Absorption of CIS Immigrants into Israeli Schools: A Semipermeable Enclave Model

Abstract

National ideology, institutional arrangements, and immigrant community self-image should be taken into account in order to understand the way immigrant students insert themselves into their host society. We found that immigrant students from the CIS (the former Soviet Union) adopted a “semipermeable enclave” mode of integration into the Israeli education system in the 1990s. CIS immigrants' high self-esteem along with the schools' so-called “pluralistic ideology” and ineffective arrangements to apply the official assimilationist national ideology produced this new absorption pattern. Because immigrant children's integration into schools is a dynamic and dialectic process resulting from the interaction between immigrants and the host society, its analysis must take into consideration not only educational policies, but also social conditions such as power relations between different ethnic groups, as well as the characteristics of the specific immigrant community.