Should immigrants assimilate?

Public Interest, Summer, 1994 by Alejandro Portes, Min Zhou

MY NAME IS HERB / and I'm not poor / I'm the Herbie that you're looking for / like Pepsi / a new generation / of Haitian determination / I'm the Herbie that you're looking for."

A beat tapped with bare hands, a few dance steps, and the Haitian kid was rapping. His song, entitled "Straight Out of Haiti," was performed at Edison High, a school that sits astride Little Haiti and Liberty City--the largest black area of Miami. The lyrics capture well the distinct outlook of his immigrant community. In Little Haiti, the storefronts leap out at the passersby. Bright blues, reds, and oranges vibrate to Haitian merengue, blaring from sidewalk speakers. Yet behind the gay Caribbean exterior, a struggle goes on that will define the future of this community. As we will see, it involves the second generation--children like Herbie--who are subject to conflicting pressure from parents and peers, and to pervasive outside discrimination.

Growing up in an immigrant family has always been difficult. Individuals are torn by conflicting social and cultural demands, while facing the challenge of entry into an unfamiliar and frequently hostile world. Yet the difficulties are not always the same. The process of "growing up American" ranges from smooth acceptance to traumatic confrontation, depending on the characteristics that immigrants and their children bring along and the social context that receives them. We believe that something quite disturbing is happening to the assimilation or, if you will, the "Americanization" of the second generation of new immigrants.

Research on the new immigration--that which arose after passage of the 1965 Immigration Act--has focused almost exclusively on the first generation, which is composed of adult men and women who came to the U.S. in search of work or to escape political persecution. Little noticed until recently is the growth of the second generation. Yet by 1980, second-generation immigrants made up 10 percent of the children counted by the U.S. Census. Another survey in the late 1980s found that 3 to 5 million American students speak a language other than English at home.

While there has been a great deal of research and theorizing on post-1965 immigration, it offers only tentative guidance on the prospects and paths of adaptation of the second generation, whose outlook may be very different from that of the first. For example, it is generally accepted among immigration experts that entry-level menial jobs are performed without hesitation by newly arrived immigrants, but that these same jobs are shunned by the immigrants' U.S.-reared offspring. The social and economic progress of first-generation immigrants often fails to keep pace with the material conditions and career prospects that their American children grow to expect.

What literature on second-generation adaptation that exists is based largely on the experience of the descendants of pre-World War I immigrants. The last sociological study of the children of immigrants seems to have been Irving Child's Italian or American? The Second Generation in Conflict, published fifty years ago. Conditions at the time were quite different from those that confront settled immigrant groups today. Two such differences deserve special mention. First, the descendants of European immigrants who confronted the dilemmas of conflicting cultures were uniformly white. Even if they were of a somewhat darker hue than the natives, their skin color permitted them to skirt a major barrier to entry into the American mainstream. As a result, the process of assimilation depended largely on the individual's decision to leave the immigrant culture behind and to embrace American ways. This advantage obviously does not exist for the black, Asian, and mestizo children of today's immigrants.

Approximately 77 percent of post-1960 immigrants are non-European: 22 percent are Asian, 8 percent are black, and 47 percent are Hispanic. (The latter group, which originates in Mexico and other Latin American countries, poses a problem in terms of classification since Hispanics can be of any race.)

The immigrants of recent years also face economic opportunities different than those in the past. Fifty years ago, the United States was the premier industrial power in the world. Its diversified industrial labor requirements offered the second generation the opportunity to move up gradually through better-paid occupations while remaining part of the working class. Such opportunities have grown scarce in recent years as the result of rapid national de-industrialization and global restructuring. This process has left entrants to the American labor force confronting a growing gap between the minimally paid menial jobs commonly accepted by immigrants and the high-tech and professional jobs generally occupied by college-educated native elites. This disappearance of intermediate opportunities has contributed to the mismatch between first-generation economic progress and second-generation expectations.