[To appear in American Democracy and the Pursuit of Equality (Paradigm Publishers)]

The Melting and the Pots: Assimilations Bumpy Road1

Rubn G. Rumbaut

It is not always clear, however, what assimilation means. --Robert E. Park (1914: 606) The time has come to assert a higher ideal than the melting-pot We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed What we emphatically do not want is that [the immigrants] distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity. --Randolph Bourne (1916: 86-97) Yankee City illustrates much of what has happened and is happening to the minority groups all over America. Each group enters the city at the b ottom of the social heap (lower-lower class) and through the several generations makes its desperate climb upwards new ethnics will go through the same metamorphosis The mobile ethnic is much more likely to be assimilated than the non-mobile one. --W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole (1945: 2, 284) To what does one assimilate in modern America? The American in the abstract does not exist The point about the melting pot is that it did not happen The notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product has outlived its usefulness, and also its credibility. The persistent facts of ethnicity demand attention, understanding, and accommodation. --Nathan Gla zer and Daniel P. Moynihan (1963: xcvii, 20, 290) My essential thesis is that the sense of ethnicity has proved to be hardy the sense of ethnic belonging has survived In the careful distinction between cultural behavior and social structure lies one of the major keys to the understanding of what the assimilation process has actually been like American society has come to be composed of a number of pots, or subsocieties The entire picture may be called a multiple melting pot. --Milton M. Gordon (1964: 24-25, 67, 130-31) Despite predictions to the contrary, the 20th century turned out to be an ethnic century. --Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann (1998: 1) The culinary metaphor is an Anglo-Protestant tomato soup to which immigration adds celery, croutons, spices, parsley, and other ingredients that enrich and diversify the taste, but which are absorbed into what remains fundamentally tomato soup. --Samuel P. Huntington (2004: 129)
1

This essay takes off from and expands the argument in The Melting and the Pot: Assimilation and Variety in American Life, in Peter Kivisto, ed., Incorporating Diversity: Rethinking Assimilation in a Multicultural Era (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), pp. 154-173.

Assimilation, a protean concept with an American pedigree and a checkered past, is back in vogue. An Internet search of immigrant assimilation yields 2.8 million results in a fraction of a second. A bar graph displaying a timeline of relevant references since the 1850s shows a noticeable increase after 1880 and then a sharp increase after 1900, peaking in 1924, followed by a decline and a long plateau until the late 1980s, when references to immigrant assimilation increased sharply again, especially after 1993, peaking in 2006. An examination of a sample of periodicals and other publications across those decades shows that the meaning of assimilation has changed over time. In academic and colloquial usage, in social science, public policy and popular culture, the idea and the ideal of assimilation have had a bumpy history. Over time the term has conflated various empirical descriptions and normative prescriptions to make sense of the incorporation of ethnic difference in American life. After more than a century of use and misuse the term itself remains confusing and contentious. For a canonical concept, there remains surprising ambiguity as to its meaning, measurement and applicability. Some scholars have suggested using different concepts for empirical and normative purposesa solution for which it is probably too late (Gans 1997: 875)or considered dropping the term altogether (cf. Kivisto 2005). And yet, in a new era of mass immigration marked by an unprecedented diversity of national and class origins, with old questions being raised about the future of new American ethnic groups, the concept has reemerged, enlivened by intriguing and innovative reformulations, if still burdened by its malleability and imprecision. A leading economist has summarized the conventional wisdom as follows: The traditional view of the social mobility of immigrant households across generations is vividly encapsulated by the melting pot metaphor. In that view, immigrants from an array of diverse countries blend into a homogeneous native population relatively quickly, perhaps in two generations. Although many analysts have questioned the relevance of the melting pot image to the experience of many ethnic groups in the United States, it seems to have a magnetic and intuitive appeal that often confounds its detractors. As a result, the assimilationist perspective has long dominated the thinking of many observers of the immigrant experience. The author adds (as is done de rigueur in the literature) that classic expositions of the melting pot hypothesis are given by Robert Parkand Milton Gordon (Borjas 2006: 56, 69). This pithy statement captures different dimensions that are typically conflated by the term (cultural adaptations, economic mobility, social acceptance into a native mainstream), although in fact neither Parks nor Gordons conceptualizations of assimilation focused on socioeconomic mobility (or Progress), let alone on melting-pot homogeneity. Perennial debates about the incorporation (or excorporation, in some egregious cases) of immigrants and ethnoracial minorities in American society have not shed their well-worn feel of familiarity. In sociology, two general perspectives have grappled with that central themeand dilemmaof American history: assimilation and pluralism. The metaphor of the melting pot has typically been used to dramatize, legitimize and celebrate the first of thesethe acculturation and integration of immigrants and their descendantswhile distracting critical attention away from the actualities, inequalities, conflicts and potentialities of the second. For all of its vaunted melting, there has been 2

never been a single American pot; that singular image will remain a deeply flawed onesociologically as well as ideologicallyunless it can be applied inclusively, across social classes, interethnically and interracially. Yet inasmuch as the possibilities of social and cultural interminglings are greater than ever, a critical reassessment of processes and outcomes of assimilation in American life is worth undertaking, along withespecially given its perennial ambiguitya reconsideration of the concept itself (Gans 1992a; Alba and Nee 1997). In what follows I explore aspects of the history of the idea in American society and social science, of the ideology of the melting pot as a master frame and of the teleology of Progress underlying it; consider cultural, socioeconomic and identificational indicators of intergenerational change among contemporary ethnic groups; and raise questions about the limitations and paradoxes of the concept itself in the study of ethnicity and inequality in American life. The Evolution of Popular Meaning: From Transitive to Intransitive Verb The earliest uses of immigrant assimilation confirm Parks observation that it was a metaphor derived f om physiology to describe, as in a process of digestion and r nutrition, how alien peoples come to be incorporated with a community or state (1914: 611). As originally used, assimilation was a transitive verb, entailing the swallowing and digesting (by the incorporating community or state, the subject of the action) of alien peoples (the object) Thus, a May 19, 1852 article in the newly founded New York Times observed that The population of the United States is supplied by the world Assimilation in America, thanks to a healthy and useful digestion, is equal to the largest supplies of aliment Politically, the influx of life is only pernicious where the assimilative functions of labor and compensation are quiescent or disordered. A generation later, at the start of a new immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, the Times editorialized on May 15, 1880, that There is a limit to our powers of assimilation and when it is exceeded the country suffers from something very like indigestion We know how stubbornly conservative of his dirt and ignorance is the average immigrant who settles in New York these wretched beings change their abode, but not their habits in coming to New York. On November 27, 1892, the year that Ellis Island opened, a Times editorial asserted that Whereas the immigration we received up to 1880 was for the most part easy of assimilation to the American body politic, a very large part of that which has come to us since that date is inveterately alien It is not the Teutonic but the Slavic and the Latin elements in our new immigration of which we have reason to be afraid, and this even more upon social and political than upon economic grounds We cannot discriminate against nationalities, and yet we must discriminate among immigrants. In the Times of April 8, 1899, a letter to the editor entitled Anglo-Saxon Assimilation asserted:
It is a characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race that it can assimilate large foreign infusions without having its own race character essentially changed. It always preserves its identity But the assimilated races lose theirs. We do not compel or invite foreigners to come here and be assimilated. But if they do come, assimilated they must be. We shall certainly not allow them to assimilate us.

By August 9, 1903, another editorial in the Times noted that Little more than one half of the people of the country at the opening of the twentieth century are of American parentage Obviously the task of assimilation imposed on the American people is considerable. It was the American people who did the assimilating; it was up to the Anglo-Saxon race to absorb the foreigners. That was the meaning that Senator Alan Simpson, the ranking minority member of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Affairs, had in mind many decades later at a 1987 hearing when he referred to Hmong refugees from Laos as the most indigestible group in society (Fadiman 1997). By then Simpsons comment was jarring, for that usage had long since changed, as assimilation came increasingly if almost imperceptibly to be used as an intransitive verbreversing the focal subject and modifying the meaning of the predicate. It was now the aliens who were the subject of the action of adapting and changing themselves to American cultural standardsacculturating, as the process would later be called (cf. Redfield, Linton and Herkskovits 1936)and thereby embracing (or expected to embrace) a common national loyalty and identity. Thus in Chicago in 1914, with immigration unabated and the large majority of it residents consisting of immigrants and their children, Park (who saw the modern construction of national identities as entailing both the incorporative and the acculturative modes of intergroup change) could write that:
In America it has become proverbial that a Pole, Lithuanian, or Norwegian cannot be distinguished, in the second generation, from an American born of native parents As a matter of fact, the ease and rapidity with which aliens, under existing conditions in the United States, have been able to assimilate themselves to the customs and manners of American life have enabled this country to swallow and digest every sort of normal human difference, except the purely external ones, like color of the skin (1914: 608).

Americanization became the synonym of assimilationall the more during the national mobilizations for 100 percent Americanism spurred by World War I the , Bolshevik Revolution, and their aftermath (cf. Higham 1955). Popular usage reflected the dominant currents of thought of the times. Thus, in an era that saw the apogee of scientific racism and the eugenics movement, the headline of a major news story in the New York Times of December 17, 1909, declared that Immigration Commission Reports that Even Head Forms Assimilate in One Generation; Aliens Soon Get American Physique; Children of Long-Headed Sicilians and Round-Headed Jews Approach a Type Between the Two. It reported the findings of an investigation led by Franz Boas, founder of American Anthropology, measuring thousands of heads in New York City, indicating that not only the habits of living and ways of thinking but even the physical form of the children of foreigners tend toward assimilation. The article quoted the Commissions official synopsis: If the American environment can bring about an assimilation of the head forms in the first generation, may it not be that other characteristics may be as easily modified, and that there may be a rapid assimilation of widely varying nationalities and races to something that may well be called an American type? A week later, the Times Sunday magazine followed up with a major feature, filled with diagrams, entitled What America is Doing for the Children of the Immigrants; Professor Boas Gives Startling Results of Inquiry. Boas sought to show the influence of environment on physique at a time when biological differences between races were seen as innate and immutable, but

