Think Immigration
How do you define assimilation?
Last Friday, on her talk show, conservative commentator Laura Ingraham lamented the fact that we cannot evaluate immigrants on their level of assimilation because it is politically incorrect: “So we can say someone is potentially unstable who’s an American citizen, but if someone is potentially not assimilating as a foreigner then we can’t raise any issues about that.”
John O’Sullivan, of the National Review Online, also worried about assimilation – specifically “patriotic assimilation,” a term coined by John Fonte of the Hudson institute. Fonte provides this definition of “patriotic assimilation.” “By patriotic assimilation I mean that immigrants essentially adopt American civic values and the American heritage as their own. “
Sociologists Richard Alba and Victor Nee reject a more dated definition of assimilation, implied in Fonte’s work. That definition, by Milton Gordon, found “middle-class cultural patterns of, largely, white Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon origins” as the marker of “over-all American culture.”
Alba and Nee argue for a new definition of assimilation that recognizes a reciprocal nature to the process. They assert:
Assimilation, as a form of ethnic change, may occur through changes taking place in groups on both sides of the boundary. . . We define assimilation as the decline of an ethnic distinction and its corollary cultural and social differences. . . Individuals’ ethnic origins become less and less relevant in relation to the members of another ethnic group. . . and individuals on both sides of the boundary see themselves more and more as alike. . .
How do you define assimilation?
Read more: http://thinkimmigration.org/2013/04/23/immigration-reform-and-the-notion-of-assimilation/