them—but when seen as adaptations to American conditions, the unexpected empirical results become entirely (even perversely) plausible: “they” are becoming like “us” after all, in more ways than had been imagined.75

Consider incarceration. The present era of mass immigration has coincided with an era of mass imprisonment in the United States. The U.S. incarceration rate has become the highest of any country in the world. The vast majority of those behind bars are young men between 18 and 39, overwhelmingly high school dropouts; indeed, among some racial minorities, imprisonment has be-come a modal life event in early adulthood. Criminological theories predict higher rates of crime and incarceration for young adult males from minority groups with low educational attainment; it follows that immigrants, particularly poor labor migrants and refugees, should have higher incarceration rates than natives, and that among the immigrants the rates should decrease with growing acculturation and more education over time in the United States. Those born in Mexico—who comprise fully a third of all immigrant men ages 18-39—could be expected to have the highest rates, given their very low average education. Those hypotheses are examined empirically in Table 11.2. Data from the 2000 Census are used to measure the institutionalization rates of males, 18-39, among whom the vast majority of the institutionalized are in correctional facilities.

As Table 11.2 shows, about 3 percent of the 45.2 million males 18-39 were in federal or state prisons or local jails at the time of the 2000 Census. However, the incarceration rate of the native-born (3.5 percent) was five times the rate of the foreign-born (0.7 percent). The latter was less than half the 1.7 percent rate for native white men, and seventeen times less than the 11.6 percent incarcera-tion rate for native black men. This pattern is observable among all ethnic groups without exception. Moreover, for every immigrant group, the longer they had resided in the United States, the higher their incarceration rates. By the na-tive-born second (or higher) generation, incarceration rates increase more sharply still. These results are exactly the opposite of what was predicted.

Among Latin American immigrants, the least educated groups actually had the lowest incarceration rates: Salvadorans and Guatemalans and Mexicans. However, the rates increase significantly for their native-born co-ethnics. For



Mexicans, for example, the incarceration rate increases to 5.9 percent among the native-born. Similar results were found among Asian groups. For the Vietnam-ese, the incarceration rate increases from less than 0.5 percent among the for-eign-born to 5.6 percent among the native-born; for Laotians and Cambodians, the rate moves up from less than one percent among the foreign-born to 7.3 per-cent among the native-born (the highest figure for any group, except for native blacks). The advantage for immigrants holds when broken down by education for every ethnic group. These results are confirmed by other studies and raise significant questions about conventional theories of acculturation and assimila-tion and their embedded notions of linear progress. The finding that incarcera-tion rates are much lower among immigrant men than the national norm, despite their lower levels of education and greater poverty, but increase significantly among the second generation, suggests that the process of “Americanization” can lead to greater risk of involvement with the criminal justice system and sub-sequent downward mobility for a significant segment of this population.

What is the evidence of socioeconomic mobility (education, occupation, earnings) across generations? In 1980, after a century of measurement, the de-cennial census eliminated its parental nativity question, making it impossible to distinguish the first from the second and third-or-higher generations for inter-generational mobility studies. But in 1994 the annual Current Population Survey (CPS) restored those questions in its March demographic supplement. The CPS is based on a household sample of the civilian non-institutionalized population, and does not include certain questions asked in the decennial census (for exam-ple, English language fluency), but nonetheless makes it possible to look at the issue of intergenerational mobility. Table 11.3 compares the educational, occu-pational and economic status of adults 25-64 in the United States, by panethnic groups and generational cohorts, based on merged 2003-2006 CPS annual sur-veys (prior to the onset in late 2008 of a Great Recession whose repercussions are likely to widen social inequalities further still). New ethnic divides are ap-parent: 95 percent of all “Asians” and some 80 percent of “Hispanics” are of foreign birth or parentage (first or second generations), while about 90 percent of “non-Hispanic whites” and “blacks” are long-term natives (third, fourth or higher generations)—the historic white-majority/black-minority divide. But new class divides are sharper still: the newcomers are situated at the poles of the status hierarchies; white and black oldtimers are in between. Educational and related inequalities between native-parentage whites and blacks seem narrow compared to the gulf that separates first and second-generation Asians (at the top of these hierarchies) from Hispanics (at the bottom).