in an interview he added that This talk about the American type is nonsense, because in a country this size there are probably many types. I do not anticipate finding anything like one type... There are of course differences, but who gives us the right to establish our present type as the standard of all others? Albeit with quite different foci, questions about what it is that immigrants are assimilating to are still being debated today. The Rhetoric of the Unum, the Pluribus , and the Melting Pot What happens when peoples meet? was the question with which Milton Gordon (1964: 60) opened his seminal chapter on The Nature of Assimilation, referring to the processes and results of ethnic meetings in the modern world which take place in a wide range of contexts, from colonial conquest and military occupation, to the displacement of indigenous peoples, to large-scale voluntary immigration. He identified seven variables (or stages or subprocesses) of a complex assimilation process to describe, in the American context, what happens to the sense of peoplehood of ethnic groups, that is, of groups defined by race, religion, and national origin, or some combination of these categories (1964: 27, 69-83). E pluribus, what? International migration produces profound and unanticipated social changes in both sending and receiving societies, in intergroup relations within receiving societies, and among the immigrants themselves and their descendants. In varying contexts of exit and reception, immigration is followed predictably not only by acculturative processes on the part of the immigrants, but also by varying degrees of acceptance, intolerance or xenophobia about the alien newcomers on the part of the natives, which in turn shape the immigrants own modes of adaptive response and sense of belonging (cf. Higham 1955; Aleinikoff and Rumbaut 1998; Fry 2006). And quintessentially, immigration engenders ethnicitycollectivities who perceive themselves and are perceived by others to differ in language, religion, race, national origin or ancestral homeland, cultural heritage, and memories of a shared historical past. Their modes of incorporation across generations may take a variety of formssome leading to greater homogenization and solidarity within the society (or within segments of the society), others to greater ethnic differentiation and heterogeneity (cf. Horowitz 2000; Yinger 1994). In the United States, at different points in the national experience and going back to colonial times, both of these poles of homogeneity and heterogeneity, or assimilation and ethnic retention (Gans 1997), have been sites of sharp ideological struggles, vying to define the nations identity and ideals and the meaning of the national narrative. Historically, in times of heightened in- group consensus (especially during wars, when the premium for national unity is highest), the debate about assimilation v ersus variety in American life has been different than at other times (especially during periods of peace and prosperity when heightened demands for foreign labor as a result of an expanding economy have been mollified by the aliens not being perceived as a threat, whether to the dominant national culture or its putative ethnic purity). Put differently, both the discourse of the melting pot and assimilation, and the rhetorical uses of the synonyms of variety and diversity, reflect specific contexts and interests. Thus, for example, variety was the term used by Stephen Douglas in his famous 1858 debates with Abraham Lincoln

to argue on behalf of states rights and white supremacy (cf. Brame n 2000). That usage and defense of diversity would be inconceivable to a contemporary multiculturalist. Sociologically, assimilation has been defined as a multidimensional process of boundary reduction which blurs or dissolves an ethnic distinction and the social and cultural differences and identities associated with it (Alba and Nee 1997, 2003; Yinger 1981, 1994). At its hypothesized terminus, formerly distinguishable ethnocultural groups become effectively blended into one. At the group level, assimilation may involve the absorption of one or more minority groups into the majority, or the merging of minority groupssuch as the case of second-generation West Indians becoming black Americans (Waters 1999; Kasinitz et al., 2001). At the individual leve l, assimilation denotes the cumulative changes that make individuals of one ethnic group more acculturated, integrated, and identified with the members of another. Ideologically, the term has been used to justify selective state-imposed policies aimed at the eradication of minority cultures and the benevolent conquest of other peoples. Two notorious exampleswhich could be called a melting plotare the campaigns, encouraged by the Dawes Act of 1887, to Americanize, Christianize and civilize American Indian children by removing them from their families and immediate environments and into boarding schools like the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania; and the 1898 Benevolent Assimilation policy of the United States to colonize and pacify the Philippines and quash its struggle for independence, pursuing an imperial interest under the guise of idealized purpose and beneficent intent (Miller 1982). More popularand ideologically chargedhas been the metaphor of the Melting Pot (the title of Israel Zangwills popular Broadway play in 1908, when record numbers of immigrants were being admitted through Ellis Island). Metaphors have their politics; they have the capacity to shape a narrative of moral validation in the service of power (Prez 2008). To a self-professed nation of immigrants, melting pot projects an inclusionary image of the mechanism by which an unum is forged from the pluribus legitimizing the nation as a beacon to the world. The metaphor also evokes the difficult transformations that take place among immigrants who undergo acculturative changes in the heat and pressure of the American cauldron. Effectively, the focus of studies of immigrants adaptations to American society (of assimilation as an intransitive verb) has typically been on their rate of melting, of their acculturation and Americanization; indeed, when we apply our math and our methods to the metaphor, we can even measure their melting points. But the Pot is taken for granted; it is just there, Gods own fiery Crucible (as Zangwill called it) that will dissolve ancestral hatreds and attachments and make Americans out of a motley crew: the fifty barbarian tribes of Europe. Assimilation connotes a non- violent, uncoerced, more or less unconscious form of ethnic cleansing, a fading into what Richard Alba (1985) called the twilight of ethnicity and later a vanishing act, and what Florian Znaniecki much earlier had termed the euthanasia of memories, referring to the way in which Old World origins and identities were extinguished in the American crucible. The United States has also been accurately described as a language graveyard, underscoring the rapidity with which immigrant languages are lost and with which the switch to monolingual English 6

takes placetypically within two to three generations, from the immigrant grandparent to the thoroughly Americanized grandchild (see Portes and Rumbaut 2001, 2006). In a way, assimilation is realized through an unwitting kind of seduction. Thus Ari Shavit (1997) can point to the paradox that as American Jews find acceptance and success, they become an endangered species: Curiously, it is precisely Americas virtuesits generosity, freedom and tolerancethat are now softly killing the last of the great Diasporas. It is because of its very virtues that America is in danger of becoming the most luxurious burial ground ever of Jewish cultural existence. It takes two to tangoand to assimilate. What is euphemistically called diversity today refers less to cultural elements such as bilingualism or cuisine or music or forms of dress or worshipor to what William James (1909) called a pluralistic universe in his blueprint for modern pluralism, or what his former student Horace Kallen (1915) conceived as a democracy of nationalitiesthan to more essentialized and ascribed notions of difference (purely external, as Park had put it). If race is, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., put it (1986), a trope of ultimate, irreducible differenceunmeltable, one might addthen melting pot is a trope of fusion and ultimate union, the great dissolver of difference. Long before Zangwills play, before the Constitution itself had been ratified, the first usage of melting as a metaphor came from the pen of a French immigrant, whose name was itself a changed (melted) one. J. Hector St. John Crvecoeurs "What Is an American?" (an essay in his Letters From an American Farmer, published in 1782), put the matter presciently in an oft-cited passage, although just as often forgotten is the preface to his presagenamely, his emphasis on the weak bonds that connected the European emigrants to their origins in the first place, and the invisible power of an auspicious new-world reception bound to change their attachments and sense of belo nging and thus produce this surprising metamorphosis:
What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country where he had nothing? The knowledge of the language, the love a few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that tied him: his country is now that which gives him land, bread, protection, and consequence: Ubi panis ibi patria , is the motto of all emigrants. What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?

Still, as a master trope, there is rhetorical mischief in equating the melting with the pot: the emphasis is placed on the acculturative processes of melting while distracting attention away from a critical analysis of structural pots and socio- historical conditions (not least fundamental differences in the manner of entry into the society, from voluntary migrations to enslavement and conquest, and their cumulative consequences). It takes more than melting to unum- ize the pluribus. It is a commonplace to observe that human beings adapt to their environments, but while everyone melts to one degree or another within their social surround ings, especially children who are like palimpsests and chameleons, those surround ings can differ profoundly. Thus the pots 7

of different castes and segregated ghettoes and institutions in a de facto (and for much of its history de jure) American apartheid cannot, by definition, conduce to a common melting, a sense of sharing a common fate and common narrative, an int erpenetration (in Parks definition of assimilation), let alone intermarriage. The native-born children of todays immigrants from Haiti and Mexico and China and Iran quickly become acculturated to the English language and to a homogenized consumer and popular culture but also simultaneously fitted into an American racial-ethnic hierarchy not of their parents makingliterally put in their place, in ascribed Procrustean categories. Becoming American for them may come to mean that they assimilate (acculturate, integrate, and identify, become similar) within particular segments of American society, melting in racialized pan-ethnic cruc ibles (a black pot, a white pot, a Latin pot, an Asian pot?), much as the descendants of the Europeans, not so long ago, mixed within a triple melting pot bounded by religionProtestant, Catholic, Jewish (Kennedy 1944; Herberg 1955). It remains a pervasive national bad habitand part of an interminable, irredeemable process of racializationto insist on putting people into an official ethnoracial pentagon (Hollinger 1995) of one-size- fits-all official categories: Asians, Hispanics/Latinos, blacks, whites, American Indians). The national motto might more accurately proclaim E Pluribus Quinque. In intergroup relations, assimilation and oppression dont mix. On the contrary, assimilation breeds under conditions of intimacy and mutual acceptance, as indexed by the warmth of the welcome and ultimately by intermarriage and the adoption of American self- identities. In Old World Traits Transplanted, a volume in a series on Americanization Studies, Park, Herbert Miller and W.I. Thomas (1921: 308) argued that:
If we give the immigrants a favorable milieu, if we tolerate their strangeness during their period of adjustment, if we give them freedom to make their own connections between old and new experiences, if we help them to find points of contact, then we hasten their assimilation. This is a process of growth as against the "ordering and forbidding" policy and the demand that the assimilation of the immigrant shall be "sudden, complete, and bitter"[W]e cannot have a political democracy unless we have a social democracy also.

And i Italian or American? (1943), a study of second-generation Italian immigrants n written when the United States was at war with Italy, Irvin Child saw the likelihood of their assimilation vs. ethnic retentiveness as a function of inclusionary vs. exclusionary contexts of reception and terms of membership. Against the background of World War II, he compared two main modes of reactionthe "rebel" (who assimilated into the American milieu) and the "in-group" type (who retained an Italian ethnicity):
If during the present period, the general American population encourages people of Italian origin to regard themselves as Americans and really offers them the full rewards of membership in American society, the rebel reaction should be by far the most frequent, and adoption of American culture traits should therefore proceed at a tremendous rate. [But] if during this period of war, the non-Italian members of the population uniformly suspect Italian-Americans of treasonable activity and do not offer them the full rewards of membership in American society the in-group reaction will be very frequent and a revival of Italian culture will therefore appear. (pp. 196-97)

