How do racial and ethnic minorities become integrated into the mainstream of society? This is the topic we address in the following pages. As should be clear from the discussion in the preceding chapter, there is nothing inevitable about minority incorporation. Exclusion can persist. Moreover, as we shall soon see, incorporation does not necessarily mean that racial and ethnic groups end up on equal terms with members of the dominant society. Nonetheless, when two or more groups interact over time, their social relations tend to have an impact on group members, shaping the way they view the world and act in it. At present, sociologists primarily make use of three concepts in efforts to describe and assess the dynamics of racial and ethnic relations: assimilation, multiculturalism, and—specifically for immigrant groups—transnationalism. This trio of concepts will be the focus of the current chapter.
Unlike multiculturalism and transnationalism, which have become significant sociological theories only recently, assimilation has been part and parcel of the conceptual arsenal of sociologists from the formative period of the discipline. Indeed, sociologists began to use the term in the late nineteenth century and it received what is generally perceived to be its canonical articulation at the hands of Robert Ezra Park, one of the prime movers of the famous Chicago School of Sociology nearly a century ago. Until recently, the term was widely used by American sociologists, while their European counterparts have preferred to use different terms with a similar meaning such as inclusion, integration, and incorporation. This has begun to change in recent years, as is evident in a recent comparative study of the assimilation of the children of immigrants in eight European nations (Crul and Schneider 2010). Thus, it appears that we may be heading in the future toward the use of a common language.
Dictionary definitions of assimilation distinguish two interrelated meanings: to make like and to incorporate or bring into. Park thought that both meanings were relevant to the assimilation of racial and ethnic minorities, describing aspects of a social process. According to Park, making like refers to the process by which members of different groups “acquire one another's language, characteristic attitudes, and modes of behavior.” Incorporation refers to the inclusion of both individuals and groups into “larger groups” (Park 1914: 606).
Much has been made of Park's “race relations cycle,” which he described on a few occasions as a series of recurring stages of engagement between groups from initial encounter through to the end of the process (Park 1950[1926]). The cycle moved through four distinct stages. The first was contact, which takes place on what Park referred to as the “racial frontier,” as groups that heretofore had not been in close proximity find themselves in a situation where they need to interact. This stage inevitably gives way to conflict, which results because of competition over resources and a desire to control. While overt conflict can persist for a significant period of time, it gives way to accommodation, which permits the establishment of a stable social order, but one characterized by power asymmetries characterized by various manifestations of inequality. The stability created during this stage established the conditions for improving intergroup relations over time, leading to the fourth and final stage, assimilation, at which point the boundaries that have separated groups break down, not only culturally and socially, but physically as well as widespread intermarriage occurs. The result of the four-stage process is that the original distinct groups disappear as a new, larger homogeneous group takes their place. To call this a cycle may be something of a misnomer, for once the final stage is achieved, the process ends for the two groups in question. It's a cycle only insofar as it presumably repeats itself whenever two groups come into contact with one another.
Figure 5.1: Robert Park's race relations cycle (drawn by Sabrina Coffey 2011).
Criticisms of the race relations cycle have come from many quarters, but can be nicely framed by one of the earliest critiques and what is probably the most recent. The former refers to Stanford Lyman's (1972: 27–70) oft-cited essay on the race relations cycle and its implications for an important sociological tradition of race relations research in America. Lyman was critical of what he considers to be its teleological character, or in other words its view of social change as moving toward an inevitable end point. Park, he argued, was part of a larger tendency in American sociology that looked at social life through the lens of evolutionary theory. The net result was that social processes were seen as occurring in a gradual, incremental, directional, and uniform manner. As a consequence, ruled out of consideration tout court were the messy contingencies of history and the possibility that different outcomes of intergroup relations were possible.
This criticism dovetails with Stephen Steinberg's recent effort to historicize the very terms Park used to describe the stages of the cycle. Steinberg (2007: 51) describes contact as a “euphemism for colonialism” and competition a “euphemism for conquest and slavery.” He goes on to point out that the word “accommodation” conjures up images of compliance and servility in the face of injustice—and, as in the American case of the Uncle Tom (derived from a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous nineteenth century novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the term coming to be a derogatory characterization of any servile black male), of efforts to curry the favor of the “winners” of the competitive struggle. Assimilation, thus, is a term divorced from the fact that the process of getting there entailed untold suffering and sacrifice, reduced simply to “the price of progress” (Steinberg 2007: 52).
These criticisms of the race relations cycle as a variant of evolutionary thought are on target. And there is certainly a passage in Park's work that provides the critics with a tempting target:
The race relations cycle which takes the form, to state it abstractly, of contacts, competition, accommodation, and eventual assimilation, is apparently progressive and irreversible. Customs regulations, immigration restrictions, and racial barriers may slacken the tempo of the movement; it may halt it altogether for a time; but cannot change its direction; cannot at any rate, reverse it
(Park 1950[1926]: 150)
Yet a careful reading of Park's work as a whole can lead one to question how significant the race relations cycle actually was to his view of race and ethnic relations in general or assimilation in particular. Indeed, it's worth noting that in the three articles he authored during his lifetime that explicitly addressed what he meant by assimilation he did not make any reference to the cycle (Kivisto 2004). Furthermore, as Lyman (1992: 33) noted two decades after his original commentary on the race relations cycle, by the 1930s Park had begun to have second thoughts about the idea of social change occurring in an evolutionary fashion.
Certainly, he was unconvinced that blacks in America were likely to be assimilated in the foreseeable future, and he was keenly aware that the initial contact between blacks and whites in the US occurred in the seventeenth century—three centuries earlier. Finally, Park was not a rosy-eyed optimist who blithely ignored what Steinberg above called the “price of progress.” In “An Autobiographical Note,” he wrote that, “I knew enough about civilization even at that time [when he was working as a muckraking journalist for the Congo Reform Association] to know that progress, as philosopher William James once remarked, is a terrible thing. It is so destructive and wasteful” (Park 1950[1926]: vii).
