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

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 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.In the new view, associated with the hypothesis of "segmented assimilation" propounded by Alejandro Portes, Ruben Rumbaut, and Min Zhou, today's reality is far less forgiving of any problems that the immigrants might import or encounter. 2 The newcomers of the last age of mass migration may not have found favor with the elites of the time, but this was just a passing phenomenon: in the end, what mattered is that both newcomers and oldtimers were white.Today's migrants, however, originating from everywhere but Europe and visibly distinctive, enter a mainly white society still not cured of its racist afflictions.As these scholars see it, getting ahead for these new Americans of color will not be easy.Back then, the children of peasant migrants could drop out of high school and move on to well-paying, secure, blue-collar factory jobs; the progression from peddler to plumber to professor could wait for the third generation.There's little such hope today.While the immigrant parents arrive willing to do the jobs that natives won't hold, the children want more; unfortunately, the steady shrinkage of well-paid, blue-collar jobs makes incremental improvement hard.Immigrant children could acquire the advanced degrees needed to move into the professional/managerial elite.However, the experience 1 Thanks to