By contrast, under a regime of ethnoracial oppression, segregation, and stigmatization, the process boomerangsnot into the euthanasia of memories, but into what Czeslaw Milosz h called the memory of wounds (1980); not into the twilight as but into the high noon of reactive ethnicity (Portes and Rumbaut 2001, 2006); not into thinned but thickened boundaries and identities, and what W.E.B. DuBois a century ago (1903) called a double consciousness and a merging of two unreconciled strivings that is not the zero-sum game implied in melting. No Americans have been so thoroughly left out of the discourse of the Melting Pot as African Americans. In the narrow narrative of a nation of immigrants, it is often forgotten that in 1915, seven years after Zangwills The Melting Pot opened on Broadway and half a century after the end of the American Civil War, D.W. Griffiths epic film The Birth of a Nation premiered in New York and drew millions nationwidean estimated three million tickets were sold in its first 11 months in New York City alonebecoming the most profitable film ever made (until the late 1930s), as well as a major recruitment vehicle for the Ku Klux Klan. Based on the play The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, it told the tale of the devastation wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction, depicting radical Republicans and empowered blacks as the cause of all postwar social, political, and economic problems and, in a rousing climax, crediting a glorious Ku Klux Klan for the suppression of the black threat to white society. The newly created National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other black political groups strenuously protested the films vicious and blatant racism, but could not dent its runaway box-office successthough it rallied African Americans around a common cause. President Woodrow Wilson, a former history and political science professor and president of Princeton University, saw it at a private screening in the White House and was quoted as saying, "It is like writing history with lightning my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Just two years before, on the 4th of July, 1913, President Wilson had addressed an extraordinary gathering of Union and Confederate veterans at the site of the nations bloodiest battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where on July 1-3, 1863, over 51,000 had been killed in three days of unremitting carnage. Wilson assured them that We have found one another again as brothers enemies no longer, our battles long past, the quarrel forgottenexcept that we shall not forget the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each others eyes. How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us! Not a mention of race, slavery, the cause of the war or the Jim Crow system established in its wake was made by Wilson in his Gettysburg address. In white supremacist memory, the reunion at the semicentennial was of the blue and the gray, with the black excluded even from the commemoration of the defining national tragedy (see Blight 2001). For all its magnetic and intuitive appeal, thenindeed, when it is taken at face value as a nationally inclusive metaphorthe melting pot does not, cannot, square with the seamy side of the countrys history and the collective memory of those who must locate themselves in a narrative of wounds: from Dred Scott to Plessy v. Ferguson to the era of lynchings and Jim Crow, from the Trail of Tears to Wounded Knee, from the Mexican War to the Spanish-American War to the forced repatriations of Mexican Americans in the 1930s, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Japanese internment, a 9

nation whose founding declaration of freedom was signed by slaveholders, whose Constitution counted certain members as three- fifths of a human being, whose territory was taken from indigenous peoples, and which until 1952 excluded immigrants from naturalization (and others from entry altogether) on the basis of race. Nor does the metaphoror, by definition, the term assimilationfit todays contexts of widening inequalities and official persecution of millions of undocumented immigrants who form an outcaste population on the margins of society, subject to detention and deportation regardless of their level of acculturation (cf. Ngai 2004; Kanstroom 2007). Recently, after stepped-up workplace raids and the passage of hundreds of laws and local ordinances restricting access to higher education, employment, housing, drivers licenses, even library cards, the 2007 National Survey of Latinos found that 53 percent of all Latino adults in the U.S. (about a quarter of whom are undocumented immigrants) feared that they, a family member or close friend would be deported (Pew Hispanic Center 2007). Progress Is Our Most Important Product The concept of assimilation was honed during an era of rapid industrialization, urbanization and a mass new immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So was American sociology, especially in Chicago, which became a natural laboratory for the study of the immigrant and the city. Grand narratives, such as Durkheims depiction of the shift from mechanical to organic solidarity in The Division of Labor in Society (1893), sought to grasp the transition from pre- modern folk to modern industrial society. Progressive reforms, rooted in a belief in the human ability to improve social conditions, especially with the aid of experts and rational efficiency, sought to grapple with the attendant problems of large-scale social integration. The teleological notion of an endlessly improving future and positivist assumptions of linear progressof humanitys ability to realize the promise of the Enlightenmentwere made credible by the rapid expansion of science, technology and economic innovation. The idea of Progress came to dominate the worldview of the entire culture (Marx and Mazlish 1996). Even in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression and with the butchery of World War I scarcely a generation removed, the Chicago World s Fair billed itself as The Century of Progress. General Electric s successful slogan after World War II, Progress is our most important product, captured a renewed optimistic confidence in the idea of progress as a universal law. So does the ideal of assimilation. The metaphor of the melting pot and the dominant paradigm of progress met in policies and programs of Americanization. A fascinating case in point (Meyer 1980) was the Ford Motor Companys Americanization Program to adapt immigrant workers to its new system of mass production, which became the model for a Detroit-wide Americanization campaign and for a pre-war national campaign for the assimilation of immigrants. Detroits population had doubled from 1900 to 1910, and again from 1910 to 1920, leapfrogging from 13th to 4th in the countrys urban hierarchy. Fords Highland Park plant expanded in the 1910s to meet the growing demand for its Model T Ford. The overwhelming majority of its nearly 13,000 workers were unskilled immigrants coming from the least industrialized areas of EuropePoles, Russians, Italians and Sicilians, Romanians, Austro-Hungariansrated low in their racial efficiency by factory managers for poor work habits, high absenteeism and labor turnover. Ford launched its 10

Five Dollar Day to induce these workers to change their habits and attitudesboth to adapt the immigrant to a continuously moving assembly line and meet mass production requirements, and to fit the worker to a preconceived mold of the ideal American. About half the daily income paid wages for work done in the factory; the other half consisted of profits earned when specific standards of both productivity and domestic life were met. The Ford Sociological Department was established to elevate the worker and his family to a proper American way of living; it spent the profits for the worker on such items as rent and soap, made home visits, focused on health and cleanliness and on the children of the immigrants (to keep them out of trouble ), and printed Horatio Alger- like stories to show the way to the Five Dollar Day. The Ford English School extended the Americanization program into the classroom for language and cultural instruction (36 percent of the Ford workforce did not speak English in 1914, cut to 12 percent by 1917). Its mass ritual of graduation was a spectacular pageant with a giant melting pot representing the Ford English School. Entering the pot from one side were workers of many nationalities dressed in their foreign clothes and singing songs in their foreign languages; then, after the pot began to boil while being stirred vigorously with 10- foot ladles by the teachers, out the other side came the students dressed in their best American clothes, waving American flags and singing the Star Spangled Banner. After this they heard speeches praising the virtues of American citizenship, and went to a park to play American games with their teachers for the rest of the day. In the end, however, the Ford experiment in welfare capitalism and benevolent paternalism failed (Meyer 1980). Ford lost key advantages over its competitors, and a severe war-induced inflation undermined the incentive of the Five Dollar Day; in 1919 Ford established the Six Dollar Day, but it would have needed a Te n Dollar Day to provide the same incentive as in 1914. Workers were learning the rules of the game on the shop floor, and management could not use Americanization to ensure a fully malleable workforce. A recession and financial crisis in 1920-21 led to massive costcutting at Ford and the termination of its Sociological and Americanization programs, paralleling a larger societal transition from the reform- minded Progressive Era. Already in 1916, prior to the U.S. entry into the war, President Wilson had warned of Hyphenated Americans [who] have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed out (Kennedy 1980: 24). The Red Scares and Palmer Raids of 1919-21 intensified government repression of perceived immigrant radicals. Restrictive national origins quota laws in 1921 and 1924 reduced new immigrant flows and thereby the commensurate problem of assimilation, and its priority in social science. But belief in Progress endured. Assimilation in American Sociology: Three Influential Formulations The concept of assimilation seeks to grasp a contextual and not solely an individual reality that is complex, relational and multidimensional, qualities that over the years have more often than not been lost in its operationalization and application in empirical research or neglected by a penchant for formulaic definitions. In what became arguably the most influential text ever published in the history of American sociology, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess gave the concept of assimilation its first classic definition: a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire

11

the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons and groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life (1924 [1921]: 735). They distinguished systematically between four great types of interactioncompetition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilationwhich they related respectively to economic, political, social, and cultural institutions. Competition and conflict sharpen ethnic boundaries and the consciousness of intergroup difference. An accommodation (of a conflict, or to a new situation) may take place quickly, and the person or group is typically a highly conscious protagonist of the process of accommodating those circumstances. In assimilation, by contrast, the changes are more subtle and the process is typically unconscious, so that the person is incorporated into the common life of the group largely unaware of how it happened. Assimilation is very unlikely to occur among immigrants who arrive as adults. Instead, accommodation most closely reflects the modal adaptation of first- generation adult immigrants, while assimilation can become a modal outcome ultimately only for the malleable young and for the second generation, and then only if and when permitted by structural conditions of inclusion at the primary group level. Indeed, the research literature on the adaptation of twentieth century European immigrant groups in the United States suggests that evidence of assimilation was not manifestly observed at the group level until the third or even fourth generations. Assimilation thus defined takes place most rapidly and completely in primary intimate and intensesocial contacts, including intermarriage; accommodation may be facilitated through secondary contacts, but they are too distant and remote to promote assimilation. Since the nature (especially the interpersonal intimacy, the great moral solvent) of the social contacts is what is decisive, it follows that a common language is indispensable for the most intimate associations of the members of the group, and its absence is an insurmountable barrier to assimilation, since it is through communication that gradual and unconscious changes of the attitudes and sentiments of the members of the group are produced. Butcruciallylanguage and acculturation alone cannot ensure assimilation if a group is categorically segregated, racially classified, and regarded as in some sense a stranger, a representative of an alien race. That is why, Park emphasized in a later encyclopedia article (1930: 282), the English-speaking Protestant Negro, during his three hundred y ears in this country, has not been assimilated not because he has preserved in America a foreign culture and an alien tradition, for with the exception of the Indianno man in America is so entirely native to the soil. Race and place (i.e., racial discrimination and residential segregation) become critical structural determinants of the degree of assimilation or dissimilation precisely insofar as they delimit possible forms of primary social contact and heighten social contrasts and conflict. To be considered assimilated it is not enough to acquire the language and social ritual of the native communityi.e., to be acculturatedbut also to be able to participate, without encountering prejudice, in the common life, economic and political (1930: 281). The melting pot metaphor had been dismissed by Park and Burgess as a magic crucible notion of assimilation where the ideal of assimilation was conceived to be that of feeling, thinking, and acting alike (1924: 735). The end result of assimilation is not like- mindedness, but rather a unity of experience and orientation, out of which may develop a community of purpose and action The extent and importance of the 12

kind of homogeneity and like- mindedness that individuals of the same nationality exhibit has been greatly exaggerated. Like- mindedness...contributes little or nothing to national solidarity (Park 1914; reproduced in Park and Burgess, 1924: 759). Park and Burgess would have advised a different approach (1924: 739-40):
Not by the suppression of old memories, but by their incorporation in his new life is assimilation achieved... Assimilation cannot be promoted directly, but only indirectly, that is, by supplying the conditions that make for participation. There is no process but life itself that can effectually wipe out the immigrant's memory of his past. The inclusion of the immigrant in our common life may perhaps best be reached, therefore, in cooperation that looks not so much to the past as to the future. The second generation of the immigrant may share fully in our memories, but practically all that we can ask of the foreign-born is participation in our ideals, our wishes, and our common enterprises.

