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

Abstract

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 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 and find that 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 twentieth 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 twenty-first century, at least as the professors see them, make it unlikely that the immigrant past will be prologue to the immigrant future about to unfold.