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/