In short, Park thought that assimilation was a powerful, but not an inevitable social process. He was well aware of the many barriers that marginalized and oppressed groups confront in their quest to become equal members of the larger society.
Park and the generation of Chicago School sociologists he trained were acutely aware of the fact that the barriers to assimilation were significant and though not necessarily eternal, had real durability. At the same time, they thought that the American society they were studying during the first half of the twentieth century did show signs of change. A major preoccupation in their research agenda concerned explorations of the persistence of social and spatial distance between groups.
Two of the most well-known research tools that came out of the Chicago School were the social distance scale, created by former Park student Emory Bogardus (1933), and the concentric zone model of urban residential patterns. The former allowed generations of sociologists to query people about their willingness to interact at various levels with members of different ethnic groups, with questions ranging from whether members of a particular group should even be permitted to enter the country to at the other end of the spectrum whether a person would be sympathetic to their child marrying a person from the group. Box 5.1 lists the seven questions people were asked regarding their willingness to accept members of various racial and ethnic groups, along with the scores they received for each answer. A score of 1 indicated little or no social distance, while at the opposite end a score of 7 revealed an extreme social distance.
Would you accept people from group X:
The latter, deriving from the social ecology perspective promoted by Park, provided the initial basis for demographic studies that sought to determine levels of residential segregation by race. One such outgrowth is the index of dissimilarity, which despite some built-in shortcomings, continues to be a widely used index for ascertaining levels of segregation (Iceland 2009). Thus, we know by using this index that at this writing, Chicago—the “laboratory” for the Chicago School—continues to be one of the most segregated of the major cities in the US. For information on how the index is calculated, see Box 5.2, which is a concise description that appears on the website of the Racial Residential Segregation Measurement Project at the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center.
The most commonly used measure of neighborhood segregation is the index of dissimilarity. This is a measure of the evenness with which two groups are distributed across the component geographic areas that make up a larger area. For purposes of census taking, metropolises are divided into census tracts that contain, on average, about 4,000 residents. We could consider a metropolitan area such as Los Angeles and determine the evenness with which whites and blacks are distributed across census tracts.
One extreme possibility would be an American Apartheid situation in which all blacks lived in exclusively black census tracts while all whites lived in all-white census tracts. Of course this does not occur but this would be the maximum residential segregation of blacks from whites. If there were such an apartheid situation, the index of dissimilarity would take on its peak value of 100. Another extreme example would be a situation in which blacks and whites were randomly assigned to their census tracts of residence. This never happens but, if it did, the index of dissimilarity would equal 0 meaning that blacks and whites were evenly distributed across census tracts.
In metropolitan Los Angeles in 2000, the index of dissimilarity comparing the distribution of blacks and whites across census tracts was 69 indicating a moderately high degree of residential segregation. This value reports that either 69 percent of the white or 69 percent of the black population would have to move from one census tract to another to produce a completely even distribution of the two races across census tract; that is, an index of dissimilarity of 0.
Population Studies Center, University of Michigan
Perhaps the most important work to emerge from the original Chicago School tradition was W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole's The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (1945), which was part of their Yankee City studies. Both methodologically and theoretically their work was emblematic of a tradition of sociological research that extended into the 1960s. This was a major study of Newburyport, Massachusetts, a medium-sized city in the Boston orbit. Warner and Srole sought to offer a panoramic overview of all of the varied groups in the city, dividing them into three categories: ethnic, racial, and ethno-racial (a rather vaguely defined middle category).
They sought to ascertain which groups were likely to assimilate relatively quickly and which groups would face a much slower process of inclusion—with no guarantees of an outcome similar to those who assimilated quickly. To that end, they developed a “scale of subordination and assimilation.” Not surprisingly, they concluded that ethnic groups from Europe who were defined as white were assimilating rather quickly, while racial minorities, especially blacks, confronted a major obstacle to assimilation insofar as they were forced to exist in a static caste social location while others found themselves in a fluid class social structure. In short, assimilation for some groups appeared to be almost a given while for others it appeared to be extremely unlikely well into the future. The interstitial category proved to be more ambiguous or uncertain, though they had some ideas of the direction. Thus, they argued that Asians would likely end up in a “semi-caste situation,” while Latinos could conceivably end up in either a class or caste location.
Assimilation is clearly a multidimensional phenomenon, a fact that was not always captured by sociologists influenced by the canonical formulation. A half century after Park's initial formulation, Milton Gordon (whose embrace of the ideal of assimilation was personal, having changed his given name from Milton Meyer Goldberg to Milton Myron Gordon in the 1940s) published what proved to be an influential study, Assimilation in American Life (1964). The rationale for the book was to provide the reader with an empirical stocktaking of the state of assimilation in a nation built by immigrants, but which had not experienced a major migratory wave since the passage of anti-immigration legislation in 1924. Thus, it was not an effort at theory construction.
However, what was original about the book and what continues to make it a landmark work was the typology of assimilation that it presented. Gordon (1964: 71) identified seven different types of assimilation:
One of the virtues of this typology is that it allows for an ability to distinguish between different facets of assimilation and to see that it is possible to find evidence of assimilation in some types and little assimilation in other. Thus, blacks are by most measures culturally assimilated (e.g., they speak English and are predominantly Christian), but often live in highly segregated neighborhoods and send their children to equally segregated schools.
