Why immigrants assimilate

Its purpose was to welcome new residents to a community; hostesses would visit new residents with a gift basket of product samples contributed by local businesses and discount coupons for services.

They also included information on schools, the community and events. Importantly, the welcome pack also told them about health services and local government access. This concept flourished for more than 50 years. I think we should revisit this idea. Too often, officials see immigrants as a problem that needs to be administered, instead of an opportunity that we should all invest in. It could be the starting point for building bridges. Instead of isolation, we provide the tools for participation.

Crucially, we will succeed if we help immigrants combine the links in their ethnic community while building connections to their new home country around them. Forced assimilation simply does not work. Not for business. Not for society. We need to develop and deploy participation platforms that ensure immigration results not in problems but opportunities.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. Should governments do more to combat the climate crisis? For 60 years, Antarctica has seen strong global cooperation. But without hitting ambitious targets at COP26, it will significantly disrupt global systems.

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License and Republishing. Written by. More on Global Governance View all. This is what people think policymakers should do to tackle climate change Should governments do more to combat the climate crisis? Johnny Wood 10 Nov Antarctica has benefitted from extraordinary global cooperation. But let me examine these more closely. Yet Salins seems to have much more in mind than immigrants just learning to speak English, which is what most Americans focus on.

Unfortunately, he never really elaborates. Perhaps Salins understands that one can speak English but nevertheless remain emotionally attached to a second language—even, or perhaps especially—when one does not speak it. Yet battles over English acquisition persist.

As a result, linguistic assimilation sometimes fuels efforts to regain the language and heritage that has been lost. Having just completed his first semester at Yale, this young man was pleased to be at home for the Christmas holidays and eager to tell an Anglo visitor from back East about his Mexican heritage. Since he had grown up miles from the Mexican border, I assumed this fellow was more or less fluent in Spanish.

So, when I happened to inquire, I was surprised to hear him suddenly lower his voice. No, he replied, he did not speak Spanish, but he considered the language a critical part of the Mexican culture he fervently wanted to hold onto. For this reason, I was assured, he would see to it that his future children would learn Spanish before English. Shortly thereafter, we parted. So I never had the chance to ask him how he intended to teach his children a language he himself did not speak.

Many Latino politicians and public figures grew up speaking only English, but have subsequently learned Spanish in order to maintain their leadership of a growing immigrant community.

A more subtle and intriguing example is the career of Selena, the Tejano singer who has emerged as a cultural icon among Mexican Americans since being murdered by a fan in The tragedy of Selena is that having conquered the Spanish-language Tejano music world, she died just as she was about to cross over to the English-language market.

The irony of Selena is that she was raised in Corpus Christi, it so happens speaking English and had to learn Spanish in order to become a Tejano star. Further evidence that English acquisition does not necessarily lead to the positive outcomes we expect, emerges from recent ethnographic research on the school performance of Latino adolescents.

Several such studies report that although newly arrived students experience significant adjustment problems attributable to their rural backgrounds, inadequate schooling, and poor English-language skills, their typically positive attitudes contribute to relative academic success.

Yet among Latino students born in the United States, the opposite is often the case. Despite fluency in English and familiarity with American schools, many such students are prone to adopt an adversarial stance toward school and a cynical anti-achievement ethic. My point is obviously not that learning English is to be avoided.

But insofar as it reflects assimilation into contemporary minority youth culture, English acquisition is not an unmixed blessing. They become like the others, their attitudes change. As for the Protestant work ethic of self-reliance, hard work, and moral rectitude, there is certainly evidence that some immigrants have been adopting it. A recent study by the RAND Corporation reveals that Japanese, Korean, and Chinese immigrants enter with wages much lower than those of native-born workers, but within 10 to 15 years these newcomers have reached parity with the native-born.

On the other hand, Mexican immigrants enter with very low wages and experience a persistent wage gap relative to the native-born, even after differences in education are taken into account. Now it is not at all clear why Mexican immigrants experience this persistent gap. Among immigrants generally, there are other trouble signs.

For example, welfare participation rates among immigrants have been climbing in recent years, though overall those rates are currently about the same as among non-immigrants. Some immigrants are clearly involved in criminal activities, though to what degree is subject to dispute. Such indicators are indeed troubling. But along with the ethnographic findings about Latino adolescents cited above, they do indicate that immigrants and their children are assimilating-but not always to the best aspects of American society.

The assimilation of newcomers has long been characterized by the emergence of new ethnic group identities in response to conditions in America. The classic example, of course, is how earlier this century European peasants left their villages thinking of themselves as Sicilians, Neapolitans, and the like, but after arriving here gradually came to regard themselves as they were regarded by Americans-as Italians.

Later, they, or more likely their children and grandchildren, came to see themselves as Italian-Americans. Andjust as with European-origin groups earlier this century, Americans are troubled by this assertion of group identity and fail to understand it as one step in the assimilation process. Still, there is one important difference between group categories like Italians earlier this century and Hispanics today. These are group-based claims of an extraordinary and unprecedented nature about which Americans have reason to be anxious.

But, once again, such group claims are in response to conditions here in the United States, specifically the incentives presented by our post-civil rights political institutions. To focus on one immigrant group-Mexican Americans-I would note that Mexicans in Mexico do not agitate for the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action. Mexicans engage in such efforts only here in the United States, and they do so because our institutions encourage them to. Perhaps even more to the point, such institutions and programs, originally established in response to the demands of black Americans, have been crafted by our political elites in the name of the very same liberal democratic and egalitarian values that Salins invokes.

The first is that assimilation is multidimensional. This point was made more than thirty years ago by sociologist Milton Gordon in his classic study, Assimilation in American Life. Even when these different facets of assimilation are acknowledged, they are typically depicted as parts of a smoothly synchronized process that operates in lock-step fashion. In particular, it is typically assumed that the social, economic, or cultural assimilation of immigrants leads directly to their political assimilation, by which is invariably meant traditional ethnic politics as practiced by European immigrants at the beginning of this century.

But as Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed many years ago in Beyond the Melting Pot, what makes sociological or economic sense for a group does not necessarily make political sense.

Certainly today, what makes political sense for immigrants is often at odds with their cultural, social, and economic circumstances. Take the situation of Mexican Americans, which term I use loosely to include all Mexican-origin individuals living in the United States. My research partners and I are in the process of investigating these questions.

Based on the existing literature and our own research, we hypothesize that the economic impact of immigration today may be different from the effects during the Age of Mass Migration.

Today, the competition between immigrants and natives may be less important because immigrants tend to cluster in a limited set of occupations at the top and bottom of income distribution. The historical evidence presented here should be considered with care.

Over the past half century, the U. The contemporary migration wave is highly regulated, favoring those with money, education, and skills and drawing migrants primarily from Asia and Latin America. Selection of immigrants today is often positive, meaning those who come here are more highly skilled than their compatriots who stay in their countries of origin.

In the past, immigrants were sometimes negatively selected, meaning they were less skilled than those who stayed behind. Finally, legal immigration now is accompanied by a large undocumented inflow, which complicates efforts to study immigration effects. Much work remains to be done to understand the cultural and economic dimensions of immigration and the differences between the past and the present.

My research colleagues and I recently got access to California birth certificate records, which will allow us to compare immigrants from current and historical periods to see whether assimilation patterns are similar. The evidence is clear that assimilation is real and measurable, that over time immigrant populations come to resemble natives, and that new generations form distinct identities as Americans.

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