Cultural Assimilation

The term cultural assimilation applies to the incorporation of ethnic minorities into mainstream society. Members of an ethnic group, as well as foreigners, are required to adhere to the customs, attitudes, and values of the dominant group in cases of classical assimilation. Assimilation is the product of cultures that do not accept separate cultural and racial backgrounds. The racial traits of the minority are lost as a result of assimilation. Such occurrences are diametrically opposed to multiculturalism, which accepts, encourages, and supports ethnic diversity within a community. Milton Gordon, an American sociologist argues around three assimilation models in the US in the theory of assimilation, melting pot, Anglo conformity, and cultural pluralism (Gordon, 1964). According to him, Anglo conformity determines cases where ethnic minorities must accept values and norms of the dominant groups as superior. Melting pot determines the society where different ethnicities will fuse and create a new cultural identity. Cultural pluralism encompasses how immigrant and ethnic groups retain their cultural identities.

The various forms of assimilation are behavioral assimilation/acculturation and structural/socioeconomic assimilation. Behavioral assimilation happens when members of an ethnic minority embrace cultural values and norms of majority groups. An example of acculturation is the acquisition of citizenship of a host country or learning their language. In this case, immigrants have to detach themselves from their beliefs and traditions and adopt cultural identities of the new country. Structural assimilation happens through the integration of the ethnic minority representatives into the political, social, cultural and economic circles of the host country. This kind of assimilation enables these minority group representatives to reach higher status, enjoy benefits endowed the mainstream groups and have access to better pay for their labor. Assimilation happens through the transformation of particular cultural elements such as symbols, language, values, beliefs and norms.

Assimilation Theory

For many decades, assimilation theory has been critiqued and applied in the efforts to understand the nature, patterns and the composition of assimilation (Alba & Nee, 2006). Thus, the theory provides deeper and cumulative findings regarding the incorporation of culturally diverse immigrants together with their descendants. It is argued that, the assimilation theory still clangs on its utility to understand contemporary immigration patterns. Assimilation is seen to be falling into a disrepute. When pointing to an essay with the title “Is Assimilation Dead?” Nathan (1993, pp. 122-136) provides a summary of the temporary perspective: “Assimilation today is not a popular term.” According to some Havard students as Glazer puts, they believed that “the majority had a negative reaction to it.” Hence, rejecting assimilation is not a question of students alone but attracts great schorlars, academicians, and researchers.

Whatsoever the exact conceptions and words are with regard to the assimilation, the basic idea is to understand the nature of assimilation in the American experience. The significance of assimilation in the scientific comprehension of immigration can be pointed back to Chicago School at the beginning of the early century. It is during this time that assimilation is understood as a social science and emerges at the high points of the previous eras of immigrations and through the means of observations in Chicago, first and second cohorts constitute what is called the dominant majority (Nathan, 1993). Despite the many confusions surrounding the diverse constructions of assimilation in previous sociological literature, Milton Gordon, in his book, Assimilation in American Life provides systematic dissections of assimilation concept. The multidimensional formulations he embraces proves it necessity as it leads to operationalization and the hypothetical formulations pivotal for middle-range research activities. Gordon conception of the seven dimensions presents a critical distinction over his conceptual schemes regarding acculturation and the structural assimilation. Most of the distinction and emphasis of Gordon’s work particularly indicates some kind of individual primary-group attachments, and this indicates one of the limitation of his conceptual understanding of assimilation, which is oriented on microsociological accounts of assimiltion lacking in integration between the broad social processes.

Besides the seven conceptual models presented by Gordon, Sandberg (1973) and Gans (1973) introduces the straight-line assimilation, which adds considerable dynamic dimension to Gordon’s static formulations. It envisions the processes that unfold sequentially in generational steps, where each represents avarege new stages of adjustments to fit the host country, a step which is away from the ethnic”ground zero,”a culture and community established by the immigrants and another step that yields to complete assimilation. Thus, the implication of this idea is the generations being the motors for changes in ethnic values, norms, traditions and beliefs and not the timeframes within which the process of assimilation takes place. Moreover, the straight line assimilation concept provides an understanding on how the generations have distinctive nature of issues in their relationships with larger groups, and the tendency of their resolutions bringing patterns that allow accomondation of immigrants.