As Table 11.3 shows, for all four groups there is evidence of discernible pro-gress in virtually all measures from the 1.0 to the 1.5 and the 2nd generations. The degree of mobility (within the limitations of cross-sectional data) is strongest among Hispanics, who start at the bottom in all educational, occupational and eco-nomic indicators, more moderate or stable among Asian and white immigrants who start high in the 1.0 generation (with the largest share of advanced degrees and high-status occupations, and lowest poverty rates). However, for all groups and contrary to conventional wisdom, the evidence suggests that almost all these mobility measures peak in the 2nd generation, and then decline or reach



a plateau by the 3+ generations. In addition to this seeming “third-generation de-cline” or plateau (which posit new variations on Gans’s earlier scenarios), the data underscore the enduring patterns of intergroup inequality across generations, alongside actual intergenerational upward mobility. Similar results with CPS data from 1998 to 2002 have been reported by detailed national origins, and longitudi-nally into the fourth generation for Mexican American samples originally drawn in 1965 in Los Angeles and San Antonio and followed into 2002.76

In the coming two decades, as the baby boomers (overwhelmingly a white native-parentage population) reach retirement age, immigrants and their children are expected to account for most of the growth of the U.S. labor force, with the fastest growing occupations requiring college degrees. Table 11.4 looks at to-day’s ethnic division of labor and the generational composition of occupations and professions among all U.S. workers 25-44. The ethno-racial stratification revealed in this table makes more vivid the patterns of socioeconomic inequality depicted previously. In the 3+ generations, over 80 percent of the labor force are non-Hispanic whites; 14 percent are African-Americans. But among the 1.5 and 2nd generations, 57 percent of the workers are Hispanic and Asian, as are 76 percent of 1.0-generation immigrant workers. Among the latter, 52 percent of all physicians and surgeons are Asians (although they represent a fifth of all 1.0 workers), as are 43 percent of 1.5 and 2nd generation workers (though Asians make up 14 percent of the 1.5 and 2nd generations). Hispanic workers remain mired at the bottom of the workforce, disproportionately occupying most un-skilled and semi-skilled jobs across the generations. Despite evidence of mobil-ity, the “ethclass” clustering observed in Table 11.4 is an augur of enduring ine-qualities to come, “withal” this may bode for the future of ethnic group bounda-ries and identities.

In these widely varying contexts of social inequality, the way young new-comers come to define themselves is significant, revealing much about their social attachments as well as how and where they perceive themselves to “fit” in the society of which they are its newest members. Self-identities and ethnic loy-alties can influence long-term patterns of behavior and outlook as well as inter-group relations, with potential long-term political implications. And the decisive turning point for change in ethnic and national self-identities can be expected to take place in the second, not in the adult first generation. For a decade during the 1990s and early 2000s in South Florida and Southern California, the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study surveyed a sample of over 5,200 1.5- and 2nd-generation youths from mid-adolescence to their mid-twenties. They represented 77 different nationalities, including all of the main Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America.77 The study tracked their self-reported ethnic identities over time and generation in the United States as measured by open-ended questions. Only a tiny proportion of our sample (in the small single digits) on either coast selected a plain “American” identity, with the proportions decreasing as they grew older—scarce empirical support for a hypothesis of “identificational as-similation.”

Figure 11.1 depicts the manner in which those identities are forged in a social field shaped by the interaction of two powerful social forces, acculturation anddiscrimination, each pulling and pushing in different directions in the process of



