Rumbaut - The Melting and the Pots, Assimilations Bumpy Road (2009)

8/2/2019 Rumbaut - The Melting and the Pots, Assimilations Bumpy Road (2009)

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[To appear inAmerican 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 wewanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent ofthe governed What we emphatically do not want is that [the immigrants] distinctivequalities 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 minoritygroups all over America. Each group enters the city at the bottom of the social heap

(lower-lower class) and through the several generations makes its desperate climbupwards new ethnics will go through the same metamorphosis The mobile ethnic ismuch 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 doesnot exist The point about the melting pot is that it did not happen The notion that theintense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life wassoon to blend into a homogeneous end product has outlived its usefulness, and also itscredibility. The persistent facts of ethnicity demand attention, understanding, andaccommodation.

--Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan (1963: xcvii, 20, 290)


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Assimilation, a protean concept with an American pedigree and a checkered past, isback 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 sincethe 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, whenreferences 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 hasconflated various empirical descriptions and normative prescriptions to make sense of theincorporation 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 normativepurposesa solution for which it is probably too late (Gans 1997: 875)or considereddropping 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 oldquestions being raised about the future of new American ethnic groups, the concept has

reemerged, enlivened by intriguing and innovative reformulations, if still burdened by itsmalleability and imprecision.

A leading economist has summarized the conventional wisdom as follows: Thetraditional view of the social mobility of immigrant households across generations is

vividly encapsulated by the melting pot metaphor. In that view, immigrants from anarray 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 seemsh i d i i i l h f f d i d A l


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never been a single American pot; that singular image will remain a deeply flawedonesociologically as well as ideologicallyunless it can be applied inclusively, across

social classes, interethnically and interracially. Yet inasmuch as the possibilities of socialand cultural interminglings are greater than ever, a critical reassessment of processes and

outcomes of assimilation in American life is worth undertaking, along withespeciallygiven its perennial ambiguitya reconsideration of the concept itself (Gans 1992a; Albaand 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 ofthe 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 thestudy 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 itwas a metaphor derived from physiology to describe, as in a process of digestion and

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 theaction) of alien peoples (the object) Thus, a May 19, 1852 article in the newly foundedNew 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 thelargest 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, theTimes 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 Weknow how stubbornly conservative of his dirt and ignorance is the average immigrant


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By August 9, 1903, another editorial in the Times noted that Little more than one half ofthe 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 isconsiderable. 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 AlanSimpson, the ranking minority member of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration andRefugee 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 intransitiveverbreversing the focal subject and modifying the meaning of the predicate. It was nowthe 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, withimmigration unabated and the large majority of it residents consisting of immigrants andtheir 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 bedistinguished, in the second generation, from an American born of native parents As amatter of fact, the ease and rapidity with which aliens, under existing conditions in theUnited States, have been able to assimilate themselves to the customs and manners ofAmerican life have enabled this country to swallow and digest every sort of normalhuman difference, except the purely external ones, like color of the skin (1914: 608).

Americanization became the synonym of assimilationall the more during thenational mobilizations for 100 percent Americanism spurred by World War I, the

Bolshevik Revolution, and their aftermath (cf. Higham 1955). Popular usage reflected


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in an interview he added that This talk about the American type is nonsense, because ina 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 ourpresent 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 placein a wide range of contexts, from colonial conquest and military occupation, to thedisplacement of indigenous peoples, to large-scale voluntary immigration. He identifiedseven variables (or stages or subprocesses) of a complex assimilation process to

describe, in the American context, what happens to the sense of peoplehood of ethnicgroups, 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 inboth sending and receiving societies, in intergroup relations within receiving societies,

and among the immigrants themselves and their descendants. In varying contexts of exitand reception, immigration is followed predictably not only by acculturative processes on

the part of the immigrants, but also by varying degrees of acceptance, intolerance orxenophobia about the alien newcomers on the part of the natives, which in turn shape theimmigrants 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 inlanguage, religion, race, national origin or ancestral homeland, cultural heritage, andmemories of a shared historical past. Their modes of incorporation across generationsmay take a variety of forms some leading to greater homogenization and solidarity


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to argue on behalf of states rights and white supremacy (cf. Bramen 2000). That usageand defense of diversity would be inconceivable to a contemporary multiculturalist.