Although Gordon did not attempt to develop the typology into a coherent theoretical model, he did at least suggest in part how these types were connected. In his view, cultural assimilation was more readily achieved than structural assimilation, with marital assimilation posing an even greater challenge. While he did not propose a uniform process, or contend that assimilation writ large was inevitable, he did see certain tendencies in American society that served to promote assimilation. One thing was clear to him: structural assimilation was the most crucial. As he put it, “Structural assimilation, then, rather than acculturation, is seen to be the keystone in the arch of assimilation.” In other words, if structural assimilation was achieved, the rest would follow. As the example of blacks noted above indicates, such is clearly not the case with cultural assimilation.
Recall that back in the 1940s, Warner and Srole thought that assimilation was occurring rapidly for white ethnics, immigrants or the descendants of immigrants from Europe, while it was in many regards stymied for blacks and some other racial minorities. Here we examine the first part of this claim and in the following section we turn to the second.
The question can be simply put: have white ethnics assimilated? The answer is “no” if by assimilated we mean that group boundaries have been eradicated as individuals have come out of the melting pot, their previous ethnic identities having disappeared. But it is worth noting that neither Park nor Gordon thought that assimilation necessarily led to this result. Indeed, in Gordon's case, he actually thought that assimilation and what he called “cultural pluralism” could coexist.
This was not what some cultural pluralists during the 1960s and 1970s thought. In their view, any evidence of ethnic persistence meant that assimilation had not occurred and was not occurring. These were what became known during the era as the “unmeltable ethnics.” There was a good deal of mixing of empirical analysis with social agenda by advocates of what was dubbed an “ethnic revival” among European-origin ethnics. Whether motivated by a desire to preserve the heritages of particular ethnic groups or by a reaction to what were perceived to be gains by blacks at the expense of working class whites in the wake of the civil rights movement, the ethnic revival had its moment in the sun. Its short history need not concern us here. What is of interest is whether there was evidence to support the claim of some cultural pluralists that assimilation was not occurring.
In this regard, the key figure associated with this claim is the sociologist (and priest) Andrew Greeley. Making use of data from the National Opinion Research Center, which captured elements of attitudinal and behavioral features of subjects that might reveal the persistent impact of ethnic heritage, he sought to determine the extent to which cultural background had an impact on a variety of personality traits. He hypothesized, for example, that because they were more religious than Italians, the Irish would provide evidence of being more trusting. In this particular example, the evidence did not support the hypothesis. What Greeley found overall was a very mixed bag, leading him to offer the following highly qualified summation, “to some extent some dimensions of the ethnic culture do indeed survive and enable us to predict some aspects of the behavior of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of immigrants” (Greeley 1974: 319).
Interestingly, Greeley didn't mention the fact that structural assimilation appeared to be occurring as ethnic institutions were disappearing along with the use of the ancestral language and ethnic enclaves were being vacated for multiethnic suburbs. Moreover, marital assimilation had become increasingly commonplace. Granted, his data did not provide evidence of these aspects of assimilation, but it is curious that he doesn't try to connect in some fashion cultural assimilation to Gordon's “keystone.” The result is that while Greeley was able to illustrate evidence of some persisting patterns of ethnic culture manifested in personality traits, he fails to offer a framework for understanding what it means and how persistence is connected to counterevidence pointing to assimilation.
Such an interpretive frame was provided by Columbia University sociologist Herbert Gans (1979), who described the ethnic allegiances of European-origin ethnics as expressions of “symbolic ethnicity.” What he meant by this term is that many ethnics no longer were prepared to live by all of the normative expectations required by traditional allegiance to their ethnic group's culture, but rather were intent on holding on to their ethnic identities, periodically and selectively, primarily for reasons of nostalgia.
Two complementary studies lent considerable credence to Gans’ idea that assimilation was occurring, both appearing in 1990: Richard Alba's Ethnic Identity and Mary Waters’ Ethnic Options. Alba's study was based on interviews of a random sample of 524 residents of the Capital Region of New York state, while Waters’ project entailed in-depth interviews of sixty white ethnics of European descent who were also Roman Catholic from a California suburb and Philadelphia, relying on snowball sampling. Both researchers concluded that ethnicity no longer has the same impact on such factors as educational and occupational choice or marital selection as it once did. However, this did not mean that these ethnics found no meaning in their ethnic identities. To the contrary, ethnicity continued to resonate subjectively with their subjects, though as Waters’ title indicated, it was embraced in a highly selective manner as people opted to pick and choose from among their ancestral cultural traditions.
As the descriptions of key assimilation studies from the 1940s to the 1990s reveals, the focus of research is on ethnic minorities, and not on the larger society. The assumption is that in the process of becoming more alike entails the transformation of members of these groups. Unexplored is whether or not the majority or the mainstream changes in the process of interaction over time with ethnic minority groups. Borrowing from a schema proposed by William Newman (1973), we can examine four possible outcomes of intergroup social relations.
The first possible outcome can be characterized in the following formula:
A + B + C → A (where A is the dominant group)
In such a scenario, A would represent the Anglo-American in the US context, while B and C might represents Italians and Mexicans. Here the change that occurs over time is that Italians and Mexicans take on the attitudinal and behavioral characteristics of the English-origin dominant group. In its most pristine form, as the above suggests, this would result in the total loss of Italian and Mexican identities as they became amalgamated into the large Anglo-American pot. We have indicated that the empirical evidence does not support this picture.
However, neither does it support the opposite perspective, which suggests that somehow after a considerable period of intergroup relations, the groups manage to persist unmarked by their encounter with others, as the following would indicate:
A + B + C → A + B + C
As the research from those seeking to explore the extent to which cultural pluralism was a fair description of American society reveals, nothing like this outcome has occurred.
This leads to the question: if neither dramatic change for minority groups leading to their elimination nor a lack of change for all groups has received empirical confirmation, what does the picture look like? How would we define it? One possibility would be to go further than the first model above and claim that all groups are so radically transformed that the end result is a qualitatively new identity for all concerned, as the following would suggest:
A + B + C → D
Again, there is no evidence that anything so dramatic had occurred. If it had, one might think that Americans would have abandoned English for Esperanto and Christianity for Baha'i or an original New Age religion!