Ironically, despite his wide-ranging writings on many subjects, Park may be best known for the formulaic notion that assimilation is the final stage of a natural, progressive, inevitable and irreversible race relations cycle. As the idea of the cycle became reified and popularized, assimilation was posited as the final stage of a four-step process in international and race relations. But in a prolific career, Park only wrote about a race relations cycle twice: first in a single sentence near the end of a 1926 article, Our Racial Frontier in the Pacific; then a decade later in a brief introduction to a book on interracial marriage in Hawaii written by one of his former students. In the first instance he was arguing against the likelihood that a racial barrierwhich the passage of exclusionary laws sought to establish by barring Asian migration to the U.S.could be much of a match against global economic, political and cultural forces that have brought about an existing interpenetration of peoplesso vast and irresistible that the resulting changes assume the character of a cosmic process (Park 1926: 141, 149). And in his 1937 introduction, he explicitly rebutted any notion of a unilinear assimilative outcome to race conflict and change (what are popularly referred to as race relations), arguing instead that when stabilization is finally achieved, race relations would assume one of three configurations: They will take the form of a caste system, as in India; they will terminate in complete assimilation, as in China; or the unassimilated race will constitute a permanent racial minority within the limits of a national state, as in the case of the Jews in Europe All three types of change are involvedin what we may describe as the race relations cycle (Park 1937: xiii). What has come to be called straight- line theory (cf. Gans 1992a, 1992b) has little basis in the theories of Park or Gordon, as is often if mistakenly asserted, but gained methodological traction from W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Sroles The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups, a definitive statement on the subject published in 1945. (The data, collected in the early 1930s, formed the basis of Sroles 1940 doctoral dissertation, Ethnic Groups and American Society: A Study in the Dynamics of Social Assimilation.) They described the progressive advance of eight European-origin groups in the major status hierarchies of Yankee City (Newburyport, Massachusetts): the Irish, French Canadians, Jews, Italians, Armenians, Greeks, Poles, and Russians. In the immigrant generation, all except the Jews had come from rural backgrounds. From the first chapter (The Melting Pot, consisting of seven illustrative personal stories) to the last (The American Ethnic Group), the book systematically analyzed their spatial distribution, 13

economic life, class system, family, church, language and the school, and associations, and spelled out a set of innovative methods for the study of ethnic groups. Warner and Srole developed 6-point linear indices to measure residential, occupational and class status; and assimilation and subordination scales based on specific criteria to estimate the time for an entire group to disappear (the final result of assimilation), the proportionate number of people who drop out of a group in each generation, and the amount and kind of participation permitted members of the group by the host society. They explicitly linked upward social mobility to assimilation, which they saw as determined largely by the degree of ethnocultural (religion and language) and above all racial difference from the dominant group. While racial groups were subordinated and excluded through caste restrictions on residential, occupational, associational, and marital choice, the clash of ethnic groups with the dominant institutions of the host society was not much of a contest, particularly among the young. The industrial economy, the polity, the public school, popular culture, and the American family system all undercut and absorbed ethnicity in various ways, so that even when the ethnic parent tries to orient the child to an ethnic past the child often insists on being more American than Americans (1945: 284). For the upwardly mobile, with socioeconomic success came intermarriage and the further dilution of ethnicity. They concluded that it is the degree of racial difference from the white American norms which counts most heavily in the placement of the group and in the determination of its assimilation; absent such discrimination and structural inequalities, however, the future of American ethnic groups seems to be limited; it is likely tha t they will be quickly absorbed (pp. 294-95). That general if decidedly qualified view of assimilation as linear progress, with sociocultural similarity and socioeconomic success marching in lock step, was significantly refined by Milton Gordon in Assimilation in American Life (1964), published ironically on the eve of the beginning of the latest era of mass immigration to the United Statesand of the denouement of the concept itself in the wake of the 1960s. From the opening sentence of the book, Gordon focused on the relational and contextual character of the process: This book is concerned, ultimately, with problems of prejudice and discrimination arising out of differences in race, religion, and national background among the vario us groups which make up the American people (p. 3; emphasis added). Although he meticulously reviewed a wide variety of definitions of assimilation in the scholarly literature, he did not explicitly provide his own. Instead he broke down the assimilation sequence into seven steps, of which identificational assimilationa self- image as an unhyphenated Americanwas the end point of a hypothetical process that began with cultural assimilation, proceeded through structural assimilation and intermarriage, and was accompanied by an absence of prejudice, discrimination, and value conflict in the core society. Once structural assimilation occurred (i.e., extensive primary-level interaction with members of the core group), either in tandem with or subsequent to acculturation, the remaining types of assimilation have all taken place like a row of tenpins bowled over in rapid succession by a well placed strike (1964: 81). For the children of white European immigrants, at least, the acculturation process was so overwhelmingly triumphant that the greater risk consisted in alienation from family ties and in role reversals of the generations that could subvert parent-child relationships.

14

Nonetheless, in reviewing the actual evidence for the assimilation sequence in American life, Gordon reached very different conclusions than those that are habitually ascribed to him. He coined the term ethclass to refer to the stratified segment of social space created by the intersection of ethnicity and social class, which he saw as fast becoming the essential form of the subsociety in America (p. 51), and proposed a series of hypotheses about contextual variations in cultural behavior, social identification and group identity. He found that The most salient factis the maintenance of the structurally separate subsocieties of the three major religions and the racial and quasiracial groups, and even vestiges of the nationality groupings, along with a massive trend toward acculturation of all groupsparticularly their native-bornto American culture patterns. Anticipating what segmented assimilation would assert in the 1990s, he concluded that Structural pluralism is the major key to the understanding of the ethnic makeup of American society, while cultural pluralism is the minor one (p. 159). Gordon was aware of the ways in which the real and the rhetorical, the ideal and the ideological, get wrapped up in the idea of assimilation. Cultural pluralism as an ideology did not match empirical realities, and the theory of the Melting Pot exhibited a considerable degree of sociological naivet (p. 129). And while Anglo-conformity was the most prevalent ideology of assimilation in American history, he also noted that Structural assimilation turned out to be the rock on which the ship of Anglo-conformity foundered. And if structural assimilation, to a large degree, did not take place, then in similar measure amalgamation and identificational assimilation could not (p. 114). Historians have seen the apogee of the concept of assimilation in the 1950s and early 1960s as reflecting the need generated by World War II for national unity and the postwar tendency to see American history as a narrative of consensus rather than conflict; and the political and social upheavals of the 1960s (nationally and internationally) as shattering the consensus school and the rationale for studying assimilation, bringing back instead a focus on the ethnic group and ethnic resilience, and more inclusive conceptions of American society. As the notion of an Anglo-American core was delegitimized amid the conflicts and ethnic reassertions of the 1960s, assimilation lost its allure (Kazal, 1995). But by the 1990s, once more well into a new era of mass immigration, a systematic reevaluation of the concept of assimilation emerged, with applications in contemporary scholarship seeking to contrast differences and similarities between the old and the new immigration. Assimilation continued along its bumpy road. A Triptych of Incorporation Processes: Acculturation, Integration, Identification Combining the various emphases currently given to the term, assimilation involves a series of interrelated but analytically distinct cultural (acculturation), structural (integration) and psychological (identification) dimensions. Gordon referred to them as the three crucial variables of group identity, social participation, and cultural behavior as they pertain to the subsociety of the ethclass (1964: 51). This triptych of incorporation processes may be elaborated further, with some additional consideration of contextual and group factors shaping each of these dimensionseither by promoting or precluding assimilative outcomes (Cornell and Hartmann, 1998; Yinger, 1981, 1994).

15

Acculturation, which comes closest to the common sense notion of melting, involves complex processes of cultural diffusion and changes producing greater linguistic and cultural similarity between two or more groups. Its homogenizing influences are generally more extensive among members of smaller and weaker groups, and particularly (voluntary) immigrant groupsand more rapidly achieved with respect to what Gordon called extrinsic culture traits. Nonetheless, acculturation is never exclusively onesided; dominant groups too are culturally influenced by their contacts with other ethnocultural groups in the society (Alba and Nee 2003; Orum 2005). In the American experience, language shifts have been overwhelmingly one-sided, with the switch to monolingual English typically being accomplished by the third generation. Acculturation proceeds more rapidly among children than adults, and linguistic and other acculturative gaps commonly develop in immigrant households between parents and children; Portes and Rumbaut (2001) have identified three such acculturative patterns in parent-child relationships, labeled dissonant, consonant, and selective acculturation. At the individual level, a key distinction is between subtractive (or substitutive) acculturation and additive acculturation. The first is essentially a zero-sum game that involves giving up some elements of a cultural repertoire (such as language and memory itself) while replacing them from another; the second does not involve losing so much as gaining to form and sustain a more complex repertoire (bilingualism and biculturalism). Available research has yet to examine systematically the multiplicity of conditions and contexts yielding subtractive vs. additive acculturative outcomes, although in the United States at least it has proved exceedingly difficult to sustain fluent bilingualism beyond the second generation. The degree of acculturation, as noted earlier, is by itself not a sufficient condition for assimilation (the two terms are not synonymous but are often used equivalently; cf. Gans 1997, 2007). Structural integration was the crux of the matter for Gordon, although what he had in mind was the entrance of the minority group into the social cliques, clubs, and institutions of the core society at the primary group level (not parity with the majority group on such indices as income or education, or regression to the mean notions of standardization implicit in uses of assimilation as an intransitive verb). Given the many different institutions involved hereand the fact that integration into the economy, the polity, and the community at the secondary group level is ignored by that formulationa conceptual distinction can be made between primary and secondary dimensions. The latter refers to a wide range of integrative processes within secondary groups, including socioeconomic and spatial (residential) integration, and the acquisition of legal citizenship as a full- fledged member of the polity (contemporary evidence of which will be reviewed below). The formerextensive int eraction within personal networks and primary relationships, including intermarriageis unlikely to take place under conditions of status inequality. While all of these dimensions (acculturation, integration, intermarriage) are interdependent to varying degrees, the linkages between them are historically contingent and will vary depending on a number of factors, notably social class and the context of reception within which different groups are incorporated. Conventional accounts of shifts in ethnic identification among the descendants of European immigrants, conceived as part of a linear assimilative process, have pointed to

