Assimilation
Definition: Assimilation is the process by which immigrants become similar to natives,
particularly in a cultural sense – leading to the reduction of ethnic difference between
them.
The basic meaning of “assimilation” is readily apparent from its root (and other words based
on that root): immigrants assimilate when they become similar to natives. Differences
between immigrants and natives are typically perceived as aggregating to ethnic difference,
and so Alba and Nee define assimilation as “the decline of an ethnic distinction and its
corollary cultural and social differences” (2003: 11) – a definition exemplary for its clarity
and conciseness, denoting a process that can emerge from change in the destination society
as well as in the immigrants themselves. As noted in the chapter on integration, not all
scholars work with such a clear sense of the concept, and it is easy to find analyses where
the word is being used to refer to processes arguably better described as integration. One
can also perceive “national” patterns of usage: American migration scholars have more
commonly used “assimilation” while many European observers prefer “integration”, even
when addressing similar questions. Even so, as this is a book on concepts we take the view
that there is a useful (and perhaps essential) distinction to be made, even if the ideas are
clearly related: integration can occur without assimilation insofar as it is sometimes possible
for immigrants to gain social membership (and even to achieve a degree of equality with
natives) without becoming ethnically indistinguishable from natives.
The concept of assimilation has carried some heavy baggage which it has begun to shed only
in the last two decades. The term can be used empirically, to describe what many
immigrants actually do – but it can also be used normatively, to indicate what many natives
expect immigrants to do (with such expectations typically rooted in ethnocentrism or even
outright prejudice). For many years these two senses were thoroughly entangled, with the
consequence that when observers began to reject the projection of assimilationist
expectations onto immigrants they often rejected the word itself. In more recent years a
number of scholars (e.g. Alba and Nee 1997, 2003; Morawska 1994) have identified
assimilation as an indispensable concept for empirical understanding of what immigrants
(and the destination societies) experience, while leaving its unsavoury normative
implications firmly in the past.
These points are readily apparent in a trajectory followed by many immigration countries
during the 20th century and in particular in the American case. In early American notions of
the “melting pot” immigrants were expected to (and in some instances did) disappear as
such, blending into the receiving society, deliberately adopting traits of the latter and
leaving previous identities behind (e.g. Alba and Nee 1997). Observations of this pattern
matured into classic notions of “straight-line assimilation”, an idea originating with Warner
and Srole (1945), whose empirical findings were accompanied by the normative
assumptions of the day: immigrants’ cultural traits were “inferior” and needed to be
“unlearned”, particularly by their children. In another canonical treatment of this topic,
Milton Gordon wrote of the “middle-class cultural patterns of, largely, white Protestant,
Anglo-Saxon origins” as the United States’ “core culture” (1964: 72), to which immigrants
would assimilate. This perspective, rooted in the more general frame of modernization
theory in which wealthy destination countries were also the most “advanced”, was properly
identified as ethnocentric – just as immigrants generally became less inclined to “melt”
away. Immigrant-receiving countries in the late 20th century became, to varying degrees,
multicultural societies – at a minimum in demographic terms but in some places as a matter
of attitudes and active policies (multiculturalism). Instead of becoming similar to natives in
a comprehensive (and normatively mandated) way, immigrants’ difference and diversity
were grounds for celebration, a new way of perceiving “us”.
This historical shift, and its valorisation, led some observers to conclude that assimilation
was an outmoded idea; in short, immigrants were no longer assimilating. That assertion
was at best an exaggeration; it also constituted an excessively narrow understanding of
what assimilation actually denotes. Again, a key point is that assimilation results in part
from changes in the receiving society, not just in immigrants. The work of Alba and Nee (e.g.
2003) is particularly important here. As Kivisto and Faist (2010) note, Alba and Nee drew on
an article by Zolberg and Woon (1999 – itself building on Bauböck 1994) to identify three
distinct processes that result in assimilation. “Boundary crossing” denotes the conventional
mode of assimilation: individuals undergo substantial changes that amount to joining the
“mainstream”, e.g. learning a new language and/or rejecting “old” ethnic labels. While that
mode leaves existing boundaries more or less intact, “boundary blurring” describes a
reduction in ethnic difference operating at a societal level rather than an individual level:
boundaries between groups become less salient and more permeable, e.g. with greater
acceptance of multiple/overlapping identities, bilingualism and dual citizenship.
Immigration to the USA has clearly had this sort of transformative impact, while assimilation
in this mode has not occurred to the same extent in Europe (Alba 2005). The third process,
“boundary shifting”, is a wholesale realignment of boundaries, either in a more
exclusionary or more inclusionary direction. This far-reaching transformation is rarer, and
some observers write about it in a speculative mode, as with Gans’s (1999) suggestion that
the white/black divide in the USA is perhaps being transformed into a black/non-black
divide as “Asians” are increasingly accepted as “honorary whites”.
A redemption of assimilation as an empirical description is facilitated by an insightful
observation from both Brubaker (2003) and Joppke and Morawska (2003) regarding the
word’s grammatical properties. Assimilation can be used as a transitive and an intransitive
verb (the point applies to integration as well). In the former sense, some other actor (e.g. a
state) does something to immigrants – via legal requirements, transmission of public
attitudes, etc. – thus imposing assimilation on them. In the latter, assimilation describes
what immigrants themselves do. The normative baggage of the term has to do with its
transitive sense: many people object when governments or public attitudes lead migrants to
change their identities or actions in ways they would not themselves prefer. But the
intransitive sense of assimilation amounts to a useful concept for empirical purposes: again,
most immigrants do assimilate at least to some degree.