We believe that the evidence on hand, and there is a voluminous body of work that has explored immigration to America from colonial times to the present as well as an equally substantial body of work on the black experience and a smaller though not insubstantial research tradition on Native Americans, calls for a conceptual perspective that appreciates two facts. First, intergroup relations have been characterized by both change and persistence. Second, all groups have to some extent been transformed by their encounters with other groups—the majority group and all minority groups. Precisely how this might be captured schematically is a somewhat open question. One possibility, the one we find most convincing, would be as follows:
A + B + C (the dominant group) → ACD + BCD + CD
What this diagram indicates is a society in which discrete ethnic groups do not disappear, but are transformed in the process of intergroup interaction over time. The result of that interaction is that they come to share a common identity that, in the best of situations, exists harmoniously with particularistic ethnic identities. The common identity in question is an overarching national identity. It is not the case that each group in the society has an equal impact on the social construction of that national identity. Rather, groups that are large, have long histories in the society, and have played a dominant role in that society will have a larger impact than groups that are small, have arrived recently, and have entered the society as marginalized and often oppressed members. Nevertheless, the assumption is that the net result is a national identity that does not simply reflect the image of hegemonic groups.
Until recently, when speaking about assimilation, it was assumed that it involved entry into something called “the mainstream.” As it turns out, this is a remarkably undefined concept, as Roger Waldinger (2003) has recently observed. It can be assumed to refer to entry into the middle class, where people share a basic standard of living, life style, and opportunities for advancement. Research clearly reveals that this sort of assimilation does occur in a majority of cases in societies, such as the US and UK, where the middle class constitutes the largest and most diverse class in the society. Nevertheless, there are others who change as a result of their encounter with members of other groups, but the change that occurs does not land them in the mainstream.
Recently, Alejandro Portes, working with various colleagues, has advanced the idea of segmented assimilation to account for this phenomenon (see Portes and Zhou 1993). While this may have been an appropriate concept to use in discussing immigrants from the past, the argument has been specifically developed with contemporary post-industrial economies in mind. In the past, the manufacturing sector, particularly as it unionized, provided a vehicle for new immigrants to improve their economic circumstances and positioned them to pursue the goals and aspirations of the middle class, such as homeownership and university educations for their children. In short, it became a way for newcomers to gain entrée to the middle class.
Since the deindustrialization of the major capitalist economies that took off in the 1970s, the number of unionized manufacturing jobs has decreased dramatically, thus closing off this avenue to upward mobility. Portes argues that the resulting capitalist economies have come to resemble an hour glass, with a lot of low-paying, temporary, non-unionized jobs that do not easily translate into moving up in the organization from the bottom and similarly a lot of white collar professional jobs at the top, jobs that have human capital requirements (e.g., educational credentials) lacking in those located in the economy's bottom tier. As an alternative to involvement in the larger economy, one economic option for some ethnics is to find work among fellow ethnics in the niche or enclave economy. While this is sometimes preferred over working in a lower tier job in the larger economy, such work does not easily or readily translate into enhanced opportunities for advancement.
One of the things that is readily apparent among contemporary immigrants is that there is a considerable division between those with low and those with high levels of human capital. Thus, in the US, one finds large numbers of Mexican immigrants who have not earned high school diplomas working as itinerant laborers in the country's agricultural fields or in sweat shops, while on the other hand many Indians who have arrived during the past two decades come with advanced degrees in medicine or science and technology, and they have found themselves quickly obtaining well-paying, high status jobs.
Segmented assimilation concentrates on examining the ways that the children of newcomers in the bottom tier end up confronting three serious obstacles: racial discrimination, a bifurcated labor market, and inner-city subcultures (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). Their everyday interactions are far more likely to occur with poor innercity blacks than with affluent suburban whites, and it is the former that comes to play a significant role in shaping the acculturation process. John Ogbu (1978) has argued that many inner-city black youths have embraced an oppositional culture that distains being white. Yale University ethnographer Elijah Anderson (2000) has referred to this adversarial lifestyle as defined in terms of the “code of the street.” The segmented assimilation thesis contends that when dissonant acculturation occurs, it can readily lead to downward mobility, which contributes to such counterproductive behaviors as gang involvement, drug activities, unplanned pregnancies, and dropping out of school.
Some critics of segmented assimilation theory argue that it paints too negative and stark a portrait and tends to overemphasize the role that race plays in the process. No serious scholars appear prepared to argue that downward mobility due to dissonant acculturation doesn't occur, but they do question how extensive it is while also pointing to the fact that native-born whites can also embrace an oppositional identity (see, for example, Kasinitz, et al. 2008). While the focus of research on segmented assimilation has been the US, some research on other nations has been produced, yielding mixed results (Boyd 2002; Silberman, et al. 2007).
Despite some problems with segmented assimilation as it is currently understood, it has the virtue of attempting to connect the acculturation patterns of various ethnic groups to their differing social class locations. While assimilation theory at the hands of Park and his followers paid very little attention to social class, even with Gordon's call for consideration of what he dubbed “ethclass,” this is a positive development—one that represents less of a break with the tradition of assimilation theory than a useful corrective to it.
It's a truism to say that the world's major advanced industrial nations have in recent decades become increasingly diverse societies. The assertiveness of long-marginalized indigenous peoples (e.g., the Native Americans in the US, First Nations people in Canada, Australia's Aborigines, and the Sami in northern Finland, Norway, and Sweden) has helped to make diversity increasingly visible. The same can be said of the movements of ethnonationalist minorities for greater autonomy or even independence (e.g., the Scots and Welsh in Britain, the Basques and Catalan in Spain, and the Québécois in Canada). Finally, the third factor contributing to growing diversity is immigration. Indeed, despite deep ambivalence and often with considerable levels of opposition, these nations have become countries of new immigrants. This includes large numbers of immigrants from Turkey in Germany, Muslims from northern Africa in France, Afro-Caribbeans and Asians from the Indian subcontinent in Britain. It includes large contingents of Chinese and Indians in Canada, and similarly large numbers of Mexicans, Chinese, Koreans, and Indians in the US. It also includes much smaller numbers of a wide array of ethnic groups in all of these nations and in similar ones.