Figure 11.1 Types of Ethnic Self-Identities by Acculturation and Discrimination (1) Acculturation index = Composite measure (0 to 1) of preferences for English lan-guage and American ways; (2) Discrimination index = Composite Measure (0 to 1) of experiences and expectations of discrimination. Source: CILS

ethnic self-definition. The main types of ethnic (foreign national origin, hyphen-ated-American, plain “American”) and pan-ethnic identities (Hispanic/Latino, Black, Asian), as reported by the respondents in answer to an open-ended ques-tion, have been mapped onto the space formed by the intersection of the two axes of acculturation and discrimination, based on their respective mean scores in the acculturation and discrimination indices measured in CILS.78 As Figure 11.1 shows, the national-origin identity occupies the high-discrimination, low-acculturation top left quadrant of the social field; at the opposite end is found the “American” identity, occupying the low-discrimination, high-acculturation bottom right quadrant. The hyphenated American identity is located along the diagonal between those two, although closer to the American than to the national-origin location. In the low-discrimination, low-acculturation lower left quadrant is found the “Hispanic” or “Latino” pan-ethnic identity. This identity was adopted largely by youth in the Miami area, where Latin American-origin groups form a majority of the population—and where an institutionally complete community can serve both as a buffer against external discrimination and as a brake to rapid accultura-tion. Finally, in the high-discrimination, high-acculturation upper right quadrant are found second-generation youth who define themselves as “Black” (including Haitians, Jamaicans and other West Indians). Their adoption of a pan-ethnic iden-tity has little to do with a lack of acculturation—they clearly prefer English and American ways—but to persistent high levels of racial discrimination and the in-exorable sense of otherness that accompanies it.

Our study also found that the offspring of Latin American immigrants were far more likely to define their racial identities in sharp contrast to their own par-ents. In one CILS survey (when the youths were 17-18-years old), they and their parents were asked to answer a question about their “race” by choosing one of


five categories: “white,” “black,” “Asian,” “multiracial,” or “other” (if the latter was checked, they had to specify what that “other race” was). Among Latin American-origin youths, less than a fourth of the total sample chose white, black, or Asian; some reported being multiracial, but two-thirds checked “other.” When those “other” self-reports were coded, it turned out that two-fifths of the sample wrote down “Hispanic” or “Latino” as their “race,” and a fifth gave their nationality as their “race.” The explicit racialization of the “His-panic/Latino” category, as well as the substantial proportion of youths who con-ceived their national origin as a racial category, are noteworthy both for their potential long-term implications in hardening minority group boundaries, not blurring them, and for their illustration of the arbitrariness of racial construc-tions—and of the ease with which an “ethnic” category developed for adminis-trative purposes becomes externalized, diffused, objectified, and internalized as a marker of essentialized social difference.

The latter point is made more salient by directly comparing the youths’ no-tions of their “race” with that reported by their own parents. About three-fifths of Latin parents defined themselves as “white,” compared to only one-fifth of their own children. Specifically, 93 percent of Cuban parents identified as white, compared to only 41 percent of their children; 85 percent of Colombian parents defined themselves as white, but only 24 percent of their children did so—proportions that were similar for other South Americans; two-thirds of the Sal-vadoran, Guatemalan, and Nicaraguan parents saw themselves as white, but only one-fifth of their children agreed; about a third of the Dominican parents re-ported as white, more than twice the proportion of their children. Well over half of the Dominican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Colombian, Peruvian and Ecuadorian youth reported their race as “Hispanic” or “Latino,” whereas very few of their parents did so. Among the Mexicans, whose pattern differed from all of the others, the children preponderantly racialized the national label.

These results point to the force of a different sort of acculturation process—racialization—and its impact on children’s self-identities in the United States. In-deed, they provide a striking instance of the malleability of racial constructions, even between parents and children in the same family. More fully exposed than their par-ents to American culture and its ingrained racial notions, and being incessantly cate-gorized and treated as Latino or Hispanic, the children of immigrants learn to see themselves in these terms—as members of a racial minority. If these intergenera-tional differences between Latin American immigrants and their U.S.-raised children can be projected to the third generation, the process of racialization could become more entrenched still. Already a panel study of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio into the fourth generation has suggested as much.79

The CILS study also found that despite their growing awareness of racial and ethnic inequalities, almost two-thirds of the youth affirmed a confident be-lief in the promise of equal opportunity through educational achievement; 61 percent agreed in the baseline survey that “there is no better country to live in than the United States,” an endorsement that grew to 71 percent three years later—despite a growing anti-immigrant mood in the country and in California during that period.80 Tellingly, the groups most likely to endorse that view were the children of political exiles who found a favorable context of reception in the


