Is Assimilation Dead?

Abstract

This article considers the decline in the positive attitude toward the term “assimilation” as an ideal for immigrant and minority groups in the United States, and it explores the period between World War I and the mid-1920s, during which assimilation moved from an ideal to a forceful policy, under the name “Americanization.” During this period, attention was given almost exclusively to immigrants; blacks were totally ignored in the debate over assimilation and Americanization. Nevertheless, until the mid-1960s, the dominant black ideal for their future in the United States was assimilation. The failure of assimilation to work its effects on blacks as on immigrants, owing to the strength of American discriminatory and prejudiced attitudes and behavior toward blacks, has been responsible for throwing the entire assimilatory ideal and program into disrepute.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2015) The Integration of Immigrants into American Society. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

“…The report reviews earlier research using the New Immigrant Survey data which found that, after controlling for education, English-language proficiency, country of origin, occupation, family background, ethnicity and race, immigrants with the lightest skin color still earned 16 to 23 per cent more than those with the darkest. These results confirm the 'racial/ethnic disadvantage model of assimilation' (Glazer and Moynihan, 1963;Glazer, 1993); the fact that race and physically visible ethnic differences are barriers to economic upward mobility. This ethnic disadvantage model may have social and cultural consequences, such as an increase in the importance of bounded solidarity, ensuring favorable economic conditions within the disadvantaged ethnic group, but hindering assimilation and integration due to 'Constraints on Freedom' and 'Leveling Pressures' (Portes and Sensenbrenner, 1993). Sociocultural integration is also covered by the report.…”

Multicultural Indonesia in Geographical and Cultural Perspectives

“…1 The famed "melting pot" of the USA in the early twentieth century was a form of assimilation as it insisted that immigrants to the USA adopt a similar ethos and set of values. Immigrants went into the imagined melting pot and came out "cleaned" of ethnic associations [9]. Arguably a version of this was considered for Indonesia, as I explore in the second section below.…”

A Lack of Security or of Cultural Capital? Acculturative Conservatism in the Naming Choices of Early 20th-Century US Jews

“…But recent scholarship, much of which was inspired and informed by the post-1965 immigration wave to the U.S., has questioned the idea that assimilation is always the end-point of the incorporation process (e.g., Glazer 1993). In addition, it has ushered in a more nuanced and varied picture of the acculturation process (see e.g., for review, see Gans 1992Gans , 1997Nee 1997, 2003;Portes and Zhou 1993;Portes and Rumbaut 2001;Esser 2010).…”