In a “common-sense” perspective, assimilation is viewed as beneficial for immigrants in
quite a broad way; the point might seem especially obvious regarding immigrants’ children
(the “second generation”) as their socialization takes place in the destination country. But
research in several disciplines has established that the opposite conclusion (assimilation
leads to deterioration in outcomes) is sometimes more appropriate. Rumbaut (1997)
summarizes a number of these findings regarding health and education in the USA: for
example, there were lower rates of infant mortality and low birth weight among babies born
to immigrant women from Mexico than among babies born to similarly situated native
women – but that advantage did not persist for the babies of second-generation mothers,
who in effect assimilated to the (worse) patterns of native women. Risky behaviours are
also more prevalent among second-generation youths than among immigrant (foreign-born)
youths; that trajectory is not only intergenerational, it appears in the increasing rates of
risky behaviours among foreign-born youths as length of residence increases.
The notion of “segmented assimilation”, developed by Portes and Zhou (1993), provokes
doubts about the assumption of beneficial consequences in a more systematic way; it also
offers an explanation for variation in outcome patterns. It is all too easy to imagine that
assimilation is a universal process that pertains to immigrants and their children in general.
In reality, different immigrants are situated in quite different ways, with far-reaching
consequences for the type of assimilation they experience. For some, assimilation is in most
respects beneficial, consisting of (or resulting in) acceptance and upward mobility. But this
conventional assimilation pathway is often not open to members of the second-generation
who are marked in the terms of American racial categories as non-white and whose
economic position relegates them to residence in disadvantaged neighbourhoods of inner
cities. In that context, assimilation is typically “downward”: when immigrants’ children
assimilate under those conditions, they become members of the USA’s disadvantaged
minority groups, with significant consequences for their educational (and eventual
occupational) attainment (Portes and Rumbaut 1996). In those circumstances, resisting
assimilation – maintaining tight-knit ethnic communities that sustain a strong commitment
to children’s education – can lead to better outcomes.
It is perhaps tempting to think that immigrants adapt to their new circumstances in only one
mode: either they assimilate or they maintain transnational ties that sustain ethnic
identities and communities. As Morawska (2003) argues, these modes are typically
concurrent: many immigrants assimilate in particular ways while maintaining transnational
ties, and it is instructive to consider various combinations of patterns in both modes (cf.
Kivisto 2003). Transnational ties might help sustain ethnic identities and communities – but
there is no contradiction when we recall that assimilation is merely the decline of ethnic
distinctions, not their disappearance. Following Kivisto (2003), we should expect to find a
high degree of complexity in this field: ethnic distinctions decline in salience in part because
dimensions of ethnicity come to mean different things to different groups and even to
different individuals within groups. One would hardly expect immigrants to remain
unchanged after arrival – but then the same point applies to the destination society as well.
On those terms, assimilation is once again a lively topic in research on migration.
See also: Integration; Acculturation; Multiculturalism
(Zolberg and Woon 1999) (Portes and Rumbaut 1996) (Portes and Zhou 1993) (Rumbaut
1997) (Brubaker 2003) (Gans 1999) (Alba 2005) (Alba and Nee 1997) (Alba and Nee 2003)
(Morawska 1994) (Warner and Srole 1945) (Joppke and Morawska 2003) (Kivisto and Faist
2010) (Bauböck 1994) (Gordon 1964) (Morawska 2003) (Kivisto 2003)
References
Alba, Richard (2005) 'Bright vs. blurred boundaries: Second-generation assimilation and
exclusion in France, Germany, and the United States', Ethnic and Racial Studies 28:
20-49.
Alba, Richard D. and Nee, Victor (1997) 'Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of
Immigrants', International Migration Review 31: 826-74.
Alba, Richard D. and Nee, Victor (2003) Remaking the American mainstream: assimilation
and contemporary immigration, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bauböck, Rainer (1994) The Integration of Immigrants, Strasbourg: Council of Europe.
Brubaker, Rogers (2003) 'The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration
and its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States', in Christian Joppke and
Ewa Morawska (eds), Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal
Nation-states, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 39-58.
Gans, Herbert (1999) 'The possibility of a new racial hierarchy in the twenty-first century
United States', in Michèle Lamont (ed.), The Cultural Territories of Race, Chicago and
New York: University of Chicago Press and Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 371-90.
Gordon, Milton (1964) Assimilation and American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and
National Origins, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Joppke, Christian and Morawska, Ewa (2003) 'Integrating Immigrants in Liberal NationStates: Policies and Practices', in Christian Joppke and Ewa Morawska (eds), Toward
Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nation-states, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-36.
Kivisto, Peter (2003) 'Social spaces, transnational immigrant communities, and the politics of
incorporation', Ethnicities 3: 5-28.
Kivisto, Peter and Faist, Thomas (2010) Beyond a Border: The Causes and Consequences of
Contemporary Immigration, London: Pine Forge Press.
Morawska, Ewa (1994) 'In defense of the assimilation model', Journal of American Ethnic
History 13: 76-87.
Morawska, Ewa (2003) 'Immigrant transnationalism and assimilation: a variety of
combinations and the analytic strategy it suggests', in Christian Joppke and Ewa
Morawska (eds), Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nationstates, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 133-76.
Portes, Alejandro and Rumbaut, Reuven (1996) Immigrant America: a portrait, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Portes, Alejandro and Zhou, Min (1993) 'The New Second Generation: Segmented
Assimilation and Its Variants', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 530: 74-96.
Rumbaut, Rubén G. (1997) 'Assimilation and Its Discontents: Between Rhetoric and Reality',
International Migration Review 31: 923-60.
Warner, W. Lloyd and Srole, Leo (1945) The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups, New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Zolberg, Aristide R. and Woon, Long Litt (1999) 'Why Islam is like Spanish: Cultural
Incorporation in Europe and the United States', Politics & Society 27: 5-38.