Sociologically, assimilation has been defined as a multidimensional process ofboundary reduction which blurs or dissolves an ethnic distinction and the social and

cultural differences and identities associated with it (Alba and Nee 1997, 2003; Yinger1981, 1994). At its hypothesized terminus, formerly distinguishable ethnocultural groupsbecome 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 minoritygroupssuch as the case of second-generation West Indians becoming black

Americans (Waters 1999; Kasinitz et al., 2001). At the individual level, assimilationdenotes the cumulative changes that make individuals of one ethnic group moreacculturated, integrated, and identifiedwith the members of another.

Ideologically, the term has been used to justify selective state-imposed policiesaimed at the eradication of minority cultures and the benevolent conquest of other

peoples. Two notorious exampleswhich could be called a melting plotare thecampaigns, encouraged by the Dawes Act of 1887, to Americanize, Christianize and

civilize American Indian children by removing them from their families and immediateenvironments 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 imperialinterest 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 theirpolitics; they have the capacity to shape a narrative of moral validation in the service ofpower (Prez 2008). To a self-professed nation of immigrants, melting pot projects aninclusionary image of the mechanism by which an unum is forged from the pluribus


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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 whatWilliam James (1909) called a pluralistic universe in his blueprint for modern

pluralism, or what his former student Horace Kallen (1915) conceived as a democracyof nationalitiesthan to more essentialized and ascribed notions of difference (purelyexternal, 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 meltingpot 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 ofmelting as a metaphor came from the pen of a French immigrant, whose name wasitself 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 matterpresciently 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 Europeanemigrants to their origins in the first place, and the invisible power of an auspiciousnew-world reception bound to change their attachments and sense of belonging 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 onlycords that tied him: his country is now that which gives him land bread protection and


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of different castes and segregated ghettoes and institutions in a de facto (and for much ofits history de jure) American apartheid cannot, by definition, conduce to a common

melting, a sense of sharing a common fate and common narrative, an interpenetration (inParks definition of assimilation), let alone intermarriage. The native-born children of

todays immigrants from Haiti and Mexico and China and Iran quickly becomeacculturated to the English language and to a homogenized consumer and popular culturebut 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 crucibles (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 officialethnoracial pentagon (Hollinger 1995) of one-size-fits-all official categories: Asians,Hispanics/Latinos, blacks, whites, American Indians). The national motto might

more accurately proclaimE Pluribus Quinque.

In intergroup relations, assimilation and oppression dont mix. On the contrary,

assimilation breeds under conditions of intimacy and mutual acceptance, as indexed bythe warmth of the welcome and ultimately by intermarriage and the adoption ofAmerican 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 betweenold and new experiences, if we help them to find points of contact, then we hasten theirassimilation. This is a process of growth as against the "ordering and forbidding" policyand the demand that the assimilation of the immigrant shall be "sudden complete and


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By contrast, under a regime of ethnoracial oppression, segregation, andstigmatization, the process boomerangsnot into the euthanasia of memories, but into

what Czeslaw Milosz has called the memory of wounds (1980); not into the twilightbut 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 strivingsthat is not the zero-sum game implied in melting.

No Americans have been so thoroughly left out of the discourse of the MeltingPot 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 onBroadway and half a century after the end of the American Civil War, D.W. Griffithsepic 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 NewYork 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 TheClansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, it told the tale of thedevastation wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction, depicting radical Republicans

and empowered blacks as the cause of all postwar social, political, and economicproblems 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 theAdvancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other black political groups strenuouslyprotested the films vicious and blatant racism, but could not dent its runaway box-office

successthough it rallied African Americans around a common cause. PresidentWoodrow 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 assaying, "It is like writing history with lightning my only regret is that it is all so terriblytrue." 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 nationsbl di b l fi ld i G b P l i h J l 1 3 1863 51 000


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nation whose founding declaration of freedom was signed by slaveholders, whoseConstitution counted certain members as three-fifths of a human being, whose territory

was taken from indigenous peoples, and which until 1952 excluded immigrants fromnaturalization (and others from entry altogether) on the basis of race. Nor does the

metaphoror, by definition, the term assimilationfit todays contexts of wideninginequalities and official persecution of millions of undocumented immigrants who forman outcaste population on the margins of society, subject to detention and deportation

regardless of their level of acculturation (cf. Ngai 2004; Kanstroom 2007). Recently, afterstepped-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 Latinoadults 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, whichbecame 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 inTheDivision of Labor in Society (1893), sought to grasp the transition from pre-modernfolk 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 rationalefficiency, sought to grapple with the attendant problems of large-scale social integration.