16

the thinning of their ethnic self- identities in the United States. For their descendants, at least, one outcome of widespread acculturation, social mobility and intermarriage with the native population was that identity became an optional form of symbolic ethnicity, as Gans first argued in 1979 (cf. Alba 1990; Waters 1990). As the boundaries of those identities become fuzzier and less salient, less relevant to everyday social life, the sense of belonging and connection to an ancestral past faded. This mode of ethnic identity formation, however, was never solely a simple linear function of socioeconomic status and the degree of acculturationthat is, of the development of linguistic and other cultural similarities with the dominant groupbut hinged also on the context of reception and the degree of discrimination and racialization experienced by the subordinate group. Identity shifts, like acculturative changes, tend to be from lower to higher status groups. But where social mobility is blocked or hindered by prejudice and discrimination, members of lower status groups may react by reaffirming their shared identity. This process of forging a reactive ethnicity in the face of perceived threats, persecution, discrimination and exclusion is not uncommon. On the contrary, it is another mode of ethnic identity formation, accounting for the thickening rather than the dilution of ethnicity. At the extreme, as reflected in the African American experience, the result can be the sense of double consciousness of which DuBois wrote eloquently. Compared to language loyalty and language shift, generational shifts in ethnic self- identification are far more conflictual and complex. Paradoxically, despite the rapid acculturation of European immigrants in the United States, as reflected in the abandonment of the parental language and other ethnic patterns of behavior, the second generation remained more conscious of their ethnic identity than were their immigrant parents (Nahirny and Fishman 1965). The parents ethnic identity was so much taken for granted that they were scarcely explicitly aware of it, but the marginality of their children made them acutely self-conscious and sensitive to their ethnicity, especially when passing through adolescence. Moreover, as parents and children acculturated at different rates, a generational gap grew so that by the time the children reached adolescence the immigrant family had become transformed into two linguistic sub- groups segregated along generational lines. Finally, by the third generation the grandsons became literally outsiders to their ancestral heritage, and their ethnic past an object of symbolic curiosity more than anything else. Although todays new third generation is still in its infancy, some empirical examples of the complexities entailed in contemporary identity construction in the second generation are provided below, as well as indicators of language acculturation and socioeconomic integration over time among immigrant groups and across generations among major ethnic groups. Contemporary Realities, Paradoxes, and the Future of American Ethnic Groups By the end of the twentieth century a new era of mass immigration, now overwhelmingly non-European in composition, had again raised familiar questions about the assimilability of the newcomers and their children, and concerns that many of them might become consigned to vast multiethnic formations on the other side of new color lines. Gans (1992a) questioned the American myth of nearly automatic immigrant success and delineated six theoretical scenarios for the incorporation of the new second

17

generation as they were beginning to enter the workforce, hinging on economic and other conditions. Three were positive scenarios, positing upward mobility driven by educational attainment, ethnic succession, or niche improvement. Three posited negative futures, projecting the reverse of the previous three (educational failure, the stalling of ethnic succession in the legal economy, niche shrinkage)a second generation decline potentially exacerbated by a combination of economic downturns or non- labor- intensive economic growth, the second generations refusal or inability to accept the jobs their parents held, and competition from successive new waves of immigrants. Rather than experiencing upward mobility, the second generation (or segments of it, especially the children of undocumented immigrants) would join the ranks of urban poor. The new realities also raised questions about the applicability of explanatory models developed in connection with the experience of European ethnics, despite the fact that contemporary immigrants were being incorporated in a post-civil-rights context if also officially categorized by new pan-ethnic labelscharacterized more by ethnic revivals and identity politics than forced Americanization campaigns. While assimilation (as indexed by acculturation, socioeconomic mobility, residential integration, naturalized citizenship) may still represent a master trend for many of today's immigrants, as Alba and Nee (2003) have argued, it is subject to too many contingencies and affected by too many variables to render the notion of a relatively uniform and straightforward path convincing (aside from the swift switch to English among immigrants children, which cuts across all classes and nationalities). Instead, as Portes and Zhou (1993) framed it a year after Gans six scenarios, the present second generation of children of immigrants can be seen as undergoing a process of segmented assimilation where outcomes vary across immigrant minorities, and where rapid integration and acceptance into the American mainstream represent just one possible alternative. Why this is so hinges on a number of factors: internal characteristics, including the immigrants level of human capital and the structure and cohesiveness of their families, interact in complex but patterned ways with external contexts of receptiongovernment policies and programs, the state of the economy in the areas where they settle, employer preferences in local labor markets, the extent of racial discrimination and nativist hostility, the strength of existing ethnic communitiesto form the conditions within which immigrants and their children adapt to different sectors of American society (cf. Rumbaut and Portes 2001). Segmented assimilation processesi.e., adaptations that take place within varying opportunity structures and are shaped through differential associations, reference groups, experiences and attachments, especially in primary social relationships stratified by race, religion, region, and classare not new in the American experience (Rumbaut 1997). Caste restrictions based on race (extending to all aspects of social life, including citizenship), the triple melting pot of religion-bounded intermarriages, the structural pluralism of ethclasses, the persistence of ethnic groups as political interest groups, are all indicative of such adaptations. Alba and Nee (2003), thinking about the divergent outcomes that will likely obtain in the first decades of the 21st century, concede the point:
The contemporary immigration scene displays complex, contradictory patterns, from rapid assimilation apparent among some professionals and their children to the new way of sojourning apparent in some transnational circuits, and to the potential among other

18

immigrant groups for incorporation as racialized minorities Clearly, assimilation will not apply to all immigrant minorities to the same extent many in the second generation are likely to experience upward mobility into the American socioeconomic mainstream[others] may experience lateral or, at best, short-distance mobility Children of low-wage labor migration are likelier to experience downward mobility into the urban minority underclass than children of human capital migration from the same ethnic group There is no reason to believe that assimilation is inevitable or that it will be the master trend for all these diverse groups (pp. 273-75, 50).

Table 1 about here By 2000, the first and second generations of the United States (i.e., the foreignborn and U.S.-born children of foreign-born parents) had surpassed 60 million persons, and were growing rapidly. Focusing first on the former (four fifths of whom hail from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia), a profile of the largest foreign-born nationalities is provided in Table 1, based on data from the last decennial census for adults 25 to 64. Unlike the groups studied by Warner and Srole who entered at the bottom of the social heap, huge class inequalities are immediately apparent among todays immigrants; they comprise at once the most and the least educated groups in the country, with the highest and the lowest poverty rates, reflecting polar-opposite types of migrations. Overall, in 2000, about 25 percent had college degrees (the same as the native population), while 36 percent had less than a high diploma (more than twice the U.S. average). But class differences by national origin (natclasses, paraphrasing Gordon) are vast. Among all nationalities from Latin America and the Caribbean, the proportion of those without a high school diploma significantly exceeds the proportion of those with college degrees; while among all Asians (except for the Indochinese refugees), Europeans, Canadians, and immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, the proportion of college graduates far exceeds the proportion of high school dropouts. These wide disparities extend from the Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans (two thirds of whom had less than a high school education, but only one in twenty had college degrees, reflecting a disproportionate component of undocumented laborers), and the Dominicans and Cambodian and Laotian refugees (half of whom lacked a high school education, a tenth or less had finished college), to the Chinese, Filipinos, and Koreans (about half of whom had college degrees, twice the U.S. average) and especially those from India (almost three-fourths of whom had college degrees). The educational attainment of British and Canadian immigrants (42 percent of whom were college graduates) was also well above the norms for the U.S.born (college graduation rates for non-Hispanic white and black U.S. natives were 30 and 15 percent, respectively, while their high school dropout rates were 10 and 22 percent). Cubans, Jamaicans, Haitians and Vietnamese fell in between these poles. Three indicators of cultural, economic and legal integration are shown in Table 1: spoken fluency in English, poverty, and naturalized U.S. citizenship over time in the United States. (These are not longitudinal but cross-sectional data, so differences cannot be solely attributed to time in the U.S.e.g., Cubans and Vietnamese who came before 1980 were drawn from higher status classes than those who came in or after 1980but are still suggestive of the direction of change.) With few exceptions, familiar linear patterns of progress are apparent over time between those who arrived in the 1990s, the 1980s, and pre-1980: English fluency becomes predominant, poverty declines (though 19

large economic discrepancies remain between groups), and naturalization (which requires a minimum of five years after obtaining legal permanent residency status) increases. Similar patterns are observed for homeownership (not shown in the table). Many groups now arrive with levels of education and occupational skills well above U.S. norms; others are already fluent i English pre-arrival (e.g., the Jamaicans, Filipinos, Indians). Less n obvious exceptions to the linear narrative are the cases of the Canadians and British, the most assimilated of immigrants by almost any measure: English speakers with very low poverty rates, the y are the least likely to become naturalized U.S. citizensalong with the Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans, many of whom are undocumented and ineligible for naturalized citizenship (cf. Aleinikoff and Rumbaut 1998). Or take the case of island-born Puerto Rican migrants to the mainland, the most acculturated and assimilated of Latin Americans: they are U.S. citizens by birthright and more fluent in English from the start, yet retain the highest poverty rates of any group over time. Acculturation has typically been assumed to have beneficial consequences for both economic progress and psychological well-being. Just as better knowledge of the language and relevant occupational skills should propel immigrants and their descendants in the labor market, so should the shedding of old cultures and fully embracing the new one eliminate much of their distress. That view is premised on an implicit deficit model: progressive improvement results when immigrants learn how to become American, to overcome their deficits with respect to the new language and culture, the new health care and educational systems, the new economy and societya process more or less completed by the second generation. But recent research findings have repeatedly pointed to the opposite of such linear progress outcomes in diverse areas of social and cultural life over time and generation in the United States, including epidemiological paradoxes in health and pregnancy outcomes, as well as obesity, mental health, drug use and other risk behaviors, arrest and incarceration, divorce, school engagement, work ethic, and ethnic self- identity (see Rumbaut 1997; Portes and Rumbaut 2006). They are paradoxes in that the evidence contradicts orthodox expectationsi.e., they appear paradoxical from the vantage of the prevailing theoretical paradigm or worldview and the telos of progress embedded within thembut when seen as adaptations to American conditions, the unexpected empirical results become entirely (even perversely) plausible: t hey are becoming like us after all, in more ways than had been imagined (cf. Greeley 1972). Table 2 about here Consider incarceration. The present era of mass immigration has coincided with an era of mass imprisonment in the United States. The U.S. incarceration rate has become the highest of any country in the world. The vast majority of those behind bars are young men between 18 and 39, overwhelmingly high school dropouts; indeed, among some racial minorities, imprisonment has become a modal life eve nt in early adulthood. Criminological theories predict higher rates of crime and incarceration for young adult males from minority groups with low educational attainment; it follows that immigrants, particularly poor labor migrants and refugees, should have higher incarceration rates than natives, and that among the immigrants the rates should decrease with growing acculturation and more education over time in the United States. Those born in Mexico who comprise fully a third of all immigrant men between 18 and 39could be expected 20