United States: the Cubans (before Elián Gonzalez) and the Vietnamese. The groups least likely to agree with that statement were those who most felt the weight of racial discrimination: the children of immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica, and the West Indies. In reacting to their contexts of reception and learning how they are viewed and treated within them, the youths form and inform their own attitudes toward the society that receives them—and their own identities as well. If there is a moral to this story of reception and belonging, it is that societies, too, reap what they sow.

WHO ARE WE? IMMIGRATION AND AMERICAN PLURALISM

“Who are we?”, asked the late Samuel Huntington in the title of his last book. Who and what we think we are is forged in relation to, and in reaction to, who and what we think we are not. American pluralism is Janus-faced—looking behind to vastly different and even antithetical pasts, looking ahead to scarcely predictable if polyethnic futures—mixing a plurality of origins and out-looks capable of interpreting the nation’s “foundational fictions” and the ethno-national experience from very different vantage points. For Huntington, “America” has a sole authentic core: it is an Anglo-Protestant country, and must remain so. While the old European immigrants were absorbed into the core, the new immigration—above all from Mexico—is challenging that core identity: “The culinary metaphor is an Anglo-Protestant tomato soup to which immigra-tion adds celery, croutons, spices, parsley and other ingredients that enrich and diversify the taste, but which are absorbed into what remains fundamentally tomato soup.” In this outlandish metaphor, however, he is hoisted on his own petard: the tomato is indigenous to Mexico (the word tomatl comes from the Nahuatl); it was taken to Spain after the 1519 conquest by Cortez, then to Italy and later to France, where it was called the “apple of love.” While Mexican Americans today speak English and can be found in most walks of life, they are unlikely to think of themselves as a piece of celery or a crouton in an Anglo-Protestant soup, any more than the tomato is either Anglo or Protestant.

Despite the grand narratives of modernization, neither race nor religion nor ethnicity has vanished in American life. Protestants (never a homogeneous cate-gory, composed of dozens of disparate denominations and of fundamentalist, evangelical and apostolic varieties) are actually a “vanishing majority,” having fallen below 50 percent for the first time in 2005—a decline that is sharper still among younger people, in more recent years, and among the first and second generations. But religious pluralism remains alive and well. Catholics have re-mained a fourth of the population for decades now, a secular decline over time having been more than compensated by new influxes of immigrant Catholics from Latin America, the Philippines, and Vietnam. And there has been an in-crease in non-Christian religions, notably Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims; aside from the long-present Jewish population, all other non-Christian religions had increased to about 5.5 percent of the population by 2000. The United States remains today a profoundly religious country—not least because the American


state allowed immigrant groups to develop their own social and cultural institu-tions, including parishes, schools, hospitals, temples, and synagogues—a laissez faire stance now ironically attributed to the American ability to “assimilate” them.81

The fate of immigrant languages other than English is another matter: lin-guistic and other forms of acculturation do proceed rapidly, especially among immigrant children and the second generation, and that may be truer now than ever before, despite the unprecedented diversity of class, culture and color in the present era of mass immigration. But alongside undeniable upward social mobil-ity from the first to the second generation for most groups, especially the chil-dren of the poorest and least educated—though the gains appear to peak in the second generation and decline or plateau thereafter—there is compelling evi-dence of widening “ethclass” and legal inequalities, of new conflicts and politi-cal mobilizations around ethnic and racial issues, and of downward mobility and marginalization for vulnerable segments of these populations. An undocumented status has become a caste-like master status blocking access to the opportunity structure and paths to social mobility for millions of immigrants. A fraught con-cept like “assimilation,” weighted by the normative baggage of its past and by its insistent if inclusive expectation of progress and homogenized national cohe-sion, seems ill-suited to grasp these complex dynamics and to focus critical at-tention on enduring structural inequalities and persistent ethnic and pan-ethnic formations in this “permanently unfinished” society.

