Introduction: Assimilation, integration or transnationalism? An overview of theories of migrant incorporation
2023; Wiley; Volume: 61; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/imig.13118
ISSN1468-2435
Autores Tópico(s)Diaspora, migration, transnational identity
ResumoInternational MigrationVolume 61, Issue 1 p. 84-91 SPECIAL ISSUEFree Access Introduction: Assimilation, integration or transnationalism? An overview of theories of migrant incorporation Barbara Laubenthal, Corresponding Author Barbara Laubenthal [email protected] Independent Researcher, Cope, Colorado, USASearch for more papers by this author Barbara Laubenthal, Corresponding Author Barbara Laubenthal [email protected] Independent Researcher, Cope, Colorado, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 20 February 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13118AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL The incorporation of immigrants is one of the most important issues both in immigration research and for immigration societies. The question of how foreigners become members of a new society and are able to enjoy full access to social, economic and political rights has been as relevant for historical immigration processes like the 19th-century European immigration to the United States as it is for the recent Syrian refugee immigration to Europe or migrants from Latin America who are seeking to escape the violence and corruption in their home countries and are trying to cross the US southern border. To explain incorporation processes, two research paradigms have for a long time dominated scholarly and later also political debates. The first one, assimilation, was introduced as a scholarly concept at the end of the 19th century, but the article Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups with Particular Reference to Negro by US sociologist Robert Park published in 1914 is widely considered the first seminal contribution on the topic. The ideas expressed by Park were further developed over the next decades, and in the 1980 s, the concept of assimilation crossed the Atlantic and was taken up by European sociologists. In Germany, in particular, US assimilation theory became the basis for one of the most important approaches, the integration concept by sociologist Hartmut Esser (1980, 2004). Esser adapted the concept that had been further developed by American sociologists like Milton Gordon to explain the process of integration of migrants in the receiving society. Esser's theory of integration became the basis for a whole school of thought and, especially after 2000, gained more and more influence in the political sphere. While being very similar, the concept of ‘Integration’ became more commonly used in Europe while ‘assimilation’ was used more in the U.S. context. However, at the beginning of the 1990s, an alternative way of conceptualizing migrants' incorporation started to garner attention from the scientific community. The concept of transnationalism was first developed by US anthropologists (Basch et al., 1994). It was an explicit critique of the assimilation theory, and most importantly its focus on the nation-state. Although all three concepts – assimilation, integration, transnationalism – have been subject to a whole range of revisions over the years, they have remained highly influential. All three still play an important role in the scholarly realm, and assimilation and integration concepts are often reflected in immigration policies and public perceptions of immigrants, both in Europe and in the United States. There are good reasons that all three concepts did become so influential. While assimilation and integration provide us with a theoretical framework that lends itself to easy operationalization to trace the process by which immigrants adapt in a new country, transnationalism reminds us that the immigrants that we encounter in receiving societies are not a ‘blank slate’. Rather, they may have significant and various ties to their home country. Furthermore, these theories were developed in response to new immigration processes that researchers witnessed at different historical stages, and each one was based on a large amount of empirical observation. From observations about immigrants in American cities in the 1920s and various phases of openness and restriction in the 1930s and 1960s, to post-colonial and the so-called guest worker migration in Western Europe immigration to the United States in the 1960s, to anthropologists in the United States in the 1980s, assimilation, integration and transnationalism were to some extent scientific answers to realities that scholars witnessed. Today, the question of how immigrants become members of a new society arises in yet another political context. In the last decade, we have witnessed an almost global rise of right-wing populism, nationalism and anti-immigrant positions. Immigration is often represented as a danger for receiving societies. Anti-immigration sentiment and rhetoric played an important part in the first country ever leaving the European Union. There are rising levels of islamophobia across Europe, and in Germany, for the first time after the Second World War, in 2017 a far-right party entered the national parliament. In the United States, a tightening of immigration policies, anti-refugee rhetoric and policies and a rising number of hate crimes also reflect the issues that immigrants are facing. These developments make the question of migrants' incorporation particularly salient. In neutral terms, all three concepts that we have at our disposition refer to the ‘the process of settlement, interaction with the host society, and social change that follows immigration’ (Penninx & Garces-Mascarenas, 2016, 11). However, the debates about these concepts have never been neutral. On the contrary, for several decades there has been a ‘heated, contentious debate’ (Mantovani & Sciortino, 2010, 2) between the various camps. There