In many instances, when people seek to depict a society as diverse, they use as a synonym the term multiculturalism. Ever since the word entered the vocabularies of ordinary people and multiculturalism became a reality, it has had its vocal critics. In the US, this includes such figures as the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1992) and the sociologist Todd Gitlin (1995). Both feared that multiculturalism, not as a description of diversity, but as what they perceived to be a political agenda, was divisive. The former was concerned about the “disuniting of America,” while the latter feared that we might be entering the “twilight of common dreams.”
More recently, the late Samuel Huntington, who had been a professor of political science at Harvard and was a key spokesperson for the view that the profound differences between the West and elsewhere, but especially the Muslim world, was leading to a “clash of civilizations.” In his last work, Who Are We? (2004), he explored what he had concluded was the contemporary threat to American national identity. In his view, the US was historically a nation that assimilated its newcomers through a process known as Americanization. By this, he meant that those who were assimilating were inclined to embrace the fact that the society was defined chiefly by its historic roots, which included the dominance of Protestant Christianity, the English language, and undivided (i.e. not dual) citizenship). What we've just described about critics of multiculturalism has focused on the US. Suffice it to say that similar criticisms have been heard in all of the other countries of North America and Western Europe, as well as in Australia and New Zealand.
In the waning years of the past century, Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer (1997) contended that “we are all multiculturalists now.” This is a bold claim given that even two decades earlier there was actually very little use of the term itself. More recently, Yale social theorist Jeffrey Alexander (2006) has presented a sustained case for viewing multiculturalism as a new mode of incorporation, and as such, as a new alternative to assimilation. Is Glazer correct? Is Alexander?
To answer these two questions requires defining multiculturalism, which is a difficult task for two reasons. First, it is used in a rather wide variety of ways, resulting in people frequently talking past each other. Not only are misunderstandings easy, but there are different versions of multiculturalism, with some offering “harder” varieties and others “softer” positions. Second, multiculturalism has proven to be highly controversial, being accused of fomenting societal fragmentation and intensifying ethnic identities at the expense of promoting the common good and shared ideas transcending ethnic boundaries (see, for example, Huntington 2004).
While we disagree with these criticisms, it is not difficult to see where they come from insofar as what makes assimilation and multiculturalism different—both as philosophical positions and political projects—is that the former concentrates on the matter of bringing individuals from heretofore outsider groups into the larger society (call it the mainstream or something else), while the latter is concerned with finding ways to make a virtue of diversity. Indeed, multiculturalism begins with the conviction that people of diverse cultural identities cannot be treated as equals in civil society if that which makes them distinctive is ignored. In other words, multiculturalism is concerned with the prospects of finding common ground while simultaneously valuing rather than ignoring cultural differences.
This needs to be qualified somewhat. Our view of multiculturalism dovetails with a number of key theorists, the most important being the Canadian philosophers Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka, the British social theorists Bhiku Parekh and Tariq Modood, and the American theorist Jeffrey Alexander. All are intent on finding ways to “achieve diversity.” By achieving diversity, all of these theorists, despite their differences, seek to preserve and enhance distinctiveness while at the same time expanding the sphere of solidarity to encompass members of other groups. In so arguing, they represent softer or more moderate versions of multiculturalism, in contrast to, for example, the harder or more radical view of the late University of Chicago philosopher Iris Marion Young.
Young's (1990) position called for the creation of what she called “differentiated citizenship.” This type of citizenship places a premium on group differences, including distinctive group rights. She repudiates the idea of universally shared values and worldviews, contending that all they amount to is a projection of the values and worldview of any society's dominant group. In other words, from her perspective, any effort to arrive at a sense of common purpose and a shared identity is inevitably assimilationist, a form of incorporation resulting from socially excluded groups becoming integrated by embracing the values of the dominant group.
Her position has been subject to widespread criticism on the part of soft multiculturalists. Some have pointed out that her understanding of who in the US qualifies for differentiated rights is so broad that something like 75 percent of the population would qualify, including but not simply limited to the main racial minorities in the society, women, gays and lesbians, and members of the working class. What she does in making this case is to treat the idea of culture so loosely that where she sees distinct cultures others would perceive variations within a culture. Beyond this, what serves to distinguish Young's version of multiculturalism from more moderate positions is that it promotes group insularity and social fragmentation. It does so because it fails to reckon with the fact that most people are capable of seeing both the distinctive perspective of their own group and at the same time understand the limits of that perspective and the virtues of also seeing things from the vantage of the larger society. Alexander (2006: 398) has criticized Young for promoting a philosophic position that calls for “recognition without solidarity,” by which he means that in claiming to be respected and accorded distinctive rights, members of the groups in question do not in the end establish bonds of attachment and allegiance to members of other groups.
While the moderate multiculturalists cited above have all developed original theoretical statements, for our purposes the similarities among these thinkers are far more important than the differences. To begin with, in contrast to Young, they see multiculturalism as a mechanism for including the members of groups that have heretofore been socially excluded. Alexander (2006: 450–457) depicts multiculturalism as a new mode of incorporation, and insofar as this is the case, it represents an alternative to assimilation. Likewise, Modood (2007: 14) describes multiculturalism as “a form of integration.”