NOTES

This essay takes off from and expands the argument in “The Melting and the Pot: Assimi-lation and Variety in American Life,” in Peter Kivisto, ed., Incorporating Diversity: Re-thinking Assimilation in a Multicultural Era (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 154-73.

1 Robert E. Park, “Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups with Particular Refer-ence to the Negro,” American Journal of Sociology 19, no. 5 (March 1914): 606-623.

2 Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-national America,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1916: 86-97.

3 W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups(New Haven: Yale University Press. 1945).

4 Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963), xcvii, 20, 290.

5 Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 24-25, 67, 130-131.

6 Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 1998), 1.

7 Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 129.

8 George J. Borjas, “Making It in America: Social Mobility in the Immigrant Popula-tion,” The Future of Children 16, no. 2 (2006): 56.

9 Ibid.


10 Herbert J. Gans, “Second Generation Decline: Scenarios for the Economic and Ethnic Futures of Post-1965 American Immigrants,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 15, no. 2 (April 1992): 173-92; Richard Alba and Victor Nee, “Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration,” International Migration Review 31, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 826-874.

11 Park, “Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups with Particular Reference to the Negro,” 611.

12 Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

13 Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, and Melville J. Herskovits, “Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation,” American Anthropologist 38, no. 1 (1936): 149-152.

14 Park, “Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups with Particular Reference to the Negro,” 608.

15 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1955).

16 Gordon, 60. 17 Ibid., 27, 69-83. 18 Higham, Strangers in the Land; T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Rumbaut, “Terms of

Belonging: Are Models of Membership Self-Fulfilling Prophecies?”, Georgetown Immi-gration Law Journal 13, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 1-24; Brian Fry, Nativism and Immigration: Regulation the American Dream (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2006).

19 Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press; 2000); Milton Yinger, Ethnicity: Source of Strength? Source of Con-flict? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).

20 Gans, “Toward a Reconciliation of ‘Assimilation’ and ‘Pluralism:’ The Interplay of Acculturation and Ethnic Retention,” International Migration Review 31, no. 4 (Win-ter 1997): 875-892.

21 Carrie Bramen, The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for Na-tional Distinctiveness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

22 Alba and Nee, “Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration”; Alba and Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Yinger, Ethnicity: Source of Strength? Source of Conflict?; Yinger, “Toward a Theory of Assimilation and Dissimila-tion,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 4, no. 3 (July 1981): 249-264.

23 Mary Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Re-alities (New York and Cambridge: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press, 1999); Philip Kasinitz et al., “Fade to Black? The Children of West Indian Immi-grants in South Florida,” in Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes, eds., Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (Berkeley and New York: University of California Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2001).

24 Stuart Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

25 Louis Pérez, Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

26 Alba, Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985).

27 Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation(Berkeley and New York: University of California Press, Russell Sage Foundation, 2001); Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 2006).

28 Ari Shavit, “Vanishing,” New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1997.


29 William James, A Pluralistic Universe, reprinted in Bruce Kuklick, ed., WilliamJames: Writings, 1902-1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987); Horace Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot: A Study of American Nationality,” The Nation,February 18-25, 1915.

30 Henry Louis Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1986).

31 J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, “What Is an American?” Letter III in his Letters from an American Farmer, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/CREV/contents.html

32 Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy, “Single or Triple Melting-Pot? Intermarriage Trends in New Haven, 1870-1940,” American Journal of Sociology, 49 (January 1944): 331-339; Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).

33 Park, Herbert A. Miller [and W.I. Thomas], Old World Traits Transplanted (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921).

34 Irvin Child, Italian or American? The Second Generation in Conflict (New York: Russell & Russell, 1970 [1943]), 196-197.

35 Czeslaw Milosz, “Nobel Lecture,” in Sture Allén, ed., Nobel Lectures, Literature: 1968-1980 (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, Inc, 1997); Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies; Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America.

36 David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

37 Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

38 “2007 National Survey of Latinos: As Illegal Immigration Issue Heats Up, Hispan-ics Feel a Chill” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Hispanic Center, 2007).