have been controversies among researchers from each side about the significance of the other theory and its epistemological and empirical value, and ‘all of these approaches and concepts are highly contested within the academic literature’ (Penninx & Garces-Mascarenas, 2016, 12). Although this is often not explicitly stated, what fuels these controversies to a significant degree is the inherently political character of theorizing processes of immigrant incorporation. Theories of assimilation and integration and the concept of transnationalism hold competing views on the mechanisms by which migrants become members of their host societies, and most importantly about the interaction of immigrants and the majority society. While all three concepts aim at being analytical, each one of them also has a normative dimension. Almost by definition, they contain a juxtaposition of majority society and immigrants. Therefore, they are loaded with assumptions about the relationship of immigrants with the native society, and they implicitly ask questions (or present answers) about power relations, agency, and equality between immigrants and receiving society. Against the backdrop of new immigration realities and controversies about the existing concepts, this volume sets out to revisit the main concepts that have dominated migration research over the last decades. To what extent do the classical concepts still help us to understand current immigration phenomena and the incorporation of immigrants? How valid are the various critiques that have been brought forward, especially with a view to the power relations between immigrants and the majority society? What are the merits and problems of assimilation, integration and transnationalism theories? After a short discussion of the history of these theories – assimilation, intergration, and transnationalism – this special issue takes up these questions by revisiting and critically assessing these main paradigms that dominate our understanding of the incorporation of immigrants. BETTER THAN THEIR REPUTATION: THE EARLY ASSIMILATION CONCEPTS One of the most common critiques of the classical assimilation concept is that it conceptualizes immigrant's incorporation as a process of submission of the immigrant to the core culture of the host society (Pries, 2015). However, a closer look at the original texts shows that many of the early assimilation concepts were more complex than that in some ways timelier than we give them credit for today. Most accounts on the history of assimilation theory locate its beginning at the start of the 20th century. Based on a broader interest in urban ethnography and the integration of various social groups into US society, sociologists started to have a closer look at immigration processes. Against the backdrop of several European immigration waves and the growing presence of immigrants in American cities, scholars of the newly emerging discipline of sociology started to pay attention to the process of the incorporation of immigrants. Later accounts on these origins of the assimilation concept have paid less attention to the fact that the early immigration sociologists also wrote during a time of dramatic societal changes, especially the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy. The most prominent classical conceptualizations of assimilation were written in the context of sociological thought that was interested in the mechanism of cohesion of increasingly complex societies and that wanted to understand how social cohesion would work under new conditions. This was the historical context when Robert Park, ‘the sociologist most responsible for the canonical formulation of assimilation theory’ (Kivisto, 2005) wrote his seminal article (Park, 1914). Park's theorizing of assimilation was very much embedded in reflections on the new social environment that he witnessed. Park viewed assimilation as a dimension of the process of individualization that characterized the upcoming modernity. Like many other scholars of his time, Park was interested in the mechanism that held the new and more complex society together, and he identified culture as a central mechanism. He viewed shared values as the glue that held society together, and believed that ‘social solidarity is based on sentiment and habit’. Park thought that subjective dimensions of human behaviour must be included in sociological analysis (Ballis Lal, 1990) and he focused on culture as the symbolic system that linked individuals to each other and made them social. Applied to the question of assimilation of immigrants, this meant focusing especially on culture and the process of immigrants gradually taking on the values and norms of the receiving society: ‘The growth of modern states exhibits the progressive merging of smaller, mutually exclusive, into larger and more inclusive social groups. This result has been achieved in various ways, but it has usually been followed, or accompanied, by a more or less complete adoption, by the members of the smaller groups, of the language, technique, and mores of the larger and more inclusive ones. The immigrant readily takes over the language, manners, the social ritual, and outward forms of his adopted country’ (Park, 1914, 607). Park assumed that the acquisition of the dominant culture's language, religion and values would happen automatically. Considering the later critique of the assimilation concept, it is worth noting that Park believed that obstacles to assimilation were not caused by immigrants but rather by prejudices and the racism of the majority society: The fact that the Japanese bears in his features a distinctive racial hallmark, that he wears, so to speak, a racial uniform, classifies him. He cannot become a mere individual, indistinguishable in the cosmopolitan mass of the population, as is true, for example, of the Irish and, to a lesser extent, of some of the other immigrant races. The Japanese, like the Negro, is