Multiculturalism does not refer to a social process of group interaction, but rather to a moral choice, one predicated on the idea of recognition. Taylor (1992) is perhaps the most important of the multiculturalists to advance the claim that multiculturalism ought to be construed as a preferred mode of incorporation because unlike assimilation it takes seriously the idea that people's cultural backgrounds constitute an integral element of their sense of self. Because of this it is reasonable to conclude that creating an opportunity to have one's cultural identity recognized in public by others represents a just and equitable way to approach difference. As such, it constitutes a politics of identity, one committed to the promotion of cultures of authenticity.
Posed at the level of philosophy, it is difficult to get a sense of what multiculturalism “on the ground” would look like. At a less abstract level, such as the level of public policy, how should we define multiculturalism? Summarizing the position of Will Kymlicka (1995), Duncan Ivison (2010: 2) contends that it refers to “policies designed to provide some level of public recognition, support, or accommodation to non-dominant ethnocultural groups” (which includes immigrants, refugees, ethnonational minorities, and indigenous peoples). From Kymlicka's perspective, multiculturalism goes beyond the protection of the basic civil and political rights guaranteed to all individuals in a liberal-democratic state, to also extend some level of public recognition and support for ethnocultural minorities to maintain and express their distinct identities and practices.
To speak about public policy means that the nation-state undertakes concrete initiatives to insure that such recognition and support are promoted. This being the case, it is quite obvious that governments would not be interested in advancing the sort of multiculturalism advocated by Young since public officials would be, understandably, concerned that they would lead to fragmentation. In other words, governments have an interest—a self-interest—in facilitating integration and in avoiding fragmentation. Thus, to the extent that any particular government actually promotes multiculturalism, it will be a version that resembles the perspective of the soft multiculturalists.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Canada, which is the first of the advanced industrial nations to pass legislation that established the nation as officially multicultural (Australia, modeling itself after Canada, was the only country to follow this lead). Some other countries can reasonably be seen as supportive of multiculturalism, including the US and UK, despite the fact that they have not passed an official multicultural act. Rather, these nations exhibit a multicultural sensibility. At the same time, other countries have proven to be quite resistant to multiculturalism, including France among Western European nations and Japan.
Given Canada's status as the nation with the most explicit and robust version of multiculturalism, it is worth highlighting how this came to be and what it means in practice. As is the case with settler nations, Canada's population has been diverse throughout its history and with recent waves of immigration it has become even more diverse. Of significance here is that the nation has been controlled for much of its history by settlers from Britain, and as a consequence has been forced to address the concerns and claims of the indigenous peoples—the First Nations peoples—as well as those of French-speakers concentrated in the province of Quebec. Add to this the so-called Third Force—immigrants from countries other than Britain and France—and the full complexity and diversity of the Canadian mosaic is evident.
Canada's history of multiculturalism involves two stages of development once the country abandoned “assimilation” for “integration.” It was triggered by two interrelated events that emerged during the 1960s. The first, the rise of a separatist movement within Quebec's Francophone community, was the most threatening to Canadian society insofar as if successful, it would have resulted in the splitting of Canada into two geographic regions divided by an independent Quebec. This movement was motivated by two major concerns, the economic and political marginalization of the French by the English and the future of the French language and culture brought about by the hegemony of the nation's British heritage. Compounding the challenge confronting the Canadian government was the fact that other immigrants, be they older immigrant stock who arrived in the country during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or were among the more recent, post-World War II migrants, called for an end to discrimination, marginalization, and economic disadvantage.
The government's Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, as the very name suggests, operated with an appreciation of the fact that the French minority occupied a special status in the nation, being considered along with the British one of the two “charter groups.” Canada, for example, officially became a bilingual nation, with English and French being the dual languages of government. At the same time, the commission's members understood that there was a need to reckon with the fact that non-charter groups had legitimate grievances that needed to be addressed simultaneously with the demands of French-speaking Canada. To that end a Ministry of Multiculturalism was created in 1973 to monitor the implementation of the following multicultural initiatives: assisting groups to maintain and foster their identities; assisting the same groups to overcome barriers to full incorporation into Canadian society, promoting opportunities for constructive engagements among groups, and assisting immigrants to become competent in one of the nation's two official languages.
Canada's embrace of multiculturalism become further institutionalized with the passage of the Multiculturalism Act, which went into effect in 1988, making the nation the first in the world to implement an official state-sanctioned and - promoted policy of multiculturalism. With this law, programs were created to facilitate cross-cultural understanding, to maintain and strengthen the nation's different ethnic cultures, to promote them as part of a shared national heritage, and to support policies that allow people from all ethnic groups to participate fully in Canadian society.
Canada's official multiculturalism is not without its critics. One such critic is Neil Bissoondath (2002), a Trinidad-born immigrant and writer who criticized what he called the “cult of multiculturalism” for encouraging ethnic groups to live in isolation from the larger society where their particularistic group identities are reinforced and strengthened, while the process of identifying with and embracing Canadian identity is impeded. He was not alone in this criticism. The idea that multiculturalism is divisive was echoed by other commentators. It was also a view that reflected public opinion. While the Canadian public is more supportive of multiculturalism than its counterparts in the other advanced industrial nations, it also has concerns about existing policy. Canadians appear relatively comfortable with the reality of Canada as a diverse society, but at the same time are anxious about the possibility that multiculturalism on the ground has promoted respect for difference without expending sufficient attention to the flip side of the coin, which is the need for all Canadians to see themselves as united with others on the basis of a shared citizenship.
As in other countries increasingly receptive to multiculturalism, Canada has been forced to wrestle with the competing demands of claims for recognition based on particularistic aspects of ethnic identity and countervailing claims based on more universal principles. This could be seen, for example, in the dispute that arose when Sikhs in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police argued for an exemption from wearing the traditional police hat because of the religious requirement that adult men wear a turban. The Sikhs and their supporters argued that an exemption was warranted as a mark of respect for a minority religion, while their opponents (which included a group of retired members of the force) contended that wearing a turban instead of the RCMP hat amounted to a violation of the organization's secular character (Parekh 2000: 244). In this particular case, the courts ultimately sided with the Sikhs, who were permitted to wear their turbans while on duty.