to have the highest rates, given their very low average education. Those hypotheses are examined empirically in Table 2. Data from the 2000 census are used to measure the institutionalization rates of males, 18 to 39, among whom the vast majority of the institutionalized are in correctional facilities. As Table 2 shows, about 3 percent of the 45.2 million males age 18-39 were in federal or state prisons or local jails at the time of the 2000 census. However, the incarceration rate of the U.S.-born (3.5 percent) was five times the rate of the foreignborn (0.7 percent). The latter was less than half the 1.7 percent rate for native white men, and seventeen times less than the 11.6 percent incarceration rate for native black men. This pattern is observable among all ethnic groups without exception. Moreover, f r o every immigrant group, the longer they had resided in the U.S., the higher their incarceration rates. By the U.S.-born second (or higher) generation, incarceration rates increase more sharply still. These results are exactly the opposite of what was predicted. Among Latin American immigrants, the least educated groups actually had the lowest incarceration rates: Salvadorans and Guatemalans, and Mexicans. However, the rates increase significantly for their U.S.-born co-ethnics. For Mexicans, for example, the incarceration rate increases to 5.9 percent among the U.S.-born. Similar results were found among Asian groups. For the Vietnamese, the incarceration rate increases from less than 0.5 percent among the foreign-born to 5.6 percent among the U.S.-born; for Laotians and Cambodians, the rate moves up from less than one percent among the foreign-born to 7.3 percent among the U.S.-born (the highest figure for any group, except for native blacks). The advantage for immigrants holds when broken down by education for every ethnic group. These results are confirmed by other stud ies and raise significant questions about conventional theories of acculturation and assimilation and their embedded notions of linear progress. The finding that incarceration rates are much lower among immigrant men than the national norm, despite their lower levels of education and greater poverty, but increase significantly among the second generation, suggests that the process of Americanization can lead to greater risk of involvement with the criminal justice system and subsequent downward mobility for a significant segment of this population. Table 3 about here What is the evidence of socioeconomic mobility (education, occupation, earnings) across generations? In 1980, after a century of measurement, the decennial census eliminated its parental nativity question, making it impossible to distinguish the first from the second and third-or-higher generations for intergenerational mobility studies. But in 1994 the annual Current Population Survey (CPS) restored those questions in its March demographic supplement. The CPS is based on a household sample of the civilian noninstitutionalized population, and does not include certain questions asked in the decennial census (e.g., English language fluency), but nonetheless makes it possible to look at the issue of intergenerational mobility. Table 3 compares the educational, occupational and economic status of adults 25 to 64 in the United States, by panethnic groups and generational cohorts, based on merged 2003-2006 CPS annual surveys (prior to the onset in late 2007 of a Great Recession whose repercussions are likely to widen social inequalities further still). New ethnic divides are apparent: 95 percent of all Asians and 21

some 80 percent of Hispanics are of foreign birth or parentage (first or second generations), while about 90 percent of non-Hispanic whites and blacks are longterm natives (third, fourth or higher generations)the historic white- majority/blackminority divide. But new class divides are sharper still: The newcomers are situated at the poles of the status hierarchies; white and black oldtimers are in between. Educational and related inequalities between native-parentage whites and blacks seem narrow compared to the gulf that separates first and second-generation Asians (at the top of these hierarchies) from Hispanics (at the bottom). As Table 3 shows, for all four groups there is evidence of discernible progress in virtually all measures from the 1.0 to the 1.5 and the 2nd generations. The degree of mobility (within the limitations of cross-sectional data) is strongest among Hispanics, who start at the bottom in all educational, occupational and economic indicators, more moderate or stable among Asian and white immigrants who start high in the 1.0 generation (with the largest share of advanced degrees and high-status occupations, and lowest poverty rates). However, for all groups and contrary to conventional wisdom, the evidence suggests that almost all these mobility measures peak in the 2nd generation, and then decline or reach a plateau by the 3+ generations. In addition to this seeming thirdgeneration decline or plateau (which posit new variations on Gans earlier scenarios), the data underscore the enduring patterns of intergroup inequality across generations, alongside actual intergenerational upward mobility. Similar results with CPS data from 1998 to 2002 have been reported by detailed national origins (Rumbaut 2004), and longitudinally into the fourth generation for Mexican American samples originally drawn in 1965 in Los Angeles and San Antonio and followed into 2002 (Telles and Ortiz 2008). Table 4 about here In the coming two decades, as the baby boomers (overwhelmingly a white nativeparentage population) reach retirement age, immigrants and their children are expected to account for most of the growth of the U.S. labor force, with the fastest growing occupations requiring college degrees. Table 4 looks at todays ethnic division of labor and the generational composition of occupations and professions among all U.S. workers 25 to 44. The ethnoracial stratification revealed in this table makes more vivid the patterns of socioeconomic inequality depicted previously. In the 3+ generations, over 80 percent of the labor force are non-Hispanic whites; 14 percent are African Americans. But among the 1.5 and 2nd generations, 57 percent of the workers are Hispanic and Asian, as are 76 percent of 1.0-generation immigrant workers. Among the latter, 52 percent of all physicians and surgeons are Asians (although they represent a fifth of all 1.0 workers), as are 43 percent of 1.5 and 2nd generation workers (though Asians make up 14 percent of the 1.5 and 2nd generations). Hispanic workers remain mired at the bottom of the workforce, disproportionately occupying most unskilled and semi-skilled jobs across the generations. Despite evidence of mobility, the ethclass clustering observed in Table 4 is an augur of enduring inequalities to come, with all this may bode for the future of ethnic group boundarie s and identities. In these widely varying contexts of social inequality, the way young newcomers come to define themselves is significant, revealing much about their social attachments as 22

well as how and where they perceive themselves to fit in the society of which they are its newest members. Self- identities and ethnic loyalties can influence long-term patterns of behavior and outlook as well as intergroup relations, with potential long-term political implications. And the decisive turning point for change in ethnic and national selfidentities can be expected to take place in the second, not in the adult first generation. For a decade during the 1990s and early 2000s in South Florida and Southern California, the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study surveyed a sample of over 5,200 1.5- and second- generation youths from mid-adolescence to their mid twenties. They represented 77 different nationalities, including all of the main Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). The study tracked their self- reported ethnic identities over time and generation in the United States as measured by open-ended questions. Only a tiny proportion of our sample (in the small single digits) on either coast selected a plain American identity, with the proportions decreasing as they grew olderscarce empirical support for a hypothesis of identificational assimilation. Figure 1 about here Figure 1 depicts the manner in which those identities are forged in a social field shaped by the interaction of two powerful social forces, acculturation and discrimination, each pulling and pushing in different directions in the process of ethnic self-definition. The main types of ethnic (foreign national origin, hyphenated-American, plain American) and pan-ethnic identities (e.g., Hispanic/Latino, Black, Asian), as reported by the respondents in answer to an open-ended question, have been mapped onto the space formed by the intersection of the two axes of acculturation and discrimination, based on their respective mean scores in the acculturation and discrimination indices measured in CILS (see Rumbaut 2005). As Figure 1 shows, the national-origin identity occupies the high-discrimination, low-acculturation top left quadrant of the social field ; at the opposite end is found the American identity, occupying the low-discrimination, high-acculturation bottom right quadrant. The hyphenated-American identity is located along the diagonal between those two, although closer to the American than t the o national-origin location. In the low-discrimination, low-acculturation lower left quadrant is found the Hispanic or Latino pan-ethnic identity. This identity was adopted large ly by youth in the Miami area, where Latin American-origin groups form a majority of the populationand where an institutionally complete community can serve both as a buffer against external discrimination and as a brake to rapid acculturation. Finally, in the highdiscrimination, high-acculturation upper right quadrant are found second- generation youth who define themselves as Black (including Haitians, Jamaicans and other West Indians). Their adoption of a pan-ethnic identity has little to do with a lack of acculturationthey clearly prefer English and American waysbut to persistent high levels of racial discrimination and the inexorable sense of otherness that accompanies it. Our study also found that the offspring of Latin American immigrants were far more likely to define their racial identities in sharp contrast to their own parents. In one CILS survey (when the youths were 17-18 years old), the y and their parents were asked to answer a question about their race by choosing one of five categories: white, black, Asian, multiracial, or o ther (if the latter was checked, they had to specify what that other race was). Among Latin American-origin youths, less than a fourth of 23

the total sample chose white, black, or Asian; some reported being multiracial, but twothirds checked other. When those other self-reports were coded, it turned out that two- fifths of the sample wrote down Hispanic or Latino as their race, and a fifth gave their nationality as their race. The explicit racialization of the Hispanic/Latino category, as well as the substantial proportion of youths who conceived their national origin as a racial category, are noteworthy both for their potential long-term implications in hardening minority group boundaries, not blurring them, and for their illustration of the arbitrariness of racial constructionsand of the ease with which an ethnic category developed for administrative purposes becomes externalized, diffused, objectified, and internalized as a marker of essentialized social difference. The latter point is made more salient by directly comparing the youths notions of their race with that reported by their own parents. About three fifths of Latin parents defined themselves as white, compared to only one fifth of their own children. Specifically, 93 percent of Cuban parents identified as white, compared to only 41 percent of their children; 85 percent of Colombian parents defined themselves as white, but only 24 percent of their children did soproportions that were similar for other South Americans; two thirds of the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Nicaraguan parents saw themselves as white, but only one fifth of their children agreed; about a third of the Dominican parents reported as white, more than twice the proportion of their children. Well over half of the Dominican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Colombian, Peruvian and Ecuadorian youth reported their race as Hispanic or Latino, whereas very few of their parents did so. Among the Mexicans, whose pattern differed from all of the others, the children preponderantly racialized the national label. These results point to the force of a different sort of acculturation process racializationand its impact on childrens self- identities in the U.S. Indeed, they provide a striking instance of the malleability of racial constructions, even between parents and children in the same family. More fully exposed than their parents to American culture and its ingrained racial notio ns, and being incessantly categorized and treated as Latino or Hispanic, the children of immigrants learn to see themselves in these termsas members of a racial minority. If these intergenerational differences between Latin American immigrants and their U .S.-raised children can be projected to the third generation, the process of racialization could become more entrenched still. Already a panel study of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio into the fourth generation has suggested as much (Telles and Ortiz 2008). The CILS study (Portes and Rumbaut, 2001) also found that despite their growing awareness of racial and ethnic inequalities, almost two-thirds of the youth affirmed a confident belief in the promise of equal opportunity through educational achievement; 61 percent agreed in the baseline survey that there is no better country to live in than the United States, an endorsement that grew to 71 percent three years laterdespite a growing anti- immigrant mood in the country and in California during that period. Tellingly, the groups most likely to endorse that view were the children of political exiles who found a favorable context of reception in the U.S.: the Cubans (before Elin) and the Vietnamese. The groups least likely to agree with that statement were those who most felt the weight of racial discrimination: the children of immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica

24

and the West Indies. In reacting to their contexts of reception and learning how they are viewed and treated within them, the youths form and inform their own attitudes toward the society that receives themand their own identities as well. If there is a moral to this story of reception and belonging, it is that societies, too, reap what they sow. Who Are We? Immigration and American Pluralism Who are we?, asked Samuel Huntington in the title of his last book (2004). Who and what we think we are is forged in relation to, and in reaction to, who and what we think we are not. American pluralism is Janus-facedlooking behind to vastly different and even antithetical pasts, looking ahead to scarcely predictable if polyethnic futuresmixing a plurality of origins and outlooks capable of interpreting the nations foundational fictions and the ethno-national experience from very different vantage points. For Huntington, America has a sole authentic core: it is an Anglo-Protestant country, and must remain so. While the old European immigrants were absorbed into the core, the new immigrationabove all from Mexicois challenging that core i entity: d The culinary metaphor is an Anglo-Protestant tomato soup to which immigration adds celery, croutons, spices, parsley and other ingredients that enrich and diversify the taste, but which are absorbed into what remains fundamentally tomato soup. In this outlandish metaphor, however, he is hoisted with his own petard: the tomato is indigenous to Mexico (the word tomatl comes from the Nahuatl); it was taken to Spain after the 1519 conquest by Cortez, the n to Italy and later to France, where it was called the apple of love. While Mexican Americans today speak English and can be found in most walks of life, they are unlikely to think of themselves as a piece of celery or a crouton in an AngloProtestant soup, any more than the tomato is either Anglo or Protestant. Despite the grand narratives of modernization, neither race nor religion nor ethnicity has vanished in American life. Protestants (never a homogeneous category, composed of dozens of disparate denominations and of fundamentalist, evangelical and apostolic varieties) are actually a vanishing majority, having fallen below 50 percent for the first time in 2005a decline that is sharper still among younger people, in more recent years, and among the first and second generations. But religious pluralism remains alive and well. Catholics have remained a fourth of the population for decades now, a secular decline over time having been more than compensated by new influxes of immigrant Catholics from Latin America, the Philippines, and Vietnam. And there has been an increase in non-Christian religions, notably Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims; aside from the long-present Jewish population, all other non-Christian religions had increased to about 5.5 percent of the population by 2000. The United States remains today a profoundly religious countrynot least because the American state allowed immigrant groups to develop their own social and cultural institutions, including parishes, schools, hospitals, temples, and synagoguesa laissez faire stance now ironically attributed to the American ability to assimilate them (see Portes and Rumbaut 2006). The fate of immigrant languages other than English is another matter: linguistic and other forms of acculturation do proceed rapidly, especially among immigrant children and the second generation, and that may be true r now than ever before, despite the unprecedented diversity of class, culture and color in the present era of mass

25

immigration. But alongside undeniable upward social mobility from the first to the second generation for most groups, especially the children of the poorest and least educatedthough the gains appear to peak in the second generation and decline or plateau thereafterthere is compelling evidence of widening ethclass and legal inequalities, of new conflicts and political mobilizations around ethnic and racial issues, and of downward mobility and marginalization for vulnerable segments of these populations. An undocumented status has become a caste- like master status blocking access to the opportunity structure and paths to social mobility for millions of immigrants. A fraught concept like assimilation, weighted by the normative baggage of its past and by its insistent if inclusive expectation of progress and homogenized national cohesion, seems ill- suited to grasp these complex dynamics and to focus critical attention on enduring structural inequalities and persistent ethnic and pan-ethnic formations in this permanently unfinished society.

26

REFERENCES
Alba, Richard D. 1985. Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Alba, Richard D. 1990. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Alba, Richard D., and Victor Nee. 1997. "Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration." International Migration Review 31, 4: 826-874. Alba, Richard D., and Victor Nee. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aleinikoff, T. Alexander, and Rubn G. Rumbaut. 1998. Terms of Belonging: Are Models of Membership Self-Fulfilling Prophecies? Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, 13, 1: 1-24. Blight, David W. 2001. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Borjas, George J. 2006. Making It in America: Social Mobility in the Immigrant Population. The Future of Children 16, 2: 55-71. Bourne, Randolph S. 1916. Trans-National America. The Atlantic Monthly, 118: 86-97. Bramen, Carrie Tirado. 2000. The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Child, Irvin. 1970 [1943]. Italian or American? The Second Generation in Conflict. New York: Russell & Russell. Cornell, Stephen, and Douglas Hartmann. 1998. Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Crvecoeur, J. Hector St. John. 1782. "What Is an American?" Letter III in his Letters from an American Farmer. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/CREV/contents.html DuBois, W. E. B. 1989 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam. Fadiman, Anne. 1997. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fry, Brian N. 2006. Nativism and Immigration: Regulating the American Dream. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing. Gans, Herbert J. 1979. Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America. Ethnic and Racial Studies 2, 1: 1-20. Gans, Herbert J. 1992a. Second Generation Decline: Scenarios for the Economic and Ethnic Futures of Post-1965 American Immigrants. Ethnic and Racial Studies 15, 2: 173-92.

27

Gans, Herbert J. 1992b. Ethnic Invention and Acculturation: A Bumpy-Line Approach. Journal of American Ethnic History 12: 45-52. Gans, Herbert J. 1997. Toward a Reconciliation of Assimilation and Pluralism: The Interplay of Acculturation and Ethnic Retention. International Migration Review 31, 4: 875-892. Gans, Herbert J. 2007. Acculturation, Assimilation, and Mobility. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, 1: 152-64. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. 1986. Race, Writing, and Difference. University of Chicago Press. Glazer, Nathan. 1997. We Are All Multiculturalists Now. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan. 1963. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press. Gordon, Milton M. 1964. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press. Greeley, Andrew. 1971. Why Cant They Be Like Us? Americas White Ethnic Groups. New York: E.P. Dutton. Herberg, Will. 1955. ProtestantCatholic Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chic ago Press. Higham, John. 1955. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New York: Atheneum. Hollinger, David A. 1995. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books. Horowitz, Donald L. 2000. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenges to Americas National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. James, William. 1987 [1909]. A Pluralistic Universe. In Bruce Kuklick, ed., William James: Writings, 1902-1910. New York: Library of America. Kallen, Horace M. 1915. Democracy versus the Melting Pot: A Study of American Nationality. The Nation 100 (February 18 and 25): 190-94, 217-20. Kanstroom, Daniel. 2007. Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kasinitz, Philip, Juan Battle, and Ins Miyares. 2001. Fade to Black? The Children of West Indian Immigrants in South Florida. In Rubn G. Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes, eds., Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley and New York: University of California Press and Russell Sage Foundation.

28

Kazal, Russell A. 1995. "Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History." American Historical Review, 100, 2: 437-471. Kennedy, David M. 1980. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Kennedy, Ruby Jo Reeves. 1944. Single or Triple Melting-Pot? Intermarriage Trends in New Haven, 1870-1940. American Journal of Sociology, 49: 331-339. Marx, Leo, and Bruce Mazlish, eds. 1996. Progress: Fact or Illusion? Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Meyer, Stephen. 1980. Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory, 1914-1921. Journal of Social History 14, 1: 67-82. Miller, Stuart Creighton. 1982. Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Milosz, Czeslaw. 1994 [1980]. Nobel Lecture. In Sture Alln, ed., Nobel Lectures, Literature: 1968-1980. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, Inc. Nahirny, Vladimir C., and Joshua A. Fishman. 1965. American Immigrant Groups: Ethnic Identification and the Problem of Generations. Sociological Review, NS13: 311-26. Ngai, Mae M. 2005. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Orum, Anthony M. 2005. Circles of Influence and Chains of Command: The Social Processes Whereby Ethnic Communities Influence Host Societies. Social Forces 84, 2: 921-939. Park, Robert E. 1914. Racial Assimilation in Secondary groups with Particular Reference to the Negro. American Journal of Sociology 19, 5: 606-623. Park, Robert E. 1930. Assimilation, Social. In: E. R. A. Seligman and A. Johnson, eds., Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan. Park, Robert E. 1937. Introduction, to Romanzo Adams, Interracial Marriage in Hawaii. New York: Macmillan, pp. vii-xiv. Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. 1924 [1921]. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, Robert E., Herbert A. Miller [and W.I. Thomas]. 1921. Old World Traits Transplanted. A volume in the Carnegie Corporation series on Americanization Studies, directed by Allen T. Burns. New York: Harper & Brothers. Prez, Jr., Louis A. 2008. Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Pew Hispanic Center. 2007. 2007 National Survey of Latinos: As Illegal Immigration Issue Heats Up, Hispanics Feel a Chill. Washington, DC: December.

29

Portes, Alejandro, and Rubn G. Rumbaut. 2001. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. Berkeley and New York: University of California Press, Russell Sage Foundation. Portes, Alejandro, and Rubn G. Rumbaut. 2006. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press. 3rd ed.

Portes, Alejandro, and Min Zhou. 1993. The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants among Post-1965 Immigrant Youth. The Annals, AAPSS, 530: 74-98. Redfield, Robert, Ralph Linton, and Melville J. Herskovits. 1936. Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation. American Anthropologist 38, 1: 149-152. Rumbaut, Rubn G. 1997. Assimilation and Its Discontents: Between Rhetoric and Reality. International Migration Review 31, 4: 923-960. Rumbaut, Rubn G. and Alejandro Portes, eds. 2001. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley and New York: University of California Press and Russell Sage Foundation. Rumbaut, Rubn G. 2004. Ages, Life Stages, and Generational Cohorts: Decomposing the Immigrant First and Second Generations in the United States. International Migration Review 38, 3: 1160-1205. Rumbaut, Rubn G. 2005. Turning Points in the Transition to Adulthood: Determinants of Educational Attainment, Incarceration, and Early Childbearing among Children of Immigrants. Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, 6: 1041-1086. Shavit, Ari. 1997. Vanishing. The New York Times Magazine, June 8. Telles, Edward E., and Vilma Ortiz. 2008. Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Tienda, Marta, et al. 2006. Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies: Hispanics and the American Future. Washington DC: National Academies Press. Warner, W. Lloyd, and Leo Srole. 1945. The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Waters, Mary C. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Waters, Mary C. 1999. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. New York and Cambridge, MA: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press. Yinger, J. Milton. 1981. Toward a Theory of Assimilation and Dissimilation. Ethnic and Racial Studies 4, 3: 249-64. Yinger, J. Milton. 1994. Ethnicity: Source of Strength? Source of Conflict? Albany: State University of New York Press. Zangwill, Israel. 1908. The Melting Pot, Drama in Four Acts. In The Works of Israel Zangwill. http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/wsharpe/citylit/Melting1.htm

30

Table 1. Educational Attainment, English Fluency, Poverty Status, and U.S. Citizenship of Foreign-born Adults 25-64 by Decade of Arrival in the United States, 2000 Education (percent) National Origin Total (foreign-born adults 25-64) Latin America, Caribbean: Mexico El Salvador, Guatemala Puerto Ricoa Cuba Dominican Republic Colombia, Ecuador, Peru Jamaica, Other West Indies Haiti Other Latin America East and South Asia: Philippines Chineseb India Korea Vietnam Laos, Cambodia Europe and Canada: Canada, Great Britain Other Europe Elsewhere in world
Less than College high school graduate

English fluentc (percent) Decade of arrival:

1990s 1980s Pre-1980

In poverty (percent) Decade of arrival:

1990s 1980s Pre-1980

U.S. Citizen (percent) Decade of arrival:

1990s 1980s Pre-1980

36.3 69.4 64.0 22.6 32.9 49.1 26.0 24.3 35.5 28.3 9.0 19.3 9.7 10.6 35.9 49.9 8.0 18.9 14.5

25.5 4.3 5.4 15.0 20.7 10.1 20.6 18.5 14.2 22.5 48.5 52.5 71.4 45.2 20.1 9.2 41.7 32.2 41.5

59.3 31.9 36.3 69.0 35.1 37.8 48.0 99.0 64.6 61.8 91.9 64.2 90.0 53.2 43.4 43.0 99.1 75.4 80.7

70.0 49.0 58.0 77.4 57.6 54.4 70.1 99.6 82.3 79.2 95.8 69.9 93.4 67.2 68.1 59.9 99.2 86.8 91.9

84.1 64.5 71.7 84.2 84.9 68.8 82.8 99.5 90.4 92.6 97.1 82.6 96.7 85.1 83.8 77.0 99.3 93.3 95.0

22.4 31.8 24.9 33.2 22.0 29.7 21.8 15.7 25.2 22.2 8.0 18.7 9.8 26.2 16.3 35.3 7.4 14.9 20.3

17.3 26.3 19.4 28.5 20.0 27.3 14.3 11.7 18.7 14.6 5.3 9.5 5.8 9.4 14.0 22.6 6.0 7.6 11.8

12.0 18.5 16.7 24.5 9.2 22.3 10.4 10.5 14.2 10.4 4.3 6.2 3.9 7.5 8.5 14.9 6.1 6.6 8.2

15.9 7.1 7.4

100.0

47.0 25.7 29.0

100.0

73.1 50.0 60.6

100.0

12.4 15.2 10.5 25.0 18.1 10.2 26.4 15.8 10.8 11.9 35.4 21.2 8.0 21.0 16.0

49.8 41.8 47.2 60.1 55.1 41.0 72.4 69.4 60.6 54.0 78.6 54.0 30.3 53.1 56.2

86.4 65.4 75.4 76.9 74.2 73.8 90.3 92.7 84.8 87.4 89.1 69.7 60.3 79.3 77.9

Source: 2000 U.S. Census, 5% PUMS.

a b c

Island-born Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth and not immigrants; the data are broken down by the decade of their move from the island to the U.S. mainland. Including Hong Kong and Taiwan. English fluency defined as speaking English only, or well or very well.