condemned to remain among us an abstraction, a symbol, and a symbol not merely of his own race, but of the Orient and of that vague, ill-defined menace we sometimes refer to as the “yellow peril”. (Park, 1914, 611) Park's examples of non-assimilation relate to oppression, social injustice and unequal power relations, not to the failure of immigrants to assimilate. In the 1920s, conceptualizations of assimilation continued to focus on the cultural dimension of incorporation: Assimilation is a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life. (…) assimilation denotes this sharing of tradition, this intimate participation in common experiences (…). (Park & Burgess, 1921, 735) At the same time, Park and Burgess viewed differences as an essential part of assimilation: ‘The process of assimilation is concerned with differences quite as much as with likenesses’ (735), and they acknowledged the danger of losing – or having to give up – characteristics related to the home country. They stated that ‘negatively, assimilation is a process of denationalization’ (Park & Burgess, 1921, 735). One of the biggest misunderstandings in subsequent discussions of the early assimilation concepts is that they were normative. Instead, conceptualizations were based on empirical material from immigration processes that were conflictive at times but ultimately incorporated immigrants into the new society in an unproblematic way. Most importantly, the early concepts did not view assimilation as a one-way street but as a mutual process involving immigrants and majority society alike. The next text considered to be a milestone in the classical canon was ‘Assimilation in American life’ by Milton Gordon (Gordon, 1964). Like Park, Gordon wanted to come up with a scientific and analytical definition of assimilation, which he viewed as a mutual process between immigrant and receiving society: The United States has not assimilated the newcomer nor absorbed him. Pure immigrant “stock” and our native “stock” have each integrated. That is to say that each element has been changed by assimilation with each other, without complete loss of its own cultural identity The sum is greater than its parts (…). (Gordon 1994, 64) To clarify further, Gordon quoted Bernard: ‘This concept of integration rests upon a belief in the importance of cultural differentiation within a framework of social unity. It recognizes the rights of groups to be different so long as the differences do not lead to dominion or disunity’ (Gordon, 1964, 68). Gordon did not think that ‘there was a straight and uniform path to assimilation, but rather assumed (…) that it would occur along a variety of different avenues and at differing speeds. Moreover, if persistent levels of prejudice and discrimination characterize interethnic relations, all or some types of assimilation would be stymied’ (Kivisto, 2005, 14). Yet Gordon did assume that there was a dominant (Anglo-Saxon) culture in a society. In the American case, he contended that. Ethnic enclaves would prevent the incorporation of immigrants, but he also acknowledged discrimination as a hindering factor, thus assigning great importance to the attitudes of what he called the “core society”. Unusually marked discrimination (…) may indefinitely retard the acculturation process for this group. Gordon's assimilation concept contained various phases. Like his predecessors, he put a strong focus on culture: ‘cultural assimilation, or acculturation, is likely to be the first of the types of assimilation to occur when a minority group arrives on the scene’. Gordon (1964: 71) identified seven types of assimilation: (1) cultural or behavioural – also known as acculturation; (2) structural; (3) marital – or amalgamation; (4) identificational, which means creating a shared sense of peoplehood at the societal level; (5) attitude receptional; (6) behavioural receptional and (7) civic, where interethnic conflicts over values and power are overcome by the shared identity of citizenship (Kivisto, 2005, 14). According to Gordon, the other important dimension of the incorporation process is structural assimilation, defined as social relationships and entrance in majority societies’ institutions as the most important dimension of assimilation. ‘Once structural assimilation has occurred, either simultaneously with or subsequent to acculturation, all the other types of assimilation will naturally follow’. His concept placed a specific emphasis on interethnic group contact and assumed that for the second generation of immigrants, through stronger interaction with the majority society, differences will gradually disappear. Gordon did assume that structural assimilation will lead to a disappearance of immigrants' characteristics related to their home country. However, contrary to many modern readings, he does not advocate for this. He rather views it as ‘the price of assimilation’. Discrimination disappears because the immigrant community is not recognizable anymore as such. His concept does not put a normative pressure on the immigrant, but it rather acknowledges xenophobia of the majority society that allows the immigrant only to be a full member of society if they lose the characteristics of their home society. Until the 1970s, assimilation remained the hegemonic concept to analyse ethnicity in the United States. However, increasing criticism of the concept led to several attempts to refine the idea of assimilation. According to Alba and Nee (1997), ‘assimilation can be defined as the decline, and at its endpoint the disappearance, of an ethnic/racial distinction and the cultural and social differences that express it’ (Alba & Nee, 1997). Alba and Nee (2003) reformulated a ‘new assimilation theory’ that draws attention to the role of institutional changes and civil rights policies, and challenging the idea of a singular Anglo-American ‘mainstream’. Other authors, such as Moravska (2003) believed that assimilation and transnationalism can