Are the critics right about the ethnic separatism created by multiculturalism? The evidence does not support such claims. For example, immigrants to Canada opt to become naturalized citizens at a higher rate than their counterparts in the US, which is not an official multicultural nation. Likewise, rates of residential segregation are lower in Canada than the US. Since multiculturalism became an official state policy, rates of intermarriage have increased rather than decreased. In short, not only does this evidence suggest that multiculturalism does not threaten to disunite the nation, but rather that many of the integrative outcomes look surprisingly like those in nations that subscribe to assimilation.
The difference between assimilation and multiculturalism revolves around the fact that the former seeks simply to integrate while the latter attempts to simultaneously integrate and achieve diversity. In this regard, transnationalism enters the picture, not as yet another mode of incorporation, but rather as a phenomenon that can tip the preferred mode of incorporation in the direction of multiculturalism. To understand why this is the case, we need first to describe what transnationalism means.
One of the hallmarks of the contemporary world is that globalization has led to the creation of a far more interrelated world than ever before. Globalization theorists have spent considerable energy spelling out the myriad ways that this interrelatedness has economic, political, cultural, and environmental implications. While transnationalism and globalization are not synonyms, they are connected concepts. Our concern here is with transnationalism and immigration.
We live, as some commentators have pointed out, in a world in motion. The United Nations recently reported that by the middle of the first decade of the current century there were nearly 200 million people living outside of the country where they were born. While this number constitutes a small percentage of the world's overall population, it also represents a twofold increase over the course of the past century.
One of the realities of the contemporary world is that it is far easier for immigrants to maintain contact with their point of origin than was the case in earlier periods, including the period of the last major migratory wave that began in the late nineteenth century and ended around the time of the Great Depression. Whereas a century ago immigrants had to rely on letters to maintain contacts with friends and family left behind, today it is possible for many to be in contact on a routine basis due to the availability of new communications technologies. The internet has played a significant role in this process, but perhaps more importantly is the telephone, especially since the advent of cheap phone cards. Likewise, improvements in travel technologies have made movement back and forth between place of origin and point of destination considerably easier. While immigrants in an earlier era had to rely on arduous journeys by steamship and train, today's immigrants make extensive use of air travel. Newcomers to the US once arrived at Ellis Island by ship. Today they land at JFK International Airport.
The net result, according to those who have studied transnationalism practices, is that a unique social field is often created that transcends political boundaries, a social space in which patterns of interaction arise that link the immigrants to those that stay behind. This situation is depicted in Figure 5.2. The result is that immigrants are more likely to preserve aspects of their ethnic identity than otherwise might have been the case, while at the same time those who have remained in the homeland are influenced by their émigré counterparts who bring with them new ideas and ways of living from their new country. The core group that makes such a field possible are the individuals who move back and forth between two localities with a certain regularity, living, in effect, with one foot in both places. These individuals are bilingual and have an economic, and sometimes a political, stake in both homeland and destination (Portes, et al. 1999: 217). Box 5.3 offers two concrete examples from the work of sociological ethnographers on transnational communities, one with immigrants from the Dominican Republic residing in Boston and the other from Mexican immigrants living in New York City.
Figure 5.2: Transnational social spaces.
Transnationalism does not only involve those who move to and fro. It also impacts those around them in both localities. In Robert C. Smith's (2006) study of Mexican immigrants in New York City from the same town of Ticuani, a hometown association established in Brooklyn worked with those who remained in Mexico to improve the community's infrastructure, which included creating a potable water system, paving and lighting the town square, building a primary and secondary school, and renovating a church damaged by an earthquake. This aspect of transnationalism links remittances—the sending of money and goods to people remaining behind—to economic development. The Mexican government has seen this potential and has attempted to both stimulate and control such capital flows by instituting what became known as the 3 x 1 Program, which provides three dollars (from federal, state, and local governments) for each dollar donated by hometown associations for government-approved projects.
Another example of transnationalism that illustrates cultural transfers rather than economic ones can be seen in Peggy Levitt's study of Dominican immigrants from Mirafloreños living in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. In part of her study, religious change brought about by immigration is analyzed (Levitt 2001: 159–179). The Roman Catholic Church hierarchy in Boston did not opt to create distinctly Dominican congregations, but instead offered them pan-Latino churches composed of immigrants from Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. One of the results of this practice was that those religious practices and attitudes that were distinctly Dominican had to give way to what Levitt (2001: 169) calls a “least-common-denominator Catholicism.” While assimilation theory would have predicted such accommodation to a new environment, what the transnational perspective adds to the picture is the impact of such a transformation on those who remained behind in the Dominican Republic. The ongoing communication between family members in Mirafloreños and Boston, the role of remittances, and the impact of Dominican priests trained in the US led to changes in the way people in the homeland viewed and practiced their religious faith.
One question that has frequently been raised concerns the number of transnational immigrants. The most rigorous research projects to date that have explored this question have concluded that only a relatively small percentage of immigrants are transnational (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007). Nonetheless, it may only take a relatively small number of transnational migrants to create a transnational social space that involves those who stayed behind and those who moved but do not continue to move back and forth between the homeland and host society. In other words, the relatively small number may lead to the misleading conclusion that the extent to which economic, political, and cultural transnationalism is occurring has been overestimated. Portes (2003: 877) makes this case when he writes, “Despite its limited numerical character, the combination of a cadre of regular transnational activists with the occasional activities of other migrants adds up to a social process of significant economic and social impact for communities and even nations.” The bottom line is that at the moment there is abundant evidence to suggest that transnationalism is a significant phenomenon. Insofar as this is the case, it serves as a stimulus for multiculturalism rather than assimilationism as the mode of incorporation preferred by immigrants.