39 Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Progress: Fact or Illusion? (Ann Arbor: Uni-versity of Michigan Press, 1996).

40 Stephen Meyer, “Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory, 1914-1921,” Journal of Social History 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 67-82.

41 David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 24.

42 Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924 [1921]), 735.

43 Sarah E. Turner and John Bound, “Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the G.I. Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Ameri-cans,” NBER Working Paper No. 9044 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2002).

44 Park, “Assimilation, Social,” in E.R.A. Seligman and A. Johnson, eds., Encyclo-pedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 282.

45 Ibid., 281. 46 Park and Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, 735. 47 Park, “Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups with Particular Reference to the

Negro,” reprinted in Park and Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, 759. 48 Park and Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, 739-740. 49 Park, “Our Racial Frontier in the Pacific,” Survey Graphic IX (May 1926): 192-

196. Reprinted in Park’s collected papers, Race and Culture, vol. 1 (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 141, 149.

50 Park, “Introduction,” in Romanzo Adams, Interracial Marriage in Hawaii (New York: Macmillan, 1937), vii-xiv.


51 Gans, “Second Generation Decline: Scenarios for the Economic and Ethnic Futures of Post-1965 American Immigrants”; Gans, “Ethnic Invention and Acculturation: A Bumpy-Line Approach,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 45-52.

52 Warner and Srole, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups, 284. 53 Ibid., 294-295. 54 Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, 3. 55 Ibid., 81. 56 Ibid., 51. 57 Ibid., 159. 58 Ibid., 129. 59 Ibid., 114. 60 Russell Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Con-

cept in American Ethnic History,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 437-471.

61 Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, 51. 62 Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in

a Changing World (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1998); Yinger, Ethnicity:Source of Strength? Source of Conflict?; Yinger, “Toward a Theory of Assimilation and Dissimilation.”

63 Alba and Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contempo-rary Immigration; Anthony Orum, “Circles of Influence and Chains of Command: The Social Processes Whereby Ethnic Communities Influence Host Societies,” Social Forces84, no. 2 (December 2005): 921-939.

64 Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies.65 Gans, “Toward a Reconciliation of ‘Assimilation’ and ‘Pluralism:’ The Interplay

of Acculturation and Ethnic Retention”; Gans, “Acculturation, Assimilation, and Mobil-ity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 1 (January 2007): 152-164.

66 Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1990).

67 Vladimir Nahirny and Joshua A. Fishman, “American Immigrant Groups: Ethnic Identification and the Problem of Generation,” Sociological Review NS13 (1965): 311-326.

68 Gans, “Second Generation Decline: Scenarios for the Economic and Ethnic Fu-tures of Post-1965 American Immigrants.”

69 Portes and Min Zhou, “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants among Post-1965 Immigrant Youth,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530, no. 1 (1993): 74-96.

70 Rumbaut and Portes, Ethnicities.71 Rumbaut, “Assimilation and Its Discontents: Between Rhetoric and Reality,” In-

ternational Migration Review 31, no. 4 (1997): 923-960. 72 Alba and Nee, Rethinking the American Mainstream, 50, 273-275. 73 Aleinikoff and Rumbaut, “Terms of Belonging: Are Models of Membership Self-

Fulfilling Prophecies?” 74 Rumbaut, “Assimilation and Its Discontents: Between Rhetoric and Reality”;

Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America.75 Andrew Greeley, Why Can’t They Be Like Us? America’s White Ethnic Groups

(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971). 76 Rumbaut, “Ages, Life Stages, and Generational Cohorts: Decomposing the Immi-

grant First and Second Generations in the United States,” International Migration Review38, no. 3 (October 2004): 1160-1205; Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz, Generations of


Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race (New York: Russell Sage Foun-dation, 2008).

77 Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies.78 Rumbaut, “Turning Points in the Transition to Adulthood: Determinants of Educa-

tional Attainment, Incarceration, and Early Childbearing among Children of Immigrants,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 6 (November 2005): 1041-1086.

79 Telles and Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race.

80 Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies.81 Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America.

Assimilation's Bumpy Road

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