The teleological notion of an endlessly improving future and positivist assumptions oflinear progressof humanitys ability to realize the promise of the Enlightenmentweremade 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 andM li h 1996) E i 1933 i h iddl f h G D i d i h h


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Five Dollar Day to induce these workers to change their habits and attitudesboth toadapt 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. Abouthalf 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 weremet. The Ford Sociological Department was established to elevate the worker and hisfamily 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 thechildren 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 (36percent 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 potrepresenting 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 foreignlanguages; then, after the pot began to boil while being stirred vigorously with 10- footladles 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 playAmerican games with their teachers for the rest of the day.

In the end, however, the Ford experiment in welfare capitalism and benevolentpaternalism 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 1919Ford 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 onthe shop floor, and management could not use Americanization to ensure a fullymalleable workforce. A recession and financial crisis in 1920-21 led to massive cost-

cutting at Ford and the termination of its Sociological and Americanization programs,ll li l i l i i f h f i d d P i E


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the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons and groups, and, by sharing theirexperience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life (1924

[1921]: 735). They distinguished systematically between four great types ofinteractioncompetition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilationwhich they

related respectively to economic, political, social, and cultural institutions. Competitionand 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 ofaccommodating 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 veryunlikely to occur among immigrants who arrive as adults. Instead, accommodation most

closely reflects the modal adaptation of first-generation adult immigrants, whileassimilation 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 ofinclusion at the primary group level. Indeed, the research literature on the adaptation oftwentieth 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 primaryintimate and intensesocial contacts, including intermarriage; accommodation may befacilitated through secondary contacts, but they are too distant and remote to promote

assimilation. Since the nature (especially the interpersonal intimacy, the great moralsolvent) 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 itsabsence is an insurmountable barrier to assimilation, since it is through communicationthat gradual and unconscious changes of the attitudes and sentiments of the members of

the group are produced. Butcruciallylanguage and acculturation alone cannot ensurei il i if i i ll d i ll l ifi d d d d i


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kind of homogeneity and like-mindedness that individuals of the same nationalityexhibit has been greatly exaggerated. Like-mindedness...contributes little or nothing to

national solidarity (Park 1914; reproduced in Park and Burgess, 1924: 759). Park andBurgess would have advised a different approach (1924: 739-40):

Not by the suppression of old memories, but by their incorporation in his new life isassimilation achieved... Assimilation cannot be promoted directly, but only indirectly,that is, by supplying the conditions that make for participation. There is no process butlife itself that can effectually wipe out the immigrant's memory of his past. The inclusionof the immigrant in our common life may perhaps best be reached, therefore, incooperation that looks not so much to the past as to the future. The second generation ofthe immigrant may share fully in our memories, but practically all that we can ask of theforeign-born is participation in our ideals, our wishes, and our common enterprises.

Ironically, despite his wide-ranging writings on many subjects, Park may be bestknown 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-stepprocess 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 bookon 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 passageof 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 havebrought about an existing interpenetration of peoplesso vast and irresistible that theresulting 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 assimilativeoutcome 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


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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 classstatus; and assimilation and subordination scales based on specific criteria to

estimate the time for an entire group to disappear (the final result of assimilation), theproportionate number of people who drop out of a group in each generation, and theamount and kind of participation permitted members of the group by the host society.

They explicitly linked upward social mobility to assimilation, which they saw asdetermined largely by the degree of ethnocultural (religion and language) and above all

racial difference from the dominant group. While racial groups were subordinated andexcluded through caste restrictions on residential, occupational, associational, and maritalchoice, 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 thechild 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 racialdifference 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 andstructural inequalities, however, the future of American ethnic groups seems to belimited; it is likely that they will be quickly absorbed (pp. 294-95).

That general if decidedly qualified view of assimilation as linear progress, withsociocultural 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 tothe United Statesand of the denouement of the concept itself in the wake of the 1960s.