The unanswered question is whether transnationalism will continue into the future. Will people who are at present involved in transnational networks continue to be involved over the course of their lives? Will, for example, the Ticuani immigrants in New York City that we discussed above continue to work on public works projects in their hometown, or might their energies be directed to improving living condition in their New York City neighborhood? Of course, such pursuits are not mutually exclusive: people can simultaneously be involved in such activities in both the homeland and receiving country. However, Smith discovered in his study that those active in the homeland were not very invested in political and social life in the receiving society.
A more significant question is whether transnationalism is a phenomenon limited to the first generation. Will the children of immigrants be as invested in transnationalism as their parents were? What about the third generation and beyond? We can only speculate about what the future holds, but research has recently begun on the second generation. Albeit limited, the research to date would appear to indicate that with generational succession we can expect a decline in transnational practices. However, the historical record suggests that it is far too early to conclude that transnationalism is destined to fade away. The continuing interest of some groups, including Jews in the US, in homeland politics is an indication that transnationalism may prove to be durable.
Ethnonational minorities pose a different sort of incorporative issue. Unlike immigrants, who tend to assume that they need at some level to adapt and adjust to the culture of the receiving nation, ethnonational minorities have a long history within that geographic locale and assume that they have a right to survive as a group rather than acculturate into the larger society. Their identity is defined in part because of territorial claims they make. The case of the francophone community in Canada's province of Quebec was mentioned earlier. Parallel to Quebec are other ethnonational regions in the world's liberal democracies include Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom and the Basque region and Catalonia in Spain. In all of these examples, some nationalist activists have defined their ethnonational group as a stateless nation and have demanded independence. In two cases—Northern Ireland and the Basque—militant organizations have for the past few decades engaged in campaigns of violence.
The three other ethnonationalist movements have largely repudiated violence, pursuing their political goals with ballots, not bullets. They have organized political parties to advance their objectives. This would not be possible in a repressive political climate. Indeed, in Spain it was not possible during the long repressive Franco dictatorship, during which time Catalonian and Basque nationalism were forced underground as the regime implemented policies aimed at destroying their cultures and languages. Though not as repressive, the Thatcher years in the UK were ones in which the government did little to accommodate the political aspirations of its ethnonational minorities.
Existing nation-states are in general unwilling to allow their current boundaries to be reduced in size due to the withdrawal of one of its regions. Seeking to prevent such a situation from occurring can be contained by force, but this generally leads to increased levels of societal tension and conflict. As an alternative to repression, which does not advance the incorporation of minorities, nation-states have at their disposal a mechanism that accommodates ethnonational minorities while simultaneously preserving their territorial integrity. The mechanism in question is the granting of regional autonomy.
This is precisely what the administration of Tony Blair did in the UK when it implemented a policy known as devolution. What it meant was that Scotland and Wales were given considerable control over domestic policies in their respective regions. They were granted the ability to set policies regarding education, transportation, commerce, and so forth rather than having those policies dictated by the nation's central parliament in London. At the same time, foreign policy is determined solely by the central government. Scotland opened its own parliament, while in Wales a counterpart assembly was created. Residents both elected members to parliament in nationwide elections and they elected members to represent them in these two regional chambers.
Why would the New Labour government launched by Tony Blair push such a policy? In part, in accordance with the dictates of multiculturalism, it was prepared to concede both Scotland and Wales had their own cultural histories separate from that of England, and to agree that residents in each locale had a right to try to preserve their cultures. Related to this, both regions were poorer than the nation as a whole, and were considerably poorer than the southeast of England. Thus, part of their increased ability to set economic policies for their region was based on recognition of the fact that both Scotland and Wales had historically lacked control over their economic destinies and this had put them over time at a distinct disadvantage. In short, devolution could be seen as a policy designed to promote both recognition or respect and redistribution.
However, there was also an element of self-interest on the part of the nation-state. The UK, after all, did not want the nation to be dismantled as a result of successful campaigns on the part of ethnonationalist movements aimed at achieving independence. As early as the 1970s, commentator Tom Nairn (1977) predicted the “break-up of Britain.” A little more than two decades later, he would write about life “after Britain” (Nairn 2000). The claim that Britain has somehow ceased to exist obviously has an element of hyperbole to it, but it is based on the assumption that the process of granting greater autonomy to the regions is a stepping stone on the way to independence. This is clearly what the leadership of the Scottish Nationalist Party thinks, too. However, the reason that the government implemented devolution was that it thought that granting regional autonomy would defuse the separatist threat insofar as it would be seen by a majority of people in Scotland and Wales as a sufficient response to their demands. As such, the policy represents something of a gamble, and it is difficult to predict what the future portends. However, at the moment there is little likelihood that Scotland will soon become an independent nation, while the chances that this will occur in Wales appear to be even more remote.
This approach to the challenges that ethnonationalist movements pose to nation states has not been confined to the UK. One sees it as well in Spain, where people in both Catalonia and the Basque region have achieved greater say over their lives. It can be seen, not only with ethnonational minorities, but with indigenous peoples as well.
As this chapter indicates, there are two main ways—or modes of incorporation—that ethnic minorities that have experienced social exclusion come to become a part of a society's mainstream: assimilation and multiculturalism. Transnationalism, which amounts to immigrants seeking to live with one foot in the homeland and one in the receiving nation, serves to reinforce multiculturalism at the expense of assimilation. For ethnonational minorities and indigenous peoples, policies granting regional autonomy also serve to promote multiculturalism. Thus, it is not surprising that, despite the controversy that surrounds it, multiculturalism ought to be seen as a novel form of societal inclusion that is unlikely to be repudiated.