> First of all, much of what you are talking about can’t
> be empirically defined,

If we’re talking about the assimilation of an immigrant minority into a larger culture — though admittedly a complex reality — I think at least parts of it can be empirically defined/captured. I’m thinking primarily in terms of language communities.

So what aspects of assimilation can be broken down into specific, measurable elements?

1. Ability in the dominant language. This is empirically measurable, and a pivotal component of assimilation. An incoming immigrant and his/her family who are not native speakers of their new country’s dominant language can be given a standardized language test, then given the same test after a certain period (say, two years). Those who have not improved in fluency by a particular degree (or who have even lost language ability, which can happen when immigrants live in self-created “language ghettoes”) are failing at assimilation.

(If someone can give me an example of an immigrant who does not master the dominant language of the land but is somehow meaningfully assimilated, I’d like to hear it.)

Note that I think accents would have to be considered — i.e., heavy/ indecipherable accents that impede communication would be considered a problem needing correction, whereas accents that do not impair communication would not. How would this be assessed? With trained language experts, per a proficiency standard. We live in an imperfect world and doubtless such a process would be imperfect, but the goal would to create a common society and a cohesive citizenry via promotion of a common language/literacy.

Does this mean that Grandma refusing to learn the new language represents a social problem? Of course not. But if only the primary breadwinner speaks the dominant language well, while the spouse shops only at native language stores or socializes exclusively in their native language (a common immigrant community phenomenon) and the kids are going to a native language private school (less common, but possible), is this family meaningfully assimilating? No. And (I would argue) this is a problem for the greater society.

How does a progressive society prevent language ghettoization? Require a high level of language fluency for citizenship, perhaps per particular age brackets (for example, exempt Grandma/Grandpa), and provide tax exemptions for businesses that teach the dominant language to non-native speakers (i.e., encourage the growth of language fluency but without subsidizing the lessons — the burden of learning the dominant language should fall to the immigrant).

2. Demographic density. This is empirically measured in censuses. This gets at what Bob Sampson talks about above vis-a-vis Greeks and Italians self-segregating in Australia — ethnic groups clumping together into neighborhoods. In and of itself, this is not problematic. My grandmother grew up in Chicago in the 1930s, and she said you could guess if someone was Irish, Italian, Polish, German, or Lithuanian by their street address.

So, ethnic neighborhoods represent a measurable dimension of assimilation.

Birds of a feather flock together, it’s natural and it’s not a problem — unless such communities foster a sense of ethnic identity at the expense of a national identity (”We may be Vietnamese-American, but we’re Vietnamese first”). Based on my own experience, I am thinking of the tension between second-generation Norteño gangs in San Jose and their resentment of first-generation Sureños — “Mexican-Americans” who speak English as well as Spanish, versus “Mexicans in America” who speak limited English.

Again, the existence of ethnic neighborhoods per se is not problematic, but there could be aspects of those communities that would indicate an assimilation problem. Which segues to points #3 and #4…

3. Businesses conducting commerce in the non-dominant language. Though probably not conventionally tracked by social scientists, this is empirically measurable, both in terms of its existence as a social phenomenon and in terms of economic activity.

The existence of businesses that conduct commerce only or primarily in a language other than the dominant language of the land suggests cultural “gheotto-ization”. While dual-language business are far more common, for obvious reasons (far more economic opportunity with the dominant language community), there are places (Chinatown in almost any major city, parts of East L.A. where Spanish is the only language, etc.) where the language of the land is not to be found.

What might a progressive society do to address this? First, require fluency in the dominant language to get a business license (so at least the owner is functionally bilingual) and require all business signage be dual language. Then let “the market” take care of the rest. In other words, the evolution of business activity in the non-dominant language is a natural phenomenon that really cannot be controlled, so don’t try — but take reasonable steps to encourage business activity to “face” the dominant language community.

4. Media language. The existence of media channels that broadcast exclusively in the non-dominant language is empirically measurable, and also problematic to assimilation. Again, it encourages language ghettoization.

A progressive society would allow such channels, but require a significant fraction (33%? 50%?) of prime-time programming to be dual-language. How? Get creative. Have shows that are bilingual, or broadcast in foreign language with dominant language subtitles for 30 minutes, then 30 minutes vice-versa. (Grandma/Grandpa might be annoyed, but they may learn a little of the common tongue despite themselves. ) This also creates a business opportunity for dual language programming, so it fosters overall lingual assimilation — and incidentally exposes the dominant language community to the particular foreign language community. (Imagine watching those cool Chinese period-piece soap operas, but instead of the language being Cantonese with Mandarin subtitles, English subtitles.)

Publications would have similar requirements (all ads would need to be dual language, and some significant fraction of content would have to be dual language as well).

Under no circumstances should a society print ballots or permit political campaigning in anything other than the dominant language. Citizenship would be entirely in one language and one language only. You want to participate as a citizen? Learn the language of the land.