F th i t f th b k G d f d th l ti l d t t l


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Nonetheless, in reviewing the actual evidence for the assimilation sequence inAmerican 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 socialspace 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 seriesof hypotheses about contextual variations in cultural behavior, social identification andgroup identity. He found that The most salient factis the maintenance of the

structurally separate subsocieties of the three major religions and the racial and quasi-racial 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, heconcluded 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 anideology did not match empirical realities, and the theory of the Melting Pot exhibiteda considerable degree of sociological naivet (p. 129). And while Anglo-conformity

was the most prevalent ideology of assimilation in American history, he also noted thatStructural 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 insimilar 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 thepostwar 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) asshattering the consensus school and the rationale for studying assimilation, bringingback instead a focus on the ethnic group and ethnic resilience, and more inclusive

ti f A i i t A th ti f A l A i


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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 aregenerally more extensive among members of smaller and weaker groups, and particularly

(voluntary) immigrant groupsand more rapidly achieved with respect to what Gordoncalled extrinsic culture traits. Nonetheless, acculturation is never exclusively one-sided; dominant groups too are culturally influenced by their contacts with other

ethnocultural groups in the society (Alba and Nee 2003; Orum 2005). In the Americanexperience, 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 acculturativegaps commonly develop in immigrant households between parents and children; Portes

and Rumbaut (2001) have identified three such acculturative patterns in parent-childrelationships, 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 thatinvolves 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 asgaining to form and sustain a more complex repertoire (bilingualism and biculturalism).

Available research has yet to examine systematically the multiplicity of conditions andcontexts yielding subtractive vs. additive acculturative outcomes, although in the UnitedStates 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 nota 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, althoughwhat he had in mind was the entrance of the minority group into the social cliques,

l b d i tit ti f th i t t th i l l ( t it ith


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the thinning of their ethnic self- identities in the United States. For their descendants, atleast, 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 senseof belonging and connection to an ancestral past faded. This mode of ethnic identityformation, however, was never solely a simple linear function of socioeconomic status

and the degree of acculturationthat is, of the development of linguistic and othercultural 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 statusgroups. But where social mobility is blocked or hindered by prejudice and discrimination,

members of lower status groups may react by reaffirming their shared identity. Thisprocess 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 ofethnic identity formation, accounting for the thickening rather than the dilution ofethnicity. 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 rapidacculturation of European immigrants in the United States, as reflected in theabandonment of the parental language and other ethnic patterns of behavior, the second

generation remained more conscious of their ethnic identity than were their immigrantparents (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 childrenmade them acutely self-conscious and sensitive to their ethnicity, especially when passingthrough adolescence. Moreover, as parents and children acculturated at different rates, a

ti l th t b th ti th hild h d d l th


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generation as they were beginning to enter the workforce, hinging on economic and otherconditions. Three were positive scenarios, positing upward mobility driven by

educational attainment, ethnic succession, or niche improvement. Three posited negativefutures, projecting the reverse of the previous three (educational failure, the stalling of

ethnic succession in the legal economy, niche shrinkage)a second generation declinepotentially exacerbated by a combination of economic downturns or non-labor-intensiveeconomic growth, the second generations refusal or inability to accept the jobs their

parents held, and competition from successive new waves of immigrants. Rather thanexperiencing 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 explanatorymodels developed in connection with the experience of European ethnics, despite the fact

that contemporary immigrants were being incorporated in a post-civil-rights contextifalso 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, naturalizedcitizenship) 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 toomany variables to render the notion of a relatively uniform and straightforward path

convincing (aside from the swift switch to English among immigrants children, whichcuts across all classes and nationalities). Instead, as Portes and Zhou (1993) framed it ayear after Gans six scenarios, the present second generation of children of immigrants

can be seen as undergoing a process of segmented assimilation where outcomes varyacross 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 humancapital and the structure and cohesiveness of their families, interact in complex but

patterned ways with external contexts of receptiongovernment policies and programs,h f h i h h h l l f i l l


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immigrant groups for incorporation as racialized minorities Clearly, assimilation willnot apply to all immigrant minorities to the same extent many in the second generationare likely to experience upward mobility into the American socioeconomicmainstream[others] may experience lateral or, at best, short-distance mobilityChildren of low-wage labor migration are likelier to experience downward mobility intothe urban minority underclass than children of human capital migration from the sameethnic group There is no reason to believe that assimilation is inevitable or that it willbe 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 foreign-born 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 nationalitiesis 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; theycomprise 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, in2000, about 25 percent had college degrees (the same as the native population), while 36percent 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 allnationalities 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, andimmigrants from Africa and the Middle East, the proportion of college graduates far

exceeds the proportion of high school dropouts. These wide disparities extend from theMexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans (two thirds of whom had less than a high schooleducation, but only one in twenty had college degrees, reflecting a disproportionate


20/35

large economic discrepancies remain between groups), and naturalization (which requiresa minimum of five years after obtaining legal permanent residency status) increases.