Table 2. Rates of Incarceration of Males 18 to 39, by Ethnicity, Nativity, and Time in the U.S.: 2000
Ethnicity/Panethnicity Males 18-39 in U.S. Percent incarcerated Foreign-born Years in the United States 0-5 yrs 6-15 yrs 16 yrs+ U.S.-born

Total Latin American, Hispanic: Mexican Salvadoran, Guatemalan Colombian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian Cuban Dominican a Puerto Rican Asian, non-Hispanic: Filipino Chineseb Indian Korean Vietnamese Laotian, Cambodian White, non-Hispanic: Black, non-Hispanic:

45,200,417 7,514,857 5,017,431 433,828 283,599 213,302 182,303 642,106 1,902,809 297,011 439,086 393,621 184,238 229,735 89,864 29,014,261 5,453,546

3.04 3.26 2.71 0.68 1.07 3.01 2.76 5.06 0.62 0.64 0.28 0.22 0.38 0.89 1.65 1.66 10.87

0.50 0.57 0.55 0.37 0.46 1.48 1.28 2.57 0.14 0.31 0.07 0.05 0.10 0.46 0.36 1.64

0.77 0.89 1.30 0.46 0.66 2.49 1.99 4.01 0.25 0.35 0.22 0.11 0.15 0.41 0.33 0.41 2.10

1.39 1.70 1.98 0.88 1.12 3.40 3.07 6.06 0.50 0.45 0.27 0.27 0.50 0.51 1.19 0.88 3.80

3.51 6.72 5.90 3.01 2.37 4.20 3.71 5.37 1.86 1.22 0.65 0.99 0.93 5.60 7.26 1.71 11.61

Source: 2000 U.S. Census, 5% PUMS. Rates indicate percent of males institutionalized at the time of the census.
a b

Island-born Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth, not immigrants; data denote time of move from the island to the mainland.

Including Hong Kong and Taiwan. Too few cases for an accurate estimate.

32

Table 3. Socioeconomic Characteristics of Persons 25 to 64, by Panethnic Groups and Generation, 2003-2006
Non-Hispanic

Selected Characteristics

Hispanic Generational Cohort* 1.0 1.5 2nd 3+

% % % %

Asian Generational Cohort 1.0 1.5 2nd 3+

11.4 20.9 31.5 20.9 5.8 18.4 35.8 15.1 3.7 12.1 40.1 21.3 4.2 17.3 34.9 17.1

Black Generational Cohort 1.0 1.5 2nd 3+

18.5 31.4 18.2 9.0 3.8 27.1 23.9 7.2 7.6 20.1 23.1 15.5 14.4 38.6 12.7 4.9

White Generational Cohort 1.0 1.5 2nd 3+

9.5 26.0 26.5 18.6 5.9 24.9 26.1 13.5 3.8 24.1 26.7 16.2 7.0 31.8 21.5 10.8

Educational attainment: Less than high school High school graduate Bachelor's degree Advanced degree

54.8 24.6 7.0 2.6

32.9 30.1 10.1 4.2

18.2 31.3 14.0 4.4

19.4 35.8 10.1 4.3

Occupational status index:** Higher status (SEI > 50) % Low-wage labor (SEI < 25) % Economic status: Earnings Family annual income Poverty rate (persons)

13.5 69.0

31.3 40.9

38.6 30.3

36.9 31.7

49.1 29.1

56.0 21.2

63.8 12.6

55.1 18.8

29.0 46.3

37.8 28.0

51.1 22.0

32.9 39.5

51.3 26.3

53.9 21.1

57.1 16.6

49.6 23.2

$ 24,695 $ 42,626 % 21.3%

33,414 34,993 34,027 55,654 59,426 57,515 14.5% 12.0% 13.0%

46,427 80,078 9.9%

46,450 86,419 6.5%

53,180 93,983 8.1%

54,390 95,240 6.0%

33,692 56,851 14.2%

38,989 41,003 31,851 64,747 68,605 48,310 10.7% 13.6% 18.9%

49,475 80,498 9.0%

51,278 87,091 5.2%

51,392 89,144 5.4%

44,935 76,840 6.8%

Source: Current Population Survey, 2003-06.

* Generation: "1.0:" Foreign-born, arrived 13 or older; "1.5:" Foreign-born, arrived 12 or younger; "2nd:" U.S.-born, at least 1 foreign-born parent; "3+:" U.S.-born, 2 U.S.-born parents. ** Socioeconomic index (SEI): higher = professional, technical, white-collar occupations with SEI (Duncan) scores above 50; low-wage labor = jobs with SEI scores below 25.

33

Table 4. Occupational Stratification of U.S. Workers 25-44, by Generation and Panethnic Groups: 2003-2006 Occupations
Total workers (25-44): Proportion of workers by generation: Physicians and surgeons Natural and life science Computer, math, physical science Engineering, architecture Other healthcare professionals Lawyers and judges Social and behavioral science Education, training, library professionals Community and social service Arts, design, entertainment, sports, media Management Business and financial operations Sales and related occupations Police, firemen, protective services Medical technician and healthcare support Office and administrative support service Personal care and service Food preparation and serving Building and grounds cleaning, maintenance Installation, maintenance, repair Transportation and material moving Production, manufacturing Construction and extraction Farming, fishing, and forestry Source: Current Population Survey, 2003-06.
* Generational cohorts: "1.0:" Foreign-born, arrived 13 or older; "1.5:" Foreign-born, arrived 12 or younger; "2nd:" U.S.-born, at least 1 foreign-born parent; "3+:" U.S.-born, 2 U.S.-born parents. N % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % %

Hispanic
5,492,117

1.0 Generation* Asian Black

2,162,173 788,004

White
1,664,440

Hispanic
3,079,961

1.5/2nd Generations * Asian Black

1,028,945 370,526

White
2,697,316

Hispanic
2,160,029

3+ Generations* Asian Black

188,432 6,960,618

White
40,482,073

54.3 8.5 2.8 6.2 14.5 9.9 14.0 17.1 21.1 35.5 28.6 30.0 19.7 39.3 34.7 29.5 43.4 38.4 71.1 84.0 63.6 72.7 71.6 85.3 94.3

21.4 51.8 64.7 65.1 44.6 51.4 25.1 49.0 35.3 18.5 28.3 30.3 43.6 28.4 10.4 21.1 24.5 34.1 15.6 4.5 13.9 8.3 15.8 2.8 2.2

7.8 8.5 2.4 4.0 6.0 17.0 4.2 9.6 11.2 16.7 5.1 6.3 11.8 9.2 38.2 33.8 13.6 10.9 5.3 4.0 8.4 9.3 3.6 2.0 0.6

16.5 31.3 30.2 24.8 35.0 21.7 56.7 24.2 32.4 29.3 38.0 33.4 24.9 23.1 16.7 15.6 18.5 16.6 7.9 7.5 14.1 9.7 8.9 9.9 3.0

42.9 8.8 14.4 20.7 22.6 18.0 12.3 21.8 37.1 41.8 26.8 32.4 27.2 43.0 46.4 44.2 49.6 40.3 48.8 67.8 53.0 65.3 55.5 61.2 82.1

14.3 43.2 33.9 31.9 28.6 24.8 20.7 20.6 11.9 10.4 22.0 15.5 22.4 12.1 8.6 11.4 12.2 17.4 15.1 3.3 11.2 5.5 15.0 2.9 2.9

5.2 5.0 7.7 5.1 4.6 6.6 2.3 3.4 5.8 11.5 2.9 4.1 4.7 5.7 8.5 10.3 5.4 5.1 3.0 3.5 3.2 6.6 4.2 3.0 2.1

37.6 43.1 44.0 42.4 44.2 50.6 64.7 54.3 45.1 36.2 48.3 48.0 45.7 39.2 36.5 34.1 32.8 37.2 33.1 25.4 32.7 22.5 25.3 32.9 12.9

4.3 1.8 1.8 2.9 2.4 2.1 2.0 3.3 3.5 4.0 3.3 2.8 3.5 4.6 5.6 4.4 5.5 4.6 5.0 6.2 4.6 5.3 4.6 5.4 5.6

0.4 2.1 0.1 1.0 0.7 0.3 0.6 0.3 0.4 0.4 0.7 0.4 0.6 0.4 0.1 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.6 0.1 0.3 0.2 0.3 0.2 0.1

14.0 7.4 4.6 9.2 5.2 8.2 5.7 10.4 11.4 21.6 8.7 7.1 12.1 10.7 21.5 23.1 17.5 18.8 19.2 24.9 8.7 23.0 17.9 9.4 13.1

81.3 88.7 93.5 86.9 91.7 89.5 91.7 86.0 84.7 73.9 87.3 89.8 83.8 84.3 72.7 72.2 76.6 76.0 75.3 68.7 86.5 71.5 77.2 85.0 81.2

34

Figure 1. Patterns of Ethnic Self-Identification among Children of Immigrants, by Levels of Acculturation and Discrimination (CILS longitudinal sample)
Acculturation Index* LOW HIGH

HIGH

Black Immigrant Nationality

Discrimination Index**

Asian

Hyphenated American American

Hispanic Hispanic
LOW

* Acculturation index = composite measure (0 to 1) of preferences for English language and American ways reported at both surveys. ** Discrimination index = composite measure (0 to 1) of experiences and expectations of discrimination reported at both surveys. Data source: CILS. See Rumbaut (2005) for description of ethnic self-identity types, and for mean scores by national origin.

35