The main concern of assimilation theorists on assimilation is the tendency of the immigrants taking over generations slowly shifting from their original cultural patterns. According to multiculturalists, cultural elements of immigrants become consistently reformed along processes of integration and thus do not dissapear completely. Structuralists reinforce the implications of economic structures of the host country on the basis of the immigrants capacity to integrate into the cultural attitudes and the share of economic benefits (Yann Algan, 2010). Depending on factors such as politics, history and geography, all theories of assimilation will require different explanations and the weight of their application will depend on the region they are used.

Incorporation of Migrants into a Host Country using Assimilation

In the United States, assimilation remain a major issue due to the diverse nature of subsequent large waves of immigration and early settlers. In every five colonialists, four belonged to dominant ethnic group, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, otherwise referred to as WASPS. Over centuries, white societies established a unified form of a community while the non-white and new migrants differed from the dominant majority groups. On past decades, non-European ancestry population has increased considerably a situation attributed to the certain ethnic groups and immigrants having higher birth rates compared to whites. This dynamism in reality has resulted to changes in the nature of identity concepts, education and history. Assimilation policies have been influenced by institutions such as when Jewish groups were able to convince the City Council of New York to impose sanctions for taxation to higher education institutions that discriminated students based on their religion and race.

In the United States of America, one of the most pressing issue is whether to accept poor immigrants especially from Mexico. In Western Europe there has been parallel political differences regarding the welcoming of migrants from Eastern Europe and Africa (Callan, 2007). All this situations presents critics with controversies over if assimilation and integration of immigrants presents particular benefits or challenges to country. Each of the controversies is compounded through disagreements on best ways of incorporating immigrants into the host country. The wisdom and justice involving policies in well-off countries does not have a connection to wisdom or justice that encourages immigrants to be faithful to the cultured they have inherited or adaptation to the new environment in a manner that might suggest they are undermining that culture. The acquainted constellation over the perceptions regarding political immigration leaves both Europe and the US to work on advocacy measures that takes into consideration the porosity of borders and policies that encourage assimilation. However, such a combination yields mistakes across borders that may result to illegal immigrants. The extent to which assimilation can be used in US to incorporate new immigrants can be looked based on costs and the formidability of obstacles in integrating those immigrants into the fabric of the American culture. It should be understood that integration is accompanied with extensive assimilation. Understanding that assimilation happens all the time new immigrants have to be incorporated in the host country culture lays the basis of formulating policies that entail the kind of life the immigrants lead. Nevertheless, the assimilative implications of integration that majority of immigrants refer to as profoundly unfortunate fails to justify policies, which could provide state-sponsored options of for integration. When referring to some influential idea by Will Kymlicka (Dick, 2006), “societal culture”, we capture the fact that a societal culture is “a set of institutions, which has historically developed over time in a given territory, covering both private and public life, with common language, which provides people with a wide range of choices about how to lead their lives.” (Kymlicka, 2000). In other terms, culture refers to a way of life less or more self-consciously shared by a particular group of people. Correspondingly, the idea of abandoning a culture and joining another does not have a tight linkage to migration since similar ways of living can be lived in a different society and a particular society can harbor diverse cultures with some having similar way of life. These rules over assimilation as a better method of incorporating immigrants into a particular host country. According to Callan (2007), incorporation of immigrants is better achieved into a host country through integration rather than assimilation. For instance when uneducated migrants are driven by the desire to succeed in their host country, they might be engaged into repertoire of customs and skills without the need for subtraction from their existing repertoire (Callan, 2007). Such as a situation is not assimilation but rather additive acculturation. One of the obvious examples is learning the host country’s language. This appears a duanting test. But immigrants do not have to leave their native languages and it is only appaling regimes will attempt to impose such requirements. Nonetheless, if some immigrants become bilingual through linguistic integration, their achievement may not be replicated in their children, or their grandchildren forcing a complete or partial assimilation in several generations after their arrival through the additive acculturation.