Similar patterns are observed for homeownership (not shown in the table). Many groupsnow arrive with levels of education and occupational skills well above U.S. norms; others

are already fluent in English pre-arrival (e.g., the Jamaicans, Filipinos, Indians). Lessobvious exceptions to the linear narrative are the cases of the Canadians and British, themost assimilated of immigrants by almost any measure: English speakers with very low

poverty rates, they are the least likely to become naturalized U.S. citizensalong withthe 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 andassimilated 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 thelanguage and relevant occupational skills should propel immigrants and their descendantsin 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 careand educational systems, the new economy and societya process more or lesscompleted 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 culturallife 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, andethnic self-identity (see Rumbaut 1997; Portes and Rumbaut 2006). They are paradoxes

in that the evidence contradicts orthodox expectationsi.e., they appear paradoxicalf h f h ili h i l di ld i d h l f


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to have the highest rates, given their very low average education. Those hypotheses areexamined 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 theinstitutionalized are in correctional facilities.

As Table 2 shows, about 3 percent of the 45.2 million males age 18-39 were infederal 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 foreign-born (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, forevery 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 ratesincrease more sharply still. These results are exactly the opposite of what was predicted.

Among Latin American immigrants, the least educated groups actually had thelowest 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 werefound among Asian groups. For the Vietnamese, the incarceration rate increases from lessthan 0.5 percent among the foreign-born to 5.6 percent among the U.S.-born; for Laotiansand 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 nativeblacks). The advantage for immigrants holds when broken down by education for every

ethnic group. These results are confirmed by other studies and raise significant questionsabout conventional theories of acculturation and assimilation and their embedded notionsof 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


22/35

some 80 percent of Hispanics are of foreign birth or parentage (first or secondgenerations), while about 90 percent of non-Hispanic whites and blacks are long-

term natives (third, fourth or higher generations)the historic white-majority/black-minority 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 andrelated inequalities between native-parentage whites and blacks seem narrow comparedto 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 ofmobility (within the limitations of cross-sectional data) is strongest among Hispanics,

who start at the bottom in all educational, occupational and economic indicators, moremoderate 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, andlowest poverty rates). However, for all groups and contrary to conventional wisdom, theevidence 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 third-

generation 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 from1998 to 2002 have been reported by detailed national origins (Rumbaut 2004), and

longitudinally into the fourth generation for Mexican American samples originally drawnin 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 native-

parentage population) reach retirement age, immigrants and their children are expected tof f h h f h U S l b f i h h f i


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well as how and where they perceive themselves to fit in the society of which they areits 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 politicalimplications. And the decisive turning point for change in ethnic and national self-

identities 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 represented77 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-endedquestions. 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 grewolderscarce 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, plainAmerican) and pan-ethnic identities (e.g., Hispanic/Latino, Black, Asian), as reportedby 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; atthe opposite end is found the American identity, occupying the low-discrimination,

high-acculturation bottom right quadrant. The hyphenated-American identity is locatedl h di l b h l h h l h A i h h


24/35

the total sample chose white, black, or Asian; some reported being multiracial, but two-thirds 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 fifthgave their nationality as their race. The explicit racialization of the Hispanic/Latino

category, as well as the substantial proportion of youths who conceived their nationalorigin as a racial category, are noteworthy both for their potential long-term implicationsin hardening minority group boundaries, not blurring them, and for their illustration of

the arbitrariness of racial constructionsand of the ease with which an ethnic categorydeveloped 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 oftheir 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 SouthAmericans; 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 theDominican 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, whereasvery 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 providea striking instance of the malleability of racial constructions, even between parents andchildren in the same family. More fully exposed than their parents to American culture

d it i i d i l ti d b i i tl t i d d t t d L ti


25/35

and the West Indies. In reacting to their contexts of reception and learning how they areviewed 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 thisstory 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 polyethnicfuturesmixing a plurality of origins and outlooks capable of interpreting the nationsfoundational fictions and the ethno-national experience from very different vantagepoints. 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 thecore, the new immigrationabove all from Mexicois challenging that core identity:

The culinary metaphor is an Anglo-Protestant tomato soup to which immigration addscelery, croutons, spices, parsley and other ingredients that enrich and diversify the taste,

but which are absorbed into what remains fundamentally tomato soup. In this outlandishmetaphor, however, he is hoisted with his own petard: the tomato is indigenous toMexico (the word tomatl comes from the Nahuatl); it was taken to Spain after the 1519

conquest by Cortez, then to Italy and later to France, where it was called the apple oflove. While Mexican Americans today speak English and can be found in most walks oflife, they are unlikely to think of themselves as a piece of celery or a crouton in an Anglo-

Protestant soup, any more than the tomato is either Anglo or Protestant.

