Book examines how new waves of immigrants are changing America

By Susan Lang

For generations the United States welcomed immigrants who were primarily white Europeans. But immigrants from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean over recent decades have been largely nonwhites from developing countries. And their influence on American culture, neighborhoods, schools and the workplace has been profound, says a new book by two sociologists.

Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Harvard University Press) by Victor Nee and Richard Alba is the first systematic look at U.S. assimilation since the 1960s.

Nee is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell; Alba is a former assistant professor of sociology at Cornell and now Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Albany. The two compare the experiences of past immigrants from Europe and East Asia with the contemporary waves of immigrants (who now make up 20 percent of the U.S. population). They discuss theories and definitions of assimilation and predict changes in the American mainstream.

"The idea of assimilation -- that the social gap between immigrants and their children from American mainstream society closes over time -- seems outdated and, in some cases, even offensive," said Nee. "Yet assimilation has reshaped the American mainstream in the past, and it will do so again, culturally, institutionally and demographically."

The idea of a melting pot, which implies cultures melding into "a new, unitary culture," however, is certainly outdated, they write. The book details how various factors -- such as immigrants adopting English as their primary language, intermarriage, residential mobility and middle-class careers -- influence assimilation, and how assimilation is not so much a process of wiping out ethnic distinctions but one in which the boundaries between racial and ethnic groups will increasingly blur.

They draw parallels, for example, between the previous waves of immigrants with the current tides of immigration, pointing out that the experiences of both sets of immigrants are more similar than different. However, the newer immigrants are more diverse than the immigrants of the early 19th and 20th centuries. What accounts for the tremendous range in socioeconomic outcomes, the authors write, is the current wave of large numbers of labor migrants, predominately from Latin America, who come with little formal education. These immigrants and their children experience greater difficulties in adapting to a high-technology society than the large numbers of middle-class immigrants who come with college and professional degrees.

The authors conclude that immigrants and their children are expanding the cultural repertoire of America probably as much as American culture is changing them.