Immigration and Ethnic Incorporation

The sociology of immigration in the United States was shaped decisively by the Chicago School in the first half of the twentieth century. Robert E. Park, working with W. I. Thomas, Ernest Burgess, and others, drew on studies of European immigrant groups in Chicago to propose an influential account of assimilation. Park's 1926 race-relations cycle described a sequence — contact, competition, accommodation, assimilation — through which newly arrived groups would eventually be absorbed into the dominant society. Assimilation was understood as the gradual acquisition of the host society's language, cultural practices, values, and social ties, resulting in the dissolution of ethnic distinctiveness over generations.

The classical view was refined by Milton Gordon in Assimilation in American Life (1964). Gordon distinguished several dimensions — cultural (acquisition of language and customs), structural (entry into primary-group associations of the host society), marital (intermarriage), identificational (sense of peoplehood with the host society), attitude- and behavior-receptional (absence of prejudice and discrimination), and civic (absence of value conflict). Structural assimilation, Gordon argued, was the keystone: once immigrants entered the primary groups of the host society in substantial numbers, other forms followed.

Classical assimilation theory was shaped by the experience of European immigrants — Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish — whose descendants had, by the mid-twentieth century, largely merged into a 'white' American mainstream that could no longer distinguish among them. The theory assumed a relatively stable dominant culture into which newcomers would blend, an expanding industrial economy offering mobility, and a nation-state actively producing citizens through schooling and military service.

Beginning in the 1960s, this framework came under sustained criticism. Critics argued that the theory (a) reified 'Anglo-conformity' as the endpoint, (b) ignored the persistence of ethnic identities even among third- and fourth-generation descendants, (c) could not explain the distinct incorporation trajectories of non-European groups — especially Black Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans — whose pathways seemed shaped by racialization rather than simple cultural distance, and (d) assumed a mid-century US economy that no longer existed. Herbert Gans, Nathan Glazer, Richard Alba, and others documented persistent 'symbolic ethnicity' — optional, expressive ethnic identification — among white descendants of European immigrants, while racial minorities continued to face structural barriers to incorporation that classical theory had not predicted.