Winant and Omi observed ethnicity and race as distinct conceptions and disputed the existing ethnicity theory, which entails the US elaboration of how Eastern and Southern European immigrants moved from one country to another due to cultural assimilation (Janoski, Alford, Hicks, & Mildred, 2005). They asserted that, cultural assimilation was inadequate to describe patterns of the white-black disparities within the US. Hartman and Cornel were in agreement with Winant and Omi on the grounds of ethnicity and race theories being distinct and that these theories fail in mutual exclusiveness. Soysal Yasemin offers a concrete description of immigrant assimilation and the critical role politics play in assimilation. It is Soysal who developed the notion of “incorporation regime” which draws on the aspects of immigration and the law of naturalization. She focused her ideas on the response of organizations on immigrant communities around discrimination, and the ensuing incorporation into statist, liberal, and corporatist regimes. In Sweden, the corporatist regime gave support and protection of the interests of the immigrants who consituted their ethnic line and long-term promotion of their interests using lobbying. According to Soysal, such strategies resulted to distinctive immigration policies. France on the other hand practiced statist regime and thus respected assimilation. However, France does not allow immigrant associations since the state offers little funding and maintains immigrants at arm’s length and reducing their influence in several state operations and activities. The United States and Canada practice liberal regimes that neither discourage nor encourage the formation of groups. In this regime, immigrants can influence political processes similar to other associations (Janoski, Alford, Hicks, & Mildred, 2005).

Immigrant integration topic continue attracting different thoughts from different experts. Accordin to the article by Zehr (2008), President Bush had given an executive order to establish a ‘Task Force for the New Americans” inside DHS to aid immigrants discover a home in the American society. The aim of the task force was to assist immigrants embrace and adopt a joint core of the American civic culture, learn the American language, and to fully transform to Americans. In the recent times, the law makers came up with a bill in the Congress that intended to provide suppirt to the immigrants when learning their English language and civic laws. The bill called for the office of immigrant integration and citizenship (Zehr, 2008). But people like Maark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies that curtails immigration in the US uses the word assimilation and critizes the US government of failing to insist on the English primacy globally.

For many critiques, assimilation is not the best method for incorporating immigrants into the US. Assimilation is used n countries with atrocious regimes but not in liberal countries like the US. Thus, in US, integration enables immigrants play critical roles in the American society irrespective of whether they are willing or not willing to adopt American culture. However, much as assimilation is advocated, it happens along the course of time since they will continously interact with the dominant culture. The central idea surrounding the entire concept of incorporation should however not be based on complete or partial embracing of norms, values, traditions, and beliefs of a country but should be directed to create ways that foster loyalty and identity for the United States of America.







































References

Alba, R., & Nee, V. (2006). Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration. International Migration Review, 31(4).

Callan, E. (2007). IMMIGRATION, INTEGRATION, AND ASSIMILATION. published online. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwigmIPY49rSAhXqJ8AKHfcwDL0QFgguMAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mit.edu%2F~shaslang%2Fmprg%2FCallanIIA.pdf&usg=AFQjCNEOSKQVKqlnQJAN7URyksHwtVjyRA&sig2=VedaFIL02JH2uDGCHjZFzA

Dick, C. (2006). Kymlicka's Cultural Theory of Group-Differentiated Rights: Ramifications for the Rights Claims of Gays and Lesbians. Ontario, Canada: The University of Western Ontario.

Gans, H. (1973). "Introduction." In Ethnic Identity and Assimilation. In N. Sanberg, The Polish Community. New York: Praeger.

Gordon, M. (1964). Assimilation in American Life: the Role of Race, Religion and National Origins. New York, US: Oxford University Press.

Janoski, T., Alford, R., Hicks, A., & Mildred, A. S. (2005). The Handbook of Political Sociology: States, Civil Societies, and Globalization. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo: Cambridge University Press.

Kymlicka, W. (2000). Politics in the Vernacular. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Last Name, F. M. (Year). Article Title. Journal Title, Pages From - To.

Last Name, F. M. (Year). Book Title. City Name: Publisher Name.

Nathan, G. (1993). Is Assimilation Dead. The Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Sciences, 530, 122-126.

Sandberg, N. (1973). Ethnic Identity and Assimilation: The Polish Community . New York: Praeger.

Yann Algan, A. B. (2010). CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION: Perspectives on Cultural Integration of Immigrants. published online. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjrw5XfqtrSAhUpJ8AKHaf6DlMQFgglMAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fecon.sciences-po.fr%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Ffile%2Fyann%2520algan%2FIntroduction.pdf&usg=AFQjCNE-dw3RVMUvyUNyn

Zehr, M. A. (2008, August 4). Immigrant Integration, or Assimilation? Education Week. Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2008/08/immigrant_integration.html