Despite the grand narratives of modernization, neither race nor religion norethnicity has vanished in American life. Protestants (never a homogeneous category,composed of dozens of disparate denominations and of fundamentalist, evangelical andapostolic varieties) are actually a vanishing majority having fallen below 50 percent


26/35

immigration. But alongside undeniable upward social mobility from the first to thesecond generation for most groups, especially the children of the poorest and least

educatedthough the gains appear to peak in the second generation and decline orplateau 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 thesepopulations. An undocumented status has become a caste-like master status blocking

access to the opportunity structure and paths to social mobility for millions ofimmigrants. 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 attentionon enduring structural inequalities and persistent ethnic and pan-ethnic formations in this

permanently unfinished society.


27/35

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Alba, Richard D., and Victor Nee. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation andContemporary Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Aleinikoff, T. Alexander, and Rubn G. Rumbaut. 1998. Terms of Belonging: Are Models ofMembership Self-Fulfilling Prophecies? Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, 13, 1: 1-24.

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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 forNational Distinctiveness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Hollinger, David A. 1995. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: BasicBooks.

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Kazal, Russell A. 1995. "Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Conceptin American Ethnic History." American Historical Review, 100, 2: 437-471.

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National Origin Less than College

high school graduate 1990s 1980s Pre-1980 1990s 1980s Pre-1980 1990s 1980s Pre-1980

Total (foreign-born adults 25-64) 36.3 25.5 59.3 70.0 84.1 22.4 17.3 12.0 15.9 47.0 73.1

Latin America, Caribbean:

Mexico 69.4 4.3 31.9 49.0 64.5 31.8 26.3 18.5 7.1 25.7 50.0

El Salvador, Guatemala 64.0 5.4 36.3 58.0 71.7 24.9 19.4 16.7 7.4 29.0 60.6

Puerto Ricoa 22.6 15.0 69.0 77.4 84.2 33.2 28.5 24.5 100.0 100.0 100.0

Cuba 32.9 20.7 35.1 57.6 84.9 22.0 20.0 9.2 12.4 49.8 86.4

Dominican Republic 49.1 10.1 37.8 54.4 68.8 29.7 27.3 22.3 15.2 41.8 65.4

Colombia, Ecuador, Peru 26.0 20.6 48.0 70.1 82.8 21.8 14.3 10.4 10.5 47.2 75.4

Jamaica, Other West Indies 24.3 18.5 99.0 99.6 99.5 15.7 11.7 10.5 25.0 60.1 76.9

Haiti 35.5 14.2 64.6 82.3 90.4 25.2 18.7 14.2 18.1 55.1 74.2

Other Latin America 28.3 22.5 61.8 79.2 92.6 22.2 14.6 10.4 10.2 41.0 73.8

East and South Asia:

Philippines 9.0 48.5 91.9 95.8 97.1 8.0 5.3 4.3 26.4 72.4 90.3

Chineseb 19.3 52.5 64.2 69.9 82.6 18.7 9.5 6.2 15.8 69.4 92.7

India 9.7 71.4 90.0 93.4 96.7 9.8 5.8 3.9 10.8 60.6 84.8

Korea 10.6 45.2 53.2 67.2 85.1 26.2 9.4 7.5 11.9 54.0 87.4

Vietnam 35.9 20.1 43.4 68.1 83.8 16.3 14.0 8.5 35.4 78.6 89.1

Laos, Cambodia 49.9 9.2 43.0 59.9 77.0 35.3 22.6 14.9 21.2 54.0 69.7

Europe and Canada:

Canada, Great Britain 8.0 41.7 99.1 99.2 99.3 7.4 6.0 6.1 8.0 30.3 60.3

Other Europe 18.9 32.2 75.4 86.8 93.3 14.9 7.6 6.6 21.0 53.1 79.3

Elsewhere in world 14.5 41.5 80.7 91.9 95.0 20.3 11.8 8.2 16.0 56.2 77.9

Table 1.

Decade of arrival:

In poverty (percent) U.S. Citizen (percent)

Decade of arrival:

Education (percent)

cEnglish fluency defined as speaking English only, or well or very well.

of Foreign-born Adults 25-64 by Decade of Arrival in the United States, 2000

Educational Attainment, English Fluency, Poverty Status, and U.S. Citizenship

English fluentc (percent)

Decade of arrival:

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

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.b

Including Hong Kong and Taiwan.


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32

Males Percent U.S.-born

Ethnicity/Panethnicity 18-39 incarcer-

in U.S. ated 0-5 yrs 6-15 yrs 16 yrs+

Total 45,200,417 3.04 0.50 0.77 1.39 3.51

Latin American, Hispanic: 7,514,857 3.26 0.57 0.89 1.70 6.72

Mexican 5,017,431 2.71 0.55 1.30 1.98 5.90

Salvadoran, Guatemalan 433,828 0.68 0.37 0.46 0.88 3.01

Colombian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian 283,599 1.07 0.46 0.66 1.12 2.37

Cuban 213,302 3.01 1.48 2.49 3.40 4.20

Dominican 182,303 2.76 1.28 1.99 3.07 3.71

Puerto Ricana 642,106 5.06 2.57 4.01 6.06 5.37

Asian, non-Hispanic: 1,902,809 0.62 0.14 0.25 0.50 1.86

Filipino 297,011 0.64 0.31 0.35 0.45 1.22

Chineseb 439,086 0.28 0.07 0.22 0.27 0.65

Indian 393,621 0.22 0.05 0.11 0.27 0.99

Korean 184,238 0.38 0.10 0.15 0.50 0.93

Vietnamese 229,735 0.89 0.46 0.41 0.51 5.60

Laotian, Cambodian 89,864 1.65 0.33 1.19 7.26

White, non-Hispanic: 29,014,261 1.66 0.36 0.41 0.88 1.71

Black, non-Hispanic: 5,453,546 10.87 1.64 2.10 3.80 11.61

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

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

Too few cases for an accurate estimate.

Rates of Incarceration of Males 18 to 39, by Ethnicity, Nativity, and Time in the U.S.: 2000

Table 2.

b Including Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Years in the United States

Foreign-born


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33

Selected Characteristics

1.0 1.5 2nd 3+ 1.0 1.5 2nd 3+ 1.0 1.5 2nd 3+ 1.0 1.5 2nd 3+Educational attainment:

Less than high school % 54.8 32.9 18.2 19.4 11.4 5.8 3.7 4.2 18.5 3.8 7.6 14.4 9.5 5.9 3.8 7.0High school graduate % 24.6 30.1 31.3 35.8 20.9 18.4 12.1 17.3 31.4 27.1 20.1 38.6 26.0 24.9 24.1 31.8Bachelor's degree % 7.0 10.1 14.0 10.1 31.5 35.8 40.1 34.9 18.2 23.9 23.1 12.7 26.5 26.1 26.7 21.5Advanced degree % 2.6 4.2 4.4 4.3 20.9 15.1 21.3 17.1 9.0 7.2 15.5 4.9 18.6 13.5 16.2 10.8

Occupational status index:**

Higher status (SEI > 50) % 13.5 31.3 38.6 36.9 49.1 56.0 63.8 55.1 29.0 37.8 51.1 32.9 51.3 53.9 57.1 49.6Low-wage labor (SEI < 25) % 69.0 40.9 30.3 31.7 29.1 21.2 12.6 18.8 46.3 28.0 22.0 39.5 26.3 21.1 16.6 23.2

Economic status:

Earnings $ 24,695 33,414 34,993 34,027 6,427 6,450 53,180 54,390 33,692 38,989 1,003 31,851 9,475 51,278 51,392 4,935Family annual income $ 2,626 55,654 59,426 57,515 80,078 86,419 93,983 95,240 56,851 64,747 68,605 8,310 80,498 87,091 89,144 76,840Poverty rate (persons) % 21.3% 14.5% 12.0% 13.0% 9.9% 6.5% 8.1% 6.0% 14.2% 10.7% 13.6% 18.9% 9.0% 5.2% 5.4% 6.8%

* 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.

Source: Current Population Survey, 2003-06.

Asian

Generational CohortGenerational Cohort*

Hispanic

Generational Cohort Generational Cohort

Non-Hispanic

Table 3.