be a simultaneous part of the immigrant experience. Based on an empirical analysis of seven different ethnic groups, Morawska contends that transnational activity can enhance assimilation into the host society and highlights the coexistence of transnational and assimilation patterns. However, this did not stop the controversy about how to explain the incorporation of immigrants into a new society. THE EMERGENCE OF THE CONCEPT OF INTEGRATION AS A SCIENTIFIC AND POLICY PARADIGM While in the United States a number of authors tried to revise the assimilation concept, at the beginning of the 1980s, assimilation, albeit under another name, started its success story in Europe. In the German context, in particular, the most important adaptation took place by the sociologist Hartmut Esser. He laid out his concept in his book Aspekte der Wanderungssoziologie (Esser, 1980) and elaborated on his original in many subsequent publications. Esser's writings are heavily influenced by Milton Gordon. He distinguishes four dimensions of integration that mirror Gordon's dimensions of assimilation and are only presented in a slightly different order and are slightly redefined. In Esser's concept, the migrant individual is gradually integrated into and by social subsystems. These relate to the adoption of certain cultural traits, to the placement in the primary labor market and to intermarriage and emotional identification (Esser, 2004, 1130). The sociological distinction between social integration and system integration automatically leads to the focus on the individual migrant, and to a conceptualization where the individual migrant faces the majority society. However, as opposed to his American predecessors, Esser also focuses on the immigrant themselves as rational actors, According to Esser, at the starting point of assimilation is social inequality, and assimilation is the process by which ethnicity as a marker of social inequality gradually disappears. Esser's model also allows for an initial ethnic pluralization to happen and he contends that ethnic disadvantages must be expected even after several generations (Esser, 2004). Despite some criticism, the importance and resilience of Esser's assimilation theory are based on its undeniable empirical value for analysing ethnic communities. With its clear-cut four dimensions, it is easy to operationalize and is a valuable tool to identify integration successes and potential inequalities (cf. Heckmann, 2015, 72). It provides a policy-oriented framework, and under the heading of ‘integration’ it became both a policy and an everyday term (Heckmann, 2015, 69). In Germany, this concept of integration became the leitmotif of a new phase of immigration policies that started in the 2000 s. Put in a more positive way, integration as a policy concept entails the idea that immigrants need help with becoming members of the receiving society. However, many critics of the integration concept hold that it conceptualizes two antagonistic groups, the powerful majority society and the immigrants, where the latter have to address their cultural deficiencies related to their homeland to ‘make it’ in the new country. The transition from a scholarly concept to a societal and political paradigm and a dominant term in public discourse has contributed to the increasingly negative image of the integration concept. Another particular unfortunate aspect of the integration concept is its particular use of ‘culture’. Integration is viewed as something that immigrants have to perform and that is hindered by their ‘different’ culture. The more policies focus on integration, the more immigrants are constructed as a problematic, homogeneous group, and the concept cements asymmetric power relation. THE RISE OF THE TRANSNATIONALISM APPROACH Against this backdrop, in the United States, and sometime later in Europe, another concept surfaced that seemed to address some of the flaws of the integration concept. Transnationalism started out as a critique of existing concepts of migrants' incorporation and also as an ambitious attempt to ‘rescue’ the immigrant from being objectified and becoming a victim of the paradigm of the nation-state (Basch et al., 1994). One key criticism of the traditional ways of looking at migrant incorporation was its methodological nationalism, that is, the almost exclusive focus on migrants' interaction with the host society. According to its founders, transnationalism was a research program to ‘understand immigrants’ (Basch et al., 1994), and transnationalism scholars implicitly claimed that a cross-border perspective on migration would encompass a view of immigrants as actors and subjects. In the initial formulation, similarities to the early assimilation models were present. In fact, a key assumption that the integration and the transnationalism approach share is the growing importance of the nation-state (Basch et al., 1994, 59), as Basch et al. emphasize the growing importance of the border. However, they do not follow up on that idea. Rather, the concept moves from geographical spaces to social spaces by juxtaposing the space of the nation-state with social spaces that transcend national borders. Transnationalism became popular to the point of becoming a catch-all term for everything transcending a national border. However, the burgeoning amount of transnationalism studies soon became confronted with almost the same amount of critique. In a commentary on Pries (2010), Kalter (2011) pointed out all the weaknesses that were attributed to the transnationalism concept: a lack of theorization, the repeated use of the same case studies, and a lack of analytical depth and rigorous methodology which ultimately often limited transnationalism to a mere description of border-crossing activities or identities. As Kalter stated, ‘the author reports (…) relatively arbitrary results and tries to integrate them with some vague terminological attempts in an associative manner into an article’ (Kalter, 2011, 200).1 While this was certainly an intense criticism, it does capture a problem that other, less poignant critique has pointed out too: the apparent inflation of mobility patterns of a relatively small group of people into a research paradigm. The fact that the author who was criticized by Kalter used the geographical case studies that he had already used in research 10 years to make essentially the same argument seemed to support the critique. Finally, transnationalism and its idea of internationalization and loss of importance of the nation-state has to some extent been proven wrong by reality. The current rise of nationalism puts into question a concept that focuses on border-crossing and the declining importance of the nation-state. THE ARTICLES IN THIS VOLUME The articles in this volume take up these questions about the value of assimilation, integration and transnationalism concepts today by discussing recent migration phenomena from a U.S. and European perspective. The first article by Roger Waldinger discusses the relevance of the transnationalism concept by focusing on second-generation Mexican immigrants in the United States and on the effects of the United States' restrictive migration control policies. While Waldinger acknowledges the importance of the central idea of transnationalism – the focus on cross-border spaces and activities – he uses the look at the border to show that national institutions severely limit and restrict the emergence of ‘transnational lives’ as conceptualized in classical transnationalism research. Against the backdrop of restrictive migration control policies, Waldinger says, the idea that immigrants have the option to live lives across borders, as the transnationalism literature suggested, seems to belong to a different era. The next article by Claudia Diehl and Franziska Spanner addresses another critique of the transnationalism concept: its lack of methodological rigour. Following up on criticism that transnationalism makes a lot of theoretical assumptions with too little evidence, the authors assess the actual occurrence of transnational migrants. Looking at the early integration patterns of two recent immigrant groups to Germany, the author's findings confirm Waldinger's argument that immigrants' trajectories are heavily shaped by national immigration laws, and that transnationalism is an exception. However, Matthias Warmuth shows that despite the criticism that the transnationalism concept has faced, it can shed new light on the characteristics of a historical immigrant group. Warmuth's article builds on attempts to address the vagueness of the transnationalism concept by conducting a systematic analysis of types of transmigrants, categorized according to geographical and social practices. Focusing on Texas-Germans, Warmuth introduces the new category of linguistic transmigrant to describe the migration experience of this group. Sabine Waas addresses the relation between the integration of migrants and media. Based on a qualitative media analysis, she explores the value of the classical integration concept for understanding the controversy about German-Turkish soccer star Mesut Oezil who cited racism as his reason to resign from the German national soccer team. Waas analyzes the media coverage of this incident and explores how media framed it as a failure of integration and/or an example of racism. The final article in this volume leaves the classical concepts behind and proposes alternatives to the focus on the nation-state. In their article, Boccagni and Hondagneu-Sotelo focus on the local level to introduce a new concept for the integration of migrants, ‘homemaking’ as a category of integration: ‘homemaking is an invitation to look at the practical and situated ways in which migrants negotiate their claims for inclusion, recognition and ultimately membership’. Here, integration is linked to feeling at home, and the approach consequently focuses on integration from the perception of the migrants, and it highlights emotions and lived experiences. Overall, the articles in this volume show the ongoing value of the classical approaches that try to explain the incorporation of immigrants into a new society. However, they also point out that new times need new concepts, and that the various critiques of assimilation, integration and transnationalism approach are in some instances well founded. A common denominator of the contributions is that to understand immigrants' incorporation into a new society, it is necessary to leave the grand theories behind and break down and combine existing concepts to carry out analyses with more empirical and methodological depth. The articles in this volume show that the realities of the complex process of immigration are best understood by developing complex approaches that leave the old dichotomies of integration, assimilation and transnationalism behind. Endnote 1 My translation from German, BL. REFERENCES Alba, R. & Nee, V. (1997) Rethinking assimilation theory for a new era of immigration. International Migration Review, 31(4), 826– 874. Alba, R. & Nee, V. (2003) Remaking the American mainstream: assimilation and the new immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ballis Lal, B. (1990) The romance of culture in an urban civilisation. In: R.E. Park (Ed.) On race and ethnic relations in cities. London: Routledge. Basch, L.G., Glick Schiller, N. & Blanc-Szanton, C. (1994) Nations unbound: transnational projects, postcolonial predicamentes, and deterritorialized nation-states. London: Gordon and Breach. Esser, H. 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Zwischen Assimilation und Abschaffung des Integartionsbegriffs, IMIS Beitraege, 7–37. Volume61, Issue1February 2023Pages 84-91 This article also appears in:Assimilation, integration or transnationalism? An overview of theories of migrant incorporation ReferencesRelatedInformation
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