News Release

How new waves of immigrants are changing America

Book Announcement

Cornell University

ITHACA, N.Y. -- 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. The authors conclude that immigrants (who now make up 20 percent of the U.S. population) and their children are expanding the cultural repertoire of America probably just as much as American culture changes them.

Nee is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University; 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. 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-that the social gap between immigrants and their children from American mainstream society closes over time -- seems outdated and, in some cases, even offensive," says Nee.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The idea of a melting pot, which implies cultures melding into "a new, unitary culture," however, is certainly outdated, they write.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 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 ethnic and racial diversity of today's immigrants, the authors predict, is likely to change American society as much as American society will change them.

###

Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release. Some might not be part of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their content or availability.

o Victor Nee: http://www.soc.cornell.edu/faculty/nee.shtml

o Richard Alba: http://www.albany.edu/sociology/html/faculty/albar/alba.htm

o Harvard University Press catalog: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/ALBASS.html


Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.