Socioeconomic Characteristics of Persons 25 to 64, by Panethnic Groups and Generation, 2003-2006

Black White


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Occupations Hispanic Asian Black White Hispanic Asian Black White Hispanic Asian Black White

Total workers (25-44): N 5,492,117 2,162,173 788,004 1,664,440 3,079,961 1,028,945 370,526 2,697,316 2,160,029 188,432 6,960,618 40,482,073

Proportion of workers by generation: % 54.3 21.4 7.8 16.5 42.9 14.3 5.2 37.6 4.3 0.4 14.0 81.3

Physicians and surgeons % 8.5 51.8 8.5 31.3 8.8 43.2 5.0 43.1 1.8 2.1 7.4 88.7

Natural and life science % 2.8 64.7 2.4 30.2 14.4 33.9 7.7 44.0 1.8 0.1 4.6 93.5

Computer, math, physical science % 6.2 65.1 4.0 24.8 20.7 31.9 5.1 42.4 2.9 1.0 9.2 86.9

Engineering, architecture % 14.5 44.6 6.0 35.0 22.6 28.6 4.6 44.2 2.4 0.7 5.2 91.7

Other healthcare professionals % 9.9 51.4 17.0 21.7 18.0 24.8 6.6 50.6 2.1 0.3 8.2 89.5

Lawyers and judges % 14.0 25.1 4.2 56.7 12.3 20.7 2.3 64.7 2.0 0.6 5.7 91.7

Social and behavioral science % 17.1 49.0 9.6 24.2 21.8 20.6 3.4 54.3 3.3 0.3 10.4 86.0

Education, training, library professionals % 21.1 35.3 11.2 32.4 37.1 11.9 5.8 45.1 3.5 0.4 11.4 84.7

Community and social service % 35.5 18.5 16.7 29.3 41.8 10.4 11.5 36.2 4.0 0.4 21.6 73.9

Arts, design, entertainment, sports, media % 28.6 28.3 5.1 38.0 26.8 22.0 2.9 48.3 3.3 0.7 8.7 87.3

Management % 30.0 30.3 6.3 33.4 32.4 15.5 4.1 48.0 2.8 0.4 7.1 89.8

Business and financial operations % 19.7 43.6 11.8 24.9 27.2 22.4 4.7 45.7 3.5 0.6 12.1 83.8

Sales and related occupations % 39.3 28.4 9.2 23.1 43.0 12.1 5.7 39.2 4.6 0.4 10.7 84.3

Police, firemen, protective services % 34.7 10.4 38.2 16.7 46.4 8.6 8.5 36.5 5.6 0.1 21.5 72.7

Medical technician and healthcare support % 29.5 21.1 33.8 15.6 44.2 11.4 10.3 34.1 4.4 0.2 23.1 72.2

Office and administrative support service % 43.4 24.5 13.6 18.5 49.6 12.2 5.4 32.8 5.5 0.4 17.5 76.6

Personal care and service % 38.4 34.1 10.9 16.6 40.3 17.4 5.1 37.2 4.6 0.6 18.8 76.0

Food preparation and serving % 71.1 15.6 5.3 7.9 48.8 15.1 3.0 33.1 5.0 0.6 19.2 75.3

Building and grounds cleaning, maintenance % 84.0 4.5 4.0 7.5 67.8 3.3 3.5 25.4 6.2 0.1 24.9 68.7

Installation, maintenance, repair % 63.6 13.9 8.4 14.1 53.0 11.2 3.2 32.7 4.6 0.3 8.7 86.5

Transportation and material moving % 72.7 8.3 9.3 9.7 65.3 5.5 6.6 22.5 5.3 0.2 23.0 71.5

Production, manufacturing % 71.6 15.8 3.6 8.9 55.5 15.0 4.2 25.3 4.6 0.3 17.9 77.2

Construction and extraction % 85.3 2.8 2.0 9.9 61.2 2.9 3.0 32.9 5.4 0.2 9.4 85.0

Farming, fishing, and forestry % 94.3 2.2 0.6 3.0 82.1 2.9 2.1 12.9 5.6 0.1 13.1 81.2

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.

3+ Generations*1.5/2nd Generations*1.0 Generation*

Table 4.

Occupational Stratification of U.S. Workers 25-44, by Generation and Panethnic Groups: 2003-2006


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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

Discrimination

Index**

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.

HispanicAmerican

BlackImmigrant

Nationality

Asian HyphenatedAmerican

Rumbaut - The Melting and the Pots, Assimilations Bumpy Road (2009)

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