Upshot: my implied point, obviously, is that assimilation is most importantly about speaking the same language. That’s not all there is to it, obviously, but I think if a society works to ensure people can talk to each other, they can work out their problems with each other organically, and society will change and evolve over time, rather than trying to enshrine a particular ethnic community or interest group.

> that migrants have to assimilate into a white male
> dominated culture until more can be let in?

Dennis’ point about the rate of immigration for an ethnic/language minority is a good one. The greater society should be concerned about tribalization/ghettoization, because it erodes civic cohesion and the overall society’s ability to find common cause and work together. If a society does not work to mitigate tribalization, then you’re left with the problems you see in parts of Europe, Canada, the U.S.: tribalization/ factionalization. A common language is merely a preliminary step to address this problem. (Witness France, where Francophone descendents of Arab/African immigrants are still not considered “truly French”.) Getting people to speak the same language merely allows for a dialog — but without that, you can’t even have that dialog.

It’s not about the dominant culture’s values being better; it’s about the degree of participation in the meta-ethnic, meta-religious civil society. It’s the difference between genuine immigration/ assimilation, versus various manifestations of economically-centered “colonization” or Gastarbeiterprogramm.

And if you want to use American society as the example of a male-dominated culture, let’s talk about African societies that practice female genital mutilation, or about female babies abandoned in droves in China. Which culture is the most misogynistic?

That said, I’m not arguing American society doesn’t have room for improvement.

> You see this concept of a dominant culture, or even
> one culture making up a society is inherently false for
> history shows that any community, take the U.S. for
> example, is made from competitions narratives and
> democratic reiterations of different groups.

I see your point, but with all due respect: try telling an African-American that the culture in the U.S. isn’t predominantly “white”.

The overall culture may be a rainbow, but one of those stripes is as broad as all the other stripes put together. That’s significant.

Yes, of course: not only is every society multi-valent, every *citizen* is multi-valent. Each of us is a nexus of narratives. But to say that that means there are no dominant narratives — dominant sub-cultures, if you will — is a kind of political correctness. It’s like saying that there is no such thing as a forest, there are only large collections of leaves. There are leaves, there are trees, there are forests — they are different in kind but related, and they are all real. Their comparative reality is a function of context.

There *are* dominant cultures. Furthermore, some cultures — whether dominant in a particular social/national venue or not — are better than others. By “better” I mean more just, more respectful of the rights of individual people.

> With the argument above the U.S. could have argued for
> the continuation of slavery to preserve the dominant culture,
> and we could view the civil rights movement as bad because
> it was the first time black people took their destiny into their
> own hands and forced the dominant culture to do something
> they didn’t want to do.

I don’t think Dennis was trying to make an argument for blanket hidebound conservatism. You’ve knocked down a straw man.

The issue of slavery was addressed in the original draft of the American Declaration of Independence; even the U.S. Founders (some of them, anyway) recognized it was inconsistent with Enlightenment values. Slavery was preserved as a political compromise, not a philosophical one.

The American Civil War was not a confrontation between a dominant culture and an arriviste culture, or between an indigenous culture and a colonizer. It was a struggle within a particular political culture for dominance of vision. One could argue that it was an example of a minority pro-slavery culture being dragged kicking and screaming into an anti-slavery mainstream culture at the point of a bayonet. The civil rights movement furthered the process of social integration.

It bears pointing out that slavery was not overturned in the U.S. by African-Americans — it was overturned (overwhelmingly and despite units like those depicted in the 1989 film _Glory_) by white people fighting against other white people. Really the American Civil War was about the right of a dominant culture to impose itself on a cultural minority (yes, abolitionism vs. pro-slavery, but also federalism vs. states’ rights).

Likewise, the civil rights movement was not just a movement of African-Americans — it was a movement of those Americans who advocated a “color-blind society” (admittedly hugely African-American, but not exclusively, as martyrs like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner demonstrate) versus those who preferred social (and in some backwaters, even political) apartheid.

> When did multiculturalism become a dirty word?

Multiculturalism, which properly means respect for cultural differences, is a dirty word to the extent that it is conflated with cultural relativism, which is not only problematic but extremely dangerous. Cultural relativism is a form of ideological cancer: cell growth is good, tumors are bad; respecting cultures is good, holding all cultural systems as equally valid is bad. Moreover, it’s insane. All cultures are not created equal. Some are (very demonstrably) better than others. Period.

Multiculturalism is a dirty word to the extent that it encourages every tribe to put its own good over that of the community as a whole.

> That’s the beauty of the U.S. system it’s able to take
> people from all over the world and have them peacefully
> coexist within a system that does not recognize the worth
> of a person from a “dominant culture” over the worth of
> another.

The beauty of the U.S. system, to the extent that it works, is the triumph of a culture of imposed tolerance over a legion of different prejudices and chauvanisms. It is the triumph of Rawlsian “Public reason” in the creation of a society that optimizes simultaneously the freedoms and rights of individual citizens. This realized thought experiment is an artifact of a Western Enlightenment culture (or perhaps that should be “Culture”).

I think to the degree our viewpoints differ it is because we define culture differently. I think perhaