ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
1
Cultural Assimilation
1NC 1/3 .......................................................................................................................................................... 2
1NC 2/3 .......................................................................................................................................................... 3
1NC 3/3 .......................................................................................................................................................... 4
Link - Immigration ......................................................................................................................................... 5
Link - Immigration ......................................................................................................................................... 6
Link – Work Visas ......................................................................................................................................... 7
Link - Immigration Law ................................................................................................................................. 8
Link – Legal Discourse .................................................................................................................................. 9
Link - Hegemony ...........................................................................................................................................10
Link - Fear .....................................................................................................................................................11
Link - Naturalization .....................................................................................................................................12
Link - Centering Visa Policy on Economic Concerns ...................................................................................13
Link - Courts .................................................................................................................................................14
Impact - Colonialism .....................................................................................................................................16
Alternative – Localized Culture ....................................................................................................................17
Alternative – Local Culture ...........................................................................................................................18
Alternative – Local Culture ...........................................................................................................................19
**Aff Answers**
Aff Answers – Assimilation not possible ......................................................................................................20
Aff Answers – Assimilation Not Possible .....................................................................................................21
Aff Answers – Assimilation Theory Wrong ..................................................................................................22
Aff Answers – Assimilation Theory Wrong ..................................................................................................23
Aff Answers – Assimilation Theory Wrong ..................................................................................................24
Aff Answers – Cosmopolitanism Fails ..........................................................................................................25
Aff Answers – Cosmopolitanism Fails ..........................................................................................................26
Aff Answers – Nationalism Good .................................................................................................................27

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
2
Cultural Assimilation
, Professor at Chapman University School of Law, California.
John, Yale Law Journal, “Performing whiteness naturalization litigation and the construction of racial identity in America,” lexis
However, despite these reforms, a performative/white bias continues to exist in the immigration system.
First of all, the new system's per-country allocations continue to limit immigration from historically excluded countries ,(132 ) effectively limiting immigration by individuals of certain nonwhite races.
More importantly , the recent debate over immigration reform has called for greater assimilation of immigrant groups into the United States . For example, the final report of the Commission on Immigration Reform in 1997 called for the "Americanization" of new immigrants through a "process of integration by which immigrants become part of our communities and by which our communities and the nation learn from and adapt to their presence."(133) In particular, the report emphasized the importance of these new immigrant groups to conform to white, Christian, Western European norms, especially in their adoption of English as their primary language. Here, the old quid pro quo present in the racialprerequisite cases of the early half of the century is repeated: If you can assimilate yourself into the White Republic, you will gain the privileges of whiteness. Without white performance, immigration reform would be necessary and privileges would be revoked from these minority groups. The rhetoric of isolationists and other advocates of tighter borders has even made this quid pro quo explicit. White performance is still a condition of white privilege .(134)
.

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
3
Cultural Assimilation
associate professor of education and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania
Kathleen D., “BEING HERE AND BEING THERE: FIELDWORK ENCOUNTERS AND ETHNOGRAPHIC
DISCOVERIES,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , September, #595, 80-90
Immigrants become citizens through processes of social incorporation --processes that include the formation of social ties with the host society-traditionally referred to as "assimilation." But whether and how peoples come to be viewed as "assimilatable" is informed , in part, by broader processes of cultural change associated with the symbolic creation of "the nation" as an imagined community. Imagining the nation and defining the basis of national belonging involve a dual process of delineating boundaries of inclusion and of exclusion. National imaginaries , in this sense, are never simply given and never fixed or enduring. Notions of national belonging and , in turn, national identities and citizenship statuses are continually redefined, negotiated, and debated as they come to be articulated within different forms of nationalist discourse. The ongoing project of nation formation entails complex and multiple forms of cultural politics, which play out across a number of sites within the public sphere of democratic, capitalist nations--in law and policy, education, and the media, as well as in face-to-face interactions in families and ethnic communities. In the context of these cultural politics, "immigrants" are produced as subjects, multiple types of subjects associated with distinctive "minority" statuses that classify those so defined in racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, generational, and gendered terms. It is here , I argue, that identities and subjectivities are made , here, within the varied forms of cultural production at work within the public sphere.

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
4
Cultural Assimilation
, Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the
University of Westminster in London
(Chantal, Gramsci and Marxist Theory, ed by Mouffe, pp. 191-2).
The creation of a new hegemony , therefore, implies the transformation of the previous ideological terrain and the creation of a new world-view which will serve as a unifying principle for a new collective will. This is the process of ideological transformation which Gramsci designates with the term
'intellectual and moral reform'. What is important now is to see how this process is envisaged by Gramsci. The two following passages are extremely significant in this context: "What matters is the criticism to which such an ideological complex is subjected by the first representatives of the new historical phase. This criticism makes possible a process of differentiation and change in the relative weight that the elements of the old ideologies used to possess . What was previously secondary and subordinate , or even incidental, is now taken to be primary – becomes the nucleus of a new ideological and theoretical complex. The old collective will dissolves into its contradictory elements since the subordinate ones develop socially ." "How, on the other hand should this historical consciousness, proposed as autonomous consciousness, be formed? How should everyone choose and combine the elements for the constitution of such an autonomous consciousness? Will each element imposed have to be repudiated a priori ? It will have to be repudiated inasmuch as it is imposed, but not in itself, that is to say that it will be necessary to give it a new form which is specific to the given group." Here Gramsci indicates extremely clearly that intellectual and moral reform does not consist in making a clean sweep of the existing world view and in replacing it with a completely new and already formulated one. Rather, it consists in a process of transformation
(aimed at producing a new form) and of rearticulation of existing ideological elements . According to him, an ideological system consists in a particular type of articulation of ideological elements to which a certain 'relative weight' is attributed. The objective of ideological struggle is not to reject the system and all its elements but to rearticulate it, to break it down to its basic elements and then to sift through past conceptions to see which ones, with some changes of content, can serve to express the new situation. Once this is done the chosen elements are finally rearticulated into another system .

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
5
Cultural Assimilation
More to the point, the liberal xenophilic deployment of the foreigner as the truest citizen because the only truly consenting one actually feeds the xenophobic backlash against the nonconsenting immigrant — the illegal alien— to whom we supposedly do not consent and who does not consent to us .
65 If this analysis is correct, then the iconic good immigrant— the supercitizen—who upholds American liberal democracy is not accidentally or coincidentally partnered with the iconic bad immigrant who threatens to tear it down. Popular ambivalences about foreignness are not, as Rogers Smith has argued elsewhere, the product of distinct, nativist ideologies that are unconnected in any deep or significant way to American liberal democracy.66 The co-presence in American political culture of xenophilia and xenophobia comes right out of America’s fundamental liberal commitments, which map a normatively and materially privileged national citizenship onto an idealized immigrant trajectory to membership . This means that the undecidability of foreignness—the depiction of foreigners as good and bad for the nation— is partly driven by the logic of liberal, national consent, which, in the case of the
United States, both produces and denies a fundamental dependence upon foreigners who are positioned symbolically so that they must and yet finally cannot fill the gaps of consent and legitimacy for us.67 That is , nativist ideologies may shape, direct, and accelerate the xenophobia in question.
But, contra Rogers Smith, it is misleading to see them as the external corrupters of an otherwise fundamentally egalitarian and tolerant liberal tradition whose only weakness is its failure to inspire in communitarian terms.68 Indeed, as we saw in Chapter One, Smith’s characterization of the problem as one of liberalism’s corruption at the hands of an outside agitator itself replays the xenophobic script that Smith is out to criticize.
But xenophobia is not the only problem here. The iconic bad immigrant is also problematic because he distracts attention from democracy’s real problems.69 Schuck and Smith’s deployment of the figure of the illegal exceeds their apparent intent and highlights a different, more tenacious corruption than that of “illegal aliens in the polity”—that of the withdrawal of most
American citizens and residents from political life.70 The illegal imagined by Schuck and Smith turns out to stand for the much rehearsed corruption of American citizenship from an active liberal voluntarism to a nonconsenting, passive social welfare consumerism in which good citizens—“givers”—have been replaced by selfinterested maximizers and free-riders, “takers.” No more than a minority of American citizens votes in American elections; fewer still involve themselves directly in politics.
Schuck and Smith externalize these corruptions of American democratic citizenship and, in good Girardian style, project them onto a foreigner who can be made to leave. These Girardian scapegoats represent our best virtues and our worst vices. They become the occasion of a new social unity that Schuck and Smith hope, somehow, to achieve by way of some small policy changes, periodic mailings, constitutional reinterpretations, and better border policing. In short, Schuck and Smith’s iconic foreigners, both good and bad, are problematic because they invite unfair treatment of foreigners but also because they mislead us into believing that the solution to liberal democracy’s problems and the right response to heightened migrations are a politics of national retrenchment.

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
6
Cultural Assimilation
Fundamentally, the various versions of the myth of an immigrant America all seek to renationalize the state and to position it at the center of any future democratic politics. By pressing the foreign immigrant into service on behalf of the nation and its iconic economy , community, family, and liberal individual citizen , the myth positions the immigrant as either a giver to or a taker from the nation.
Indeed, the xenophilic insistence that immigrants are givers to the nation itself feeds the xenophobic anxiety that they might really be takers from it.
We saw this dynamic at work in Chapter Three, as well, where it threatened to be viciously circular. I suggested that we might break the vicious circle by thinking about immigrants in relation to democracy, rather than the nation, and by thinking of “taking” as the very thing that immigrants have to give us. I reconsider those possibilities here in a bit more detail and in the somewhat different context of American democratic theory

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
7
Cultural Assimilation
assistant professor of rhetoric at the University of Iowa
Aimee, History Review 89 (2004) 115-134 “Whose "America"?
The ominous role of Latin America's "Northern neighbor," driven by "madness and ambition," is prevalent in Martí's work:
"The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is Our America's greatest danger." 6 Martí envisioned "Our
America" as a liberated Latin America that would build from the momentum of gaining its first independence from Spain to gain its second independence from the United States.
7 Martí's concerns over U.S. American imperialist expansion have proven to be a legitimate obstacle to the class- and race-based revolutionary forms he envisioned. In the wake of U.S. annexation of northern Mexico 150 years ago, U.S. America is actively pursuing new forms of colonization that undermine Latin American independence on many disparate and interrelated fronts. Within this era of transnationalism, in which capital, media, culture, and (certain) people flow more freely across national boundaries, capitalist exploitation assumes a more flexible character than its previous, place-based, industrial rendition .
8 Thus military occupation and annexation, by and large, give way to interrelated economic, ideological, and state forms of control. For instance, ideological, economic, and state forms of control collude within the present U.S. American context to create a climate ripe for exploitation of Latin Americans. Here the cultural production of Anglo anxieties over demographic shifts is one form of ideological control in which fear is turned inside out and redirected as state-sanctioned violence against racialized immigrants such as Abner Louima and countless Latin American migrant workers . This is the process through which whiteness becomes a material force . Anti-immigration discourse inverts violence, projecting it onto racialized bodies to create the condition of possibility for statesanctioned white-on-color violence , which, in turn, may legitimately terrorize entire populations. This dynamic creates such a climate of uncertainty among immigrants and their allies that it undermines their capacity to organize, thereby (re)producing a docile, readily exploitable labor force . It produces a spatial arrangement within the United States in which whites benefit from this violence: they may move freely, buy cheaply, and retain social control, all the while believing it is they who are under siege . This is the inversion of white privilege that secures power through its seeming lack of substance, or unmarked character,
9
and becomes a material force as it constrains and/or forces the mobilities of racialized subjects while liberating that of unmarked white bodies.
Martí's concern over the formidable neighbor warrants our attention as we work within the legacy of his vision of an independent and united Latin America, because such hostilities create U.S. America as space inhospitable to Latin Americans and Latinos, particularly the poor. The formation of
U.S. nationalism, then, precludes the empowerment and free movement of working-class people of color and thus undermines the possibility of Our America. To untangle this regressive production of U.S. American nationalism is to reveal the importance of retaining sight of the formation of the national in conjunction [End Page 117] with the transnational. While it is tempting to celebrate the moment of transnationalism as the demise of the nation-state and the disintegration of its borders t his can prove a dangerous move . Within the Latin American/Latino studies context, a hemispheric approach to "the Americas" becomes deeply problematized when we consider the powerful role that U.S. nationalism exerts over the rest of the Americas. In other words, if we seek to mobilize the power of Martí's vision for
Our America, one in which Latinos/Latin Americans are free, we must do so in full sight of the regressive articulations of U.S. America produced within the borders of the U.S. national space in order to
(re)produce those very borders as one-way turnstiles for white "Americans.

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
8
Cultural Assimilation
prof of law at Florida Coastal School of Law
(Douglas, Brigham Young Univ LR, l/n)
We should pause to consider the formal or structural components of law that induce the submission and resignation typified of hegemony. There are at least three aspects of the law that sustain hegemony: exclusivity, social construction, and closure . I would like to examine these factors briefly, since they are the building blocks for the establishment of a hegemonic regime.
By exclusivity, I mean that the state has a monopoly on the enactment and enforcement of law . There is no such thing as an
"alternative legal system" akin to "alternative medicine" or "alternative cinema"; there is only one legal system and one set of laws that have the backing of the police and the court system. Regardless of whether one is critical of the law or accepts it without question, the existing law stands as a monument against which all positions are defined. One may subvert the law or violate the law (as for example, when people sell groceries on the street without a license, or when a bookmaker sets up an illegal gambling operation), but the law always stands as the dominant position that defines the subversive activity as subversive in the first instance . Even when a law is challenged in court, the law is deemed presumptively valid and the burden is placed on the challenger to persuade the court that the law is invalid. The state wields immense power in being able to exclusively declare the boundaries of law . In this regard we can compare law to a social practice that does not have the state sanction behind it, namely, fashion. People remain free to wear what they want without fear of punishment, subject of course to the sanction of popular opinion. And while there is certainly a dominant fashion, one can create alternatives that challenge the status quo without fear of government reprisal. But this is not an option when it comes to the law. In the process of changing the law, one must first recognize the law as the law (so to speak) and accept the consequences for breaking it. Further, there is no way to escape the law by inaction or "opting-out" since it applies to everyone regardless of their personal beliefs about its legitimacy . Even when lawyers draft documents to circumvent [*546] the law (e.g., to avoid taxation), the diversionary action is still defined in terms of the existing law as the object to be avoided. And even when an individual fails to take action, for example by dying without having prepared a will, the law will write a will on behalf of the deceased and distribute her property accordingly, thereby imposing the law onher private affairs. Law, then, is almost hegemonic by its very nature, since it always involves the imposition of an official code by the state onto the affairs of an individual.

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
9
Cultural Assimilation
associate professor of education and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania
Kathleen D., “BEING HERE AND BEING THERE: FIELDWORK ENCOUNTERS AND ETHNOGRAPHIC
DISCOVERIES,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , September, #595, 80-90
Legal discourse constitutes minority statuses in efforts to determine who belongs to a nation and to protect the rights of those who do. These forms of political discourse designate minority status on ethnic reductionist terms--terms that assume a homology between a community and a culture.
These essentialist constructs , in contradictory fashion, provide the basis for challenging discrimination [*116] while defining the boundaries of national belonging in racial terms . Yet processes of social incorporation are not shaped only within the designation of legal statuses and the provision of particular rights. They are founded upon and informed by visions of national unity--visions that provide the rationale for different types of integration efforts . What is assumed to preserve the social fabric of a nation or, contrastively, to tear it apart? and How are cultural differences imagined to contribute to either of these social ends?

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
.
prof of law at Florida Coastal School of Law
(Douglas, Brigham Young Univ LR, l/n)
Gramsci's movement away from Marxist "economicism" marked a major advance in the understanding of power and oppression. Put simply , domination requires the establishment of an entire way of life as standard and expected, the identification of the dominated with the dominators, and the subtle establishment of the prevailing ideology as natural and inevitable, indeed commonsensical.
When domination reaches the internal world of the actors, resistance is almost unthinkable .
This is captured nicely by Raymond Williams' insight that hegemony extends to "a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living.... It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society ." Gramsci's notions of historical bloc and common sense seem to support our impression that the power holding people to the existing system is deep and multileveled, and that we often obey as a matter of reflex for the simple reason that our very identities are formed by the dominant framework to the extent that we are powerless to do anything else . As Duncan Kennedy observed regarding hegemony: "We all feel it. It's an aspect of all of our lives that we ourselves are trapped within systems of ideas that we feel are false, but can't break out of."
10
Cultural Assimilation
.

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
11
Cultural Assimilation
American political culture is marked by a play of xenophobia and xenophilia that is not simply caused by periodic power changes from nativists to inclusionists, as Michael Walzer and Rogers Smith both suggest. 6 Nor is it merely a sign of changing economic “realities,” from expanding to shrinking labor needs.7 These may be parts of the story, but there is a deeper logic at work here. In the various versions of the myth of an immigrant America, it is — as was the case with Ruth— the immigrant’s foreignness that positions him to reinvigorate the national democracy, and that foreignness is undecidable: our faith in a just economy, our sense of community or family, our consent-based sense of legitimacy, or our voluntarist vigor are so moribund that only a foreigner could reinvigorate them. But the dream of a national home, helped along by the symbolic foreigner, in turn animates a suspicion of immigrant foreignness at the same time. “ Their” admirable hard work and boundless acquisition puts “us” out of jobs. “Their” good, reinvigorative communities also look like fragmentary ethnic enclaves. “Their” traditional family values threaten to overturn our still new and fragile gains in gender equality. “Their” voluntarist embrace of America, effective only to the extent that they come from elsewhere, works to reaffirm but also endangers “our” way of life. The foreigner who shores up and reinvigorates the regime also unsettles it at the same time. Since the presumed test of both a good and a bad foreigner is the measure of her contribution to the restoration of the nation rather than, say, to the nation’s transformation or attenuation, nationalist xenophilia tends to feed and (re)produce nationalist xenophobia as its partner.

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
12
Cultural Assimilation
Rites of renaturalization reenact the regime’s ideologically approved origins, obscuring the nonconsensual and ascriptive bases and present-day practices of American democracy.
The broadcasting (on television, in the nation’s newspapers) of this verbal, visible path to citizenship remarginalizes the varied, often violent, sources of the republic (slavery, conquest, appropriations, and constitutional conventions), and it recenters the regime on a voluntarism that most citizens and residents never experience directly. The scene may even excite in some citizens a sympathetic denaturalization that enhances their sympathetic renaturalization
(just as many married couples effectively renew their vows when they go to other people’s weddings, reexperiencing the pleasure of the gaze of the state and the community upon marital union). But this (symbolic) “solution” to the problem of consent generates problems of its own. It places the legitimacy of the regime (and its claimed universality as a republic or a democracy) in the hands of foreigners who may or may not close the gap of consent for “us.” This is a problem because many newcomers do not satisfy the national need to be chosen—many do not seek citizenship . And those who do naturalize do not simply solve the legitimacy problem; they also inadvertently highlight it by simultaneously calling attention to the fact that most American citizens never consent to the regime. (We saw the same dynamic at work in Strictly Ballroom , where Australian masculinity was both refurbished and also perpetually undone by the importation of masculinity from the Old World.) In any case, even (or especially) when immigrants do prop up the national fantasy of consent worthiness, the regime’s fundamental (un acknowledged) dependence upon foreigners produces an anxiety that finds expression in a displaced anxiety about foreigners’ dependence upon us
(an anxiety that, of course, erases the regime’s dependence upon foreignness).
Thus, it comes as no surprise that in Schuck and Smith’s book (and in American political culture, more generally: the book is deeply symptomatic), the good, consenting immigrant, the model of proper, consensual American citizenship, is shadowed by the bad immigrant , the illegal alien who undermines consent in two ways: He never consents to
American laws, and “we” never consent to his presence on “our” territory. Schuck and Smith’s illegal takes things from us and has nothing to offer in return. He takes up residence without permission; he is interested in social welfare state membership (the proverbial bank account), not citizenship (except for instrumental purposes having to do with securing access to social welfare goods); she takes services without payment (the example repeatedly invoked is that of illegals’ unpaid maternity bills at Los Angeles hospitals). 58 In short, the “illegal” in Schuck and Smith’s text slides from being a person defined by a juridical status that positions him as always already in violation of the (immigration) law into being a daily and wilfull lawbreaker.

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
13
Cultural Assimilation
Istvan, Assimilation and Optimal Immigration,” http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-p/wp507.pdf.
The economic profession has been quick to analyze some of the consequences of the new migration wave . The emphasis has tended to be on the economic progress of immigrants and their impact on the host country economy . In the labor literature, issues studied include the e ff ect of migration on the wages of low skilled workers and on the welfare state, and the economic assimilation of immigrants in the host country. Researchers in international trade also looked at the economic impact of immigration, and they have explored the connection between foreign trade and immigration . Given the substantial amount of work in this area, we now have a good understanding of these issues . But immigration also has important non-economic e ff ects on immigrants and natives. In practice discussion among non-economists centers on issues that economists have largely ignored, such as cultural frictions and clashes. Sowell (1996) documents the experience of various immigrant groups throughout history. A recurring theme is that immigrants and natives with different cultures and languages experience frictions in intergroup encounters. Hostility between immigrants and natives can often be traced back to economic reasons, since (as Sowell points out ) immigrants tend to hurt vo- cal native interest groups.
But the fact that immigrants can be singled out, based on their di ff erent cultural and other characteristics and not on their economic e ff ect, indicates that these cultural di ff erences matter to people . In contemporary Europe, anti-immigrant sentiments are just as strong in low- unemployment Switzerland as they are in high-unemployment Belgium. Clearly, to study the full impact of immigration one has to look beyond the traditional economic factors .

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
14
Cultural Assimilation
, Professor at Chapman University School of Law, California.
John, Yale Law Journal, “Performing whiteness naturalization litigation and the construction of racial identity in America.”, lexis
The doctrines found in the racial-prerequisite cases are not merely a curiosity of our past.
Rather, they continue to resonate in the law today in the form of racial-definition games. Courts
(and legislatures) continue to put themselves in a position where they must determine racial categorizations in order to determine the outcomes of lawsuits.
As the prerequisite cases earlier this century demonstrate, such a venture into racial determination is dangerous, for the ambiguous notion of race often leaves courts free to fiddle with cases to achieve unjust ends.
This potential for danger has been realized in a number of suits brought under 42 U.S.C. [sections] 1981 and [sections] 1982

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
15
Cultural Assimilation
associate professor of education and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania
Kathleen D., “BEING HERE AND BEING THERE: FIELDWORK ENCOUNTERS AND ETHNOGRAPHIC
DISCOVERIES,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , September, #595, 80-90
What Nancy Fraser has characterized as " the eclipse of a socialist imaginary centered on terms such as
'interest,' 'exploitation,' and 'redistribution'" has brought to light a new political imaginary--a politics founded in notions of "identity," "difference," "cultural domination," and "resistance"
(Fraser 1997, 11). Social-justice discourse , which in the past had privileged class and socioeconomic inequities, has been reconfigured, informing politics that now target cultural domination--forms of disadvantage and disrespect, misrecognition and social exclusion rooted in attributions of difference . This emphasis on cultural injustice, in the words of Charles Taylor (1992), assumes that nonrecognition or misrecognition ... can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, reduced mode of being.
Beyond simply lack of respect , it can inflict a grievous wound, saddling people with crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy but a vital human need . (p. 25) Across this political terrain, "cultural recognition has displaced socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle" (Taylor
1992, 11 ). The political discourse of cultural recognition differentiates people into "members of discrete ethnic, linguistic, and other cultural groups" in need of "public recognition and preservation of particular cultural identities " (Gutmann 1992, 9). Within this political imaginary, subordinate peoples gain the power to claim rights on the basis of cultural, religious, or linguistic authenticity in conflicts ranging from battles over indigenous land rights to contests over language education policies (Turner 1994).

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
16
Cultural Assimilation
prof of law at Florida Coastal School of Law
(Douglas, Brigham Young Univ LR, l/n)
Hegemony as described above is one aspect of control, the other being physical force. When both modes of domination are working at full steam, the system amounts to what Gramsci characterized as a "Centaur," half human and half animal, corresponding to the dual poles of force and consent, state and civil society. If this is so, we cannot look for domination solely in the state but must seek it also in the popular imagination, the education system, the work of intellectuals, religion, art, and even in the mundane reaches of common sense. Thus, he concludes that "the foundation of a directive class... (i.e. of a
State) is equivalent to the creation of a Weltanschauung," a dominant worldview.
If Gramsci is correct,
.
" By contrast,
.
This does not mean that physical force is replaced by reeducation camps but rather that
. Here we are reminded of William Burroughs' quip, "A functioning police state needs no police," n37 meaning that
.

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
17
Cultural Assimilation
lecturer at School of Humanities & Social Sciences,Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ANTONIO GRAMSCI: BEYOND MARXISM AND POSTMODERNISM, p. 189-190.
The impulses for change, so he writes, do not come from the intellectuals, although the various intellectual strata are functional, both in the producing, to various degrees and in various ways, of world-views and values conducive to the spontaneous consent of the masses to the status quo, as well as in the producing of counter-hegemonies to this status quo.
The impulses for democratic change do not arise from privilege. They arise form the underprivileged, from the exploited masses, from the poor, from the politically, socially, culturally and economically marginalized.
In Gramsci's account, lower-strata intellectuals interpreted these impulses, perhaps provided them with direction. And higher-strata intellectuals, often eminent public figures as well, balance the sheet, mostly in the form of justifications , between the interests of power and the lower strata of intellectuals. I am not prepared to translate Gramsci's sociological and psychological assessment of his reality into ours. Perhaps it is not translatable. What I consider useful is his insight, corroborated by my own experiences in the feminist struggle, that impulses for change do not arise from privilege, but from underprivilege. On this note, what I would like to propose is this: 'the structure of feeling' we move in, the tradition of progressive and liberal thought, is extraordinarily flexible and allows us to speak and perhaps even understand some dialects of the underdeveloped world. As intellectuals, we might be able to function as mediators between the needs and desires of developing cultures, and the mandarins of our establishments. Yet this 'structure of feeling', which allows us to communicate with global power and global powerlessness, is grounded on more than a dual activity. While it enables us to look critically at Eurocentrism, androcentrism, logocentricity and western systems of justice and rationality, it is also a structure which bespeaks our complicity in the exploitation of the underdeveloped and developing world. In spite of the various struggles we undertake against domination, our bodies move, none the less, in immense privilege, inordinately saturated with material and cultural goods, technology and consumer products on a scale incommensurable with that which governs the practices of everyday life for millions of people.

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
18
Cultural Assimilation
associate professor of education and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania
Kathleen D., “BEING HERE AND BEING THERE: FIELDWORK ENCOUNTERS AND ETHNOGRAPHIC
DISCOVERIES,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , September, #595, 80-90
It is curious that questions of nationalism and of the making of nationalist identities have largely been absent from much of the sociological literature on becoming American . Nationalism has been a taken-for-granted and, hence, largely undertheorized backdrop for analyzing assimilation and acculturation. It is "the host society" to which immigrants adapt and "American culture "--however heterogeneous-to which they eventually acculturate . The nation--the boundaries of which imply the very terms of distinction between migrant and immigrant--is reified as an enduring context within which the immigrant experience takes place. This reification of the nation and of nationalism limits our ability to explain fully the cultural dynamics of immigrant incorporation. What is needed , I argue, is a multisited ethnographic analysis of how national boundaries and ethnic identities are created, circulated, debated, and contested across social contexts and levels of scale . n2
Ethnographic research should consider not only how immigrants are incorporated but also how
" incorporation regimes " themselves are culturally produced (Soysal 1994). Turning to issues of nation
[*110] building directs our ethnographic attention to cultural politics in the public sphere where immigrant statuses are defined and debated, citizen rights and responsibilities invoked, structural inequalities challenged, and cultural identifications created--to the cultural processes in which immigrants are made and make themselves as citizens and new national imaginaries, eventually, are envisioned (Anderson 1983/1991).

ADI 2010
Fellows--Montee
19
Cultural Assimilation
Movements need myths. Activists can make up new myths, or they can take those already in existence and recycle them. The latter strategy is preferable because it takes advantage of existing cultural resources and simultaneously deprives opposing forces of the powerful narratives that would otherwise continue, uncontested, to support them in their nationalist objectives. The myth of an immigrant America can be turned from its nationalist functions to serve a democratic cosmopolitanism in which citizenship is not just a juridical status distributed
(or not) by states, but a practice in which denizens, migrants, residents, and their allies hold states accountable for their definitions and distributions of goods, powers, rights, freedoms, privileges, and justice.

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Cultural Assimilation
, Professor of Economics at Pace University-Westchester
October 10, Ghassan, http://epluribusunum11.blogspot.com/2009/10/is-assimilation-desirable.html
Some academics have even developed measures for assimilation and their studies show that the current immigrants do assimilate just as rapidly as those of a hundred years ago. It is also to be noted that what the “restrictionists” mean when they speak of assimilation ought to be rejected since their conception is best described as a linear process instead of the realistic dynamics that change both the new arrivals and the natives at the same time. Furthermore, even if old fashioned traditional assimilation was possible a century ago it is no longer plausible for the simple reason that immigration is not presently undertaken with the sole expectation that it is to be permanent. Temporary immigration is what explains immigrant remittances and the
“new economic theory of migration”.
Old fashioned assimilation, as a one way street, where the minority loses its identity in order to acquire the characteristics of the majority can succeed only in an undemocratic and hegemonic environment. We ought to celebrate its demise instead of decrying its death. Gracias amigos /as

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Cultural Assimilation
(Nyx; http://escapefromkipple.blogspot.com/2009/09/travel-log-15.html
I will explain. In Germany, I realized that because of the United States' natural order of acceptance of most (not all, because doctrine only goes so far), that I can be an American Jew and fully accepted. This is why I must not be one. I am, and proudly, a Jewish American. If it is a matter of Heimat, I was born in mine. Ethnically, I have another and I am en route, but I cast my votes primarily in the interest of the former. I am anti-Diaspora, another notion introduced to me in Germany. I bring my home with me and it is not attached necessarily to a physical place, but a spiritual one. I long for nowhere as home, except for America, because it is only there where
"in the beginning all the world was...". And I take it with me--American is everywhere, and I don't just mean commercially . The Dream is everywhere. American is made of everyone and in so, I can find it everywhere and take the brunt of the diatribe against me for knowing only one language, although that is soon to change.
I can go home and be home anywhere because that is the nature of America and "all come to look for" whether for good or for bad, whether for dreams of creation or destruction. I am aware that since America is composed of populations representing everyone from everywhere, it carries within it both the best and worst of all worlds. In turn, it creates a new one everyday.

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Cultural Assimilation
Psychological Services, Department for Community Welfare, Adelaide, Australia
Aldis L., http://www.lituanus.org/1980_4/80_4_08.htm, LITUANUS LITHUANIAN QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ARTS AND
SCIENCES Volume 26, No. 4 - Winter 1980
The model implicitly proposed by Kovacs and Cropley is undoubtedly an improvement upon the unidimensional model. However, they have only partially freed themselves from the constraints of the latter. While acknowledging that alienation from the ethnic group can occur without corresponding assimilation to the host group, they none the less consider that assimilation is impossible without at least an equivalent amount of alienation .2 The latter proposition, however, is only true for some aspects of immigrant adjustment. In many areas, particularly those most important in defining ethnicity for the majority of European immigrant groups, such as language and ethnic identification,3 such a proposition is clearly false. An immigrant can learn to speak the host language fluently without in any way diminishing his competence in the ethnic tongue; thus he can assimilate in an important area and not lose any of his ethnicity.
Similarly, just as an immigrant can alienate in terms of his self-identification from the ethnic group without assimilating to the host group, there is no logical reason which prevents identification with both host and immigrant groups simultaneously . This involves not just feeling half host and half ethnic, but to feel strong identification with both the ethnic and host groups (as a child may identify with both parents). Such a state is found most frequently in persons who emigrated at an early age or who were born to immigrant parents after their arrival in the host country. The model which more adequately describes these instances of immigrant adjustment is illustrated in Figure 3.

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Cultural Assimilation
Psychological Services, Department for Community Welfare, Adelaide, Australia
Aldis L., http://www.lituanus.org/1980_4/80_4_08.htm, LITUANUS LITHUANIAN QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ARTS AND
SCIENCES Volume 26, No. 4 - Winter 1980
As can be seen, the ethnic and host groups are placed on dimensions orthogonal to each other.4 While it still remains true that in many instances alienation and assimilation will tend to approximately equal each other, that is most persons will be found on or near the diagonal arrow, the model none the less allows for those cases where alienation and assimilation occur independently of each other, as in the case of highly alienated and highly integrated persons. The model can be expanded to include other dimensions, such as a second ethnic group or, since both ethnic and host groups are seldom completely homogeneous, subgroups within these groups. Furthermore , since the processes of adjustment by immigrants occur in a number of different areas which need not always be closely related to each other, to accurately describe an individual would require independently applying the above model to the various facets involved.
The main distinction between the multi-dimensional model and the model employed by
Kovacs and Cropley is that the former makes allowance for assimilation, at least in some areas, without the necessity of alienation. This point alone should surely be of considerable importance to those dealing with immigrants. It would appear that the pressures frequently exerted upon immigrants to give up their traditional ways, so as to be able to assimilate into the host group, may be unnecessary since it is possible to adopt at least some of the host group characteristics without rejecting one's ethnicity.

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Cultural Assimilation
Istvan, Assimilation and Optimal Immigration,” http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-p/wp507.pdf.
The literature on optimal migration has not explored the role of cultural di ff erences. Two path-breaking articles (Lazear
1995, Lazear 1996), how- ever, look at cultural externalities and assimilation from a partial equilibrium point of view.
Lazear models interaction between immigrants and natives as random matching. I depart from his model by explicitly considering the mi- gration decision. Lazear treats the size and composition of an immigrant group as exogenous, which might be the case for some specific groups (most notably, refugees). In general, however, immigrants are self- selected along many dimensions, among them the capability to assimilate. It is reasonable to expect that those who actually migrate are the ones who can learn the new culture easier.
Migration and assimilation decisions are not independent, but arise from the same fundamentals , and my model traces both back to these fundamentals. The importance of endogenizing migration is high- lighted when we look at policies such as assimilation subsidies to immigrants. In Lazear’s partial equilibrium framework assimilation subsidies can be used to implement the first best. When migration is endogenous this is no longer the case, because assimilation subsidies fail to select the immigrants who should come in the first place.

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Fellows--Montee
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Cultural Assimilation
, Professor Of Rhetoric At UC-Berkeley
[Pheng, “Given Culture,” Cosmopolitics: Thinking And Feeling Beyond The Nations, Eds. Pheng Cheah & Bruce Robbins, P. 302-
303]
My position on hybridity theory can be summed up as follows. First, as a paradigm of postcolonial agency in globalization, hybridity is a closet idealism. It is an anthropologistic culturalism, a theory of resistance that reduces the complex givenness of material reality to its symbolic dimensions and underplays the material institution of neocolonial oppression at a global-systemic level. Second , as a new internationalism or cosmopolitanism, it is feasible only to the extent that it remains confined to metropolitan migrancy and forecloses the necessity of the postcolonial nation-state as a precarious agent that defends against neocolonial global capitalist accumulation.
Third, there is a fundamental link between this new cosmopolitanism and cultural-ism .
Hybrid cosmopolitanisms can ignore the necessity of the nation-state precisely because they regard cultural agency as unmoored from , or relatively independent of, the field of material forces that engenders culture.
26 They privilege migrancy as the most radical form of transformative agency in contemporary globalization because , for them, it is the phenomenal analogue of hybrid freedom from the given .
As Bhabha puts it, "The great connective narratives of capitalism and class drive the engines of social reproduction, but do not, in themselves, provide a fundamental framework for thosemodes of cultural identification and political affect that form around issues of the lifeworld of refugees or migrants" (LC, 6).
However , as purported analyses of globalization , these accounts of trans-formative agency and cosmopolitanism sadly miss the mark. For although the meaning and symbols of neocolonial culture are unmotivated, their materialization through economic and political institutional structures in an unequal global order means that they cannot be translated, reinscribed, and read anew in the ways suggested by theories of hybridity.
For thoroughgoing global transformation to occur, some recourse to the ambivalent agency of the postcolonial nation-state and, therefore, to nationalism and national culture seems crucial even as we acknowledge that this agency is not autarchical but inscribed within a global force field .
Clifford is not entirely unaware of this, since he notes that he has not gone far enough in reconceiving practices of dwelling in a transnational context (TC, 115). My point is that in the current conjuncture, such practices of dwelling, if they are to be mass based, necessarily engender a national consciousness rather than a cosmopolitanism, no matter how "discrepant." To comprehend the possibility of the national-in-thecosmopolitical—and I use this awkward phrase to indicate a condition of globality that, in the current conjuncture, is short of a mass-based cosmopolitan consciousness—we need to understand postcolonial national culture in terms other than as an immutable organic substrate or as an ideological form imposed from above, a constraint to be transcended by the formation of an emancipatory cosmopolitan consciousness.

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Cultural Assimilation K
, Professor of English And Comparative Literature At Rutgers ,
[Bruce, “Introduction Part I,” Cosmopolitics: Thinking And Feeling Beyond The Nations, Eds. Pheng Cheah & Brucerobbins, P. 2]
Usages like these mark a change the consequences of which seem both significant enough and ambiguous enough to warrant furthe r inquiry. The "very old ideal of the cosmopolitan," in Martha Nussbaum's words, referred to "the person whose al legiance is to the worldwide community of human beings. According to this ideal , there could be only one cosmopolitanism, for there is only one "worldwide community of human beings." Kant's dream of a cosmopolitan point of view leading to perpetual peace could thus be invoked only as a defiant reassertion of Greek or Enlightenment values, of
(European) philosophical universalism.
In this sense the term seemed to offer a clear-cut contrast to nationalism. Now, to judge from the new usages, that commonsensical opposition is no longer self-evident. Like nations, cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular. Like nations, they are both European and non-European, and they are weak and underdeveloped as well as strong and privileged.
And again like the nation, cosmopolitanism is there—not merely an abstract ideal , like loving one's neighbor as oneself, but habits of thought and feeling that have already shaped and been shaped by particular collectivities, that are socially and geographically situated, hence both limited and empowered . Difficult as it may be to make a plural for "cosmos," it is now assumed more and more that worlds, like nations, come in different sizes and styles. Like nations, worlds too are "imagined. For better or worse, there is a growing consensus that cosmopolitanism sometimes works together with nationalism rather than in opposition to it. It is thus less clear what cosmopolitanism is opposed to, or what its value is supposed to be.

ADI 2010
Fellows
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Cultural Assimilation K
, Professor Of Rhetoric At UC-Berkeley, 1998
[Pheng, “Given Culture,” Cosmopolitics: Thinking And Feeling Beyond The Nations, Eds. Pheng Cheah & Bruce Robbins, P. 310-311]
In macrosociological terms, postcolonial national identity formation is in part a response to neocolonial economic globalization. The uneven accumulation of capital and distribution of wealth and resources on a global scale exacerbates the unequal distribution of political power and economic resources within decolonised countries. At the same time, globalization is accompanied by the spread of a political culture that historically emerged in the West: human rights, women's rights, equality, democratization, and so on. This intersection of cultural change and economic decline leads to resentment and resistance on the part of disadvantaged groups who may use "cultural resources to mobilize and organize opposition . . . even though a motivation and cause of opposition is economic and social disadvantage" (IP, 8). Political elites may also draw on "tradition" or "intrinsic cultural values" to justify their actions and maintain hegemony, sometimes overemphasizing cultural issues such as religion, morality, cultural imperialism, and women's appearance to divert attention from economic failures and social inequality. As
Moghadam notes with regard to Islamic reassertions: " Culture, religion, and identity are thus both defense mechanisms and the means by which the new order is to be shaped.
Islamist movements appear to be archaic but in fact combine modern and premodern discourses, means of communication and even political institutions[, and] . . . must therefore be seen as both reactive and proactive " It would be precipitous to dismiss all postcolonial national-cultural re-assertions as fanaticist pathologies or statist ideologies. In the first place, they are not necessarily religious or confined to Islamic Middle Eastern states with economies weakened by the falling price of oil . Reassertions of national-cultural identity occur in most postcolonial states, ranging from weak neocolonial African states to the high-performing newly industrializing economies of East and Southeast Asia. The seemingly undivided stand by Asian governments in rejecting intervention by Northern states over human rights issues at the Vienna Convention on the basis of cultural differences is in small part a collective assertion of postcolonial national sovereignty in response to the history of colonialism and the inequality of contemporary North-South relations.39 Hence Islamic fundamentalist nationalism ought to be analyzed alongside the
Confucian chauvinism championed by the Singaporean government as the basis of the East Asian path of global capitalist development as cases of postcolonial nationalism in the New World Order. Moreover , these cultural reassertions are not necessarily ideological constructions of state elites, because they also express the needs of disadvantaged social groups in changing economic conditions.
Although nongovernmental organizations from the South concerned with human rights have rejected the position of Asian states on human rights, they have also been careful to distinguish their criticisms of their own governments from the position of Northern governments by asserting the need to respect cultural differences and the urgency of establishing an equitable international economic order and interstate system. The resistance to global forces promised by contemporary rearticulations of postcolonial national culture is , however, severely curtailed by the fact that they arise in response to economic processes and can be manipulated by state elites in the indirect service of post-Fordist global capital.
We know that, in part, decolonization failed because it involved the devolution of state power to local and regional actors who used this power to attract investment and expand production within a transnational economic system of surplus extraction .
Similarly, much contemporary official postcolonial nationalist ideology is aimed at fostering social cohesion to attract foreign direct investment and providing cheap female labor for multinational-owned industries in free trade zones.