Foreigners Transformed: International Migration and the Remaking of a Divided People

Abstract

Foreigners Transformed: International Migration and the Remaking of a Divided People 1 by Roger Waldinger Department of Sociology UCLA Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003 January 2005 Roger Waldinger is Professor, Department of Sociology, UCLA, 264 Haines Hall, Box 951551, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551, office: 310-206-9233, fax: 310-206-9838 email: waldinge@soc.ucla.edu When it comes to the question of assimilation, the American academy and the American people no longer agree. The people and the professors earlier thought alike, both expecting that the newcomers and their descendants would abandon old country ties and habits for the ways and affiliations of the new national community that they had joined. But whereas the people continue to believe in the old-time religion, the professors have changed their minds. Conceptually, they find that assimilation lacks appeal, mainly because it has almost always overlapped with the ideology and practices it should have analyzed – namely assimilationism. Empirically, the scholars conclude that theory and reality diverge, with the very best that can be said for assimilation is that it did a good job of predicting the past. The professors generally do concede that the descendants of the Italian, Polish, and other mass migrations of the turn of the 20 th century have now climbed to the higher reaches of American society, leaving behind their ethnic attachments. But that was then, this is now: conditions at the turn of the 21 st