The United States has seen many distinct waves of immigration, and each assimilation took time — at least two generations. Nearly every wave of immigrants experienced negative bias until their contribution to culture and society was appreciated.
And do they make a difference:. Yet today many countries are struggling. In most of Europe, immigrant communities are living separate lives. Assimilation is rarely smooth and happening slower than would be optimal.
There is a reason for this: immigrants have been left to their own devices. Immigrants face numerous hurdles, and language is almost always the first and steepest. I am a third-generation Austrian-American. My great-grandmother lived in Chicago for 40 years, in a neighbourhood where everybody spoke her native German; she actually never learned to speak English. However, the barriers go beyond language. So how do we smooth the path of assimilation for immigrants in their new homeland? At Tupperware Brands, we have a diverse workforce of more than 3 million women operating around the world.
We are good at managing a broad range of cultures; still, in each of our markets we face the challenges of working with members of new immigrant communities. To better understand the dynamics, we had a closer look at our German business, because Germany is home to more than 12 million immigrants, one of the largest immigrant populations in the world. GFI interviewed members of our sales force, both native Germans and first- and second-generation migrants, specifically from Turkey and Russia.
Initially, we got it wrong as well. For years, we gave everybody identical support — both the locals and the migrants. It was obvious that our German business leaders had to rethink the entire recruitment path for immigrants, to ensure they would successfully onboard and train them.
So we changed the internal process to focus on learning, and working with the skills and qualities these women already possessed. We basically levelled the playing field by eliminating the potential barriers faced by immigrants entering the workforce. Therefore, this second indicator involves a knowledge of the neighborhood and those features of the neighborhood which are the tangible points of identity for a group.
A church, a store, a club, even a street corner, a place of work, whatever these may be, if they are the spatial context for the social life of a group of people, they become important. Their loss or sudden change can seriously affect the existence of the community. The third important variable to investigate is the linkage of the community with the larger society or community.
In a study of cultural assimilation, this is particularly important because this will represent the channels through which contacts will develop; ideas, attitudes and values come to be known, then shared or rejected; the possibilities for primary group interaction develop.
The basic links are occupation , the education of children , and political action. Occupation operates on a number of levels. A person may be working in a place where most or all of the other employees are of his same subcultural group; he may even be working in an establishment owned and operated by one of his own subculture.
In this sense, occupation may provide a very weak link with the larger community. However, to the extent to which he is working for an employer who belongs to the larger society, or with employees who are not of his own community, employment becomes an effective link with the larger world.
Education is the major socializing institution which communicates to the children, of immigrants or not, the culture of the United States.
It is the process of education which guarantees eventual assimilation. Therefore, in terms of an immigrant community, education may be dysfunctional. By socializing the children in a culture different from that of their parents, education runs the risk of creating division in the home between parent and child and thus may tend to disrupt the solidarity of the community of the first generation.
Political action brings the community into immediate participation in the organized life of the larger society. Immigrants may participate as a recognizable block, with their own strength and power; or they may join with other groups. In any event they are engaged in the action proper to the larger society as a whole. They gain power for themselves, or for the political group of which they are a part, when they reach a point where those in political power can no longer afford to disregard them.
Two final points may be introduced here: the relationship of conflict to the community, and the role of the intellectuals. Conflict outside the community often serves to strengthen the community; [27] it has a boundary-maintaining function, unless it reaches an intensity at which it becomes destructive to the smaller community. Therefore, the study of conflict becomes an important means of determining the strength of the community; it also enables one to analyze the relationship of the community to the larger society.
It is very likely that conflict which originated in a desire to contain the smaller community may become the most significant factor in giving the community the strength it needs to integrate rapidly. A second aspect of conflict is more difficult to cope with, namely, the presence of conflict within the community itself. The investigator must make a decision whether to define the community in terms of the common and harmonious possession of common values and attitudes, or whether to admit the presence of conflict within the community.
If conflict is to be admitted in the community to be studied, the function of this conflict must be explored: does it tend to strengthen or weaken the community in question? The second point refers to the elite or the intellectuals.
Gordon presents the theory that the intellectuals constitute a community of their own. On the other hand, it has been the elite who traditionally have shown the capacity to build the bridge between their own community and that of the larger society. Therefore, the study of the elite must analyze the extent to which the elite have established a community relationship with intellectuals of their own kind in the larger society; and the extent to which the elite mediate the integration of their community of origin with the larger society.
There is evidence that the immigrant community is the beachhead into the new society. It provides for the immigrant a base of security, peace, and psycho-social satisfaction while he learns to adjust to the new and strange world into which he has come. Had he no such basis of security, the too sudden exposure to a strange culture could be an upsetting shock.
The immigrant community is the basis of familiar relationships and interaction which give him an identity and the security of living according to familiar patterns among familiar people.
Useful as the concept of community has been, however, it is still marked by numerous obscurities which impede its more effective use in the analysis of the process of assimilation. The clarifications suggested above are certainly not definitive. They are attempts to make the concept more precise so that its application to the study of immigrant communities may be more fruitful. What does this tell us about the assimilation process? We can imagine that after many years in the U.
To be sure, their connections with their countries of origin are not obliterated. Instead, they may come to see themselves as hyphenated Americans, but Americans nonetheless. Fouka finds that German immigrants in states that introduced anti-German language policies during World War I responded by choosing visibly German names, perhaps as a show of community support. Concerns about the economic effects of immigration go hand in hand with fears that immigrants will remain a culturally foreign presence in our midst.
How immigration affects the income and living standards of natives and how newcomers contribute to the U. My research partners and I are in the process of investigating these questions. Based on the existing literature and our own research, we hypothesize that the economic impact of immigration today may be different from the effects during the Age of Mass Migration. Today, the competition between immigrants and natives may be less important because immigrants tend to cluster in a limited set of occupations at the top and bottom of income distribution.
The historical evidence presented here should be considered with care. Over the past half century, the U. The contemporary migration wave is highly regulated, favoring those with money, education, and skills and drawing migrants primarily from Asia and Latin America.
Selection of immigrants today is often positive, meaning those who come here are more highly skilled than their compatriots who stay in their countries of origin. In the past, immigrants were sometimes negatively selected, meaning they were less skilled than those who stayed behind. Finally, legal immigration now is accompanied by a large undocumented inflow, which complicates efforts to study immigration effects. Much work remains to be done to understand the cultural and economic dimensions of immigration and the differences between the past and the present.
My research colleagues and I recently got access to California birth certificate records, which will allow us to compare immigrants from current and historical periods to see whether assimilation patterns are similar. The evidence is clear that assimilation is real and measurable, that over time immigrant populations come to resemble natives, and that new generations form distinct identities as Americans.
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Do you enjoy reading reports from the Academies online for free? Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released. Statistics on U. Get This Book. Visit NAP. Looking for other ways to read this? No thanks. Immigration Page 28 Share Cite. Suggested Citation: "3 Effects of Immigration and Assimilation. Page 29 Share Cite. Social Policy and Welfare 1. Employment and Income Dynamics.
Page 30 Share Cite. The Context of Immigration. Page 31 Share Cite. Comparing Political and Economic Immigration. Page 32 Share Cite. Effects of Amnesty. Page 33 Share Cite.
Perinatal Health 2. Page 34 Share Cite. Mental Health. Page 35 Share Cite. Educational Attainment. Page 36 Share Cite. Research Needs. Page 37 Share Cite. The predominant portion of immigration studies has focused on the problems arising from immigration.
Studies are needed that examine the overall effects of immigration, not just the negative impacts. There is a difference between cultural assimilation e.
In addition, assimilation is a ''segmented'' process, depending on the subculture of American society in which different immigrant groups reside e.
Several aspects of assimilation are essential to study: taking on aspects of the destination community, adaptation to new social and economic characteristics compared with those of the country of origin , and integration into the destination community. Cultural assimilation does not necessarily lead to structural assimilation. There is a need to study the relationship of cultural and structural adjustment in more detailed studies of nationality groups than has been done to date.
Available studies have examined changes by age groups of immigrants, but data have been missing on the temporal and local-area contexts of individual assimilation. Further studies similar to Tienda, are needed on immigrants and labor markets, with data on contextual aspects, temporal shifts, and labor market differentials.
Available studies suggest that immigrants have lower mortality and morbidity compared with the native-born U. Fuller explanation of mortality and morbidity adjustment requires improvement of data on multiple causes of death, duration of residence of immigrants in the United States, and the residential context. These data, however, may be expensive to collect if they begin as new data collection systems; more study is called for on the benefits of such studies, relative to their costs.
First, country of origin is important because some immigrants originate in conditions with high mortality: survivors of high mortality are quite selective and may be seen as healthier in their years after arrival in the United States.
Second, the local context of their destination community can influence health outcomes. Information on conditions for both the originating and destination communities are needed for interpreting health data. Workshop participants observed that there is a need for further research on immigrant adjustment and the policies necessary for improved adjustment by 3 There are examples of ways to improve data sources without beginning new data collection systems.
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