Revenge of the Chicago School

Abstract

At a conference, I once heard Richard Alba refer to assimilation as America's dirty little When I first came into the field in the late 1970s, the very idea of assimilation was suspect and under relentless attack. Books such as Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan's 1963 Beyond the Melting Pot, Michael Novak's 1972 The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, and Andrew Greeley's 1974 Ethnicity in the United States: A Preliminary Reconnaissance stressed the resilience of immigrant cultures and pointed to the remarkable persistence of ethnicity to refute assimilation theory and its supposed prediction of Anglo conformity and cultural absorption. In a series of papers published during the 1980s and 1990s, however, Alba and his colleague Victor Nee, sometimes working together and sometimes separately, kept finding results that confirmed the dirty little secret. By the end of the twentieth century, descendants of earlier European immigrants had indeed assimilated across a variety of social, economic, and cultural dimensions. Moreover, the children and grandchildren of the new immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean were by and in-large following suit. National origin groups differed with respect to patterns and rates of assimilation, of course; but the reality of ongoing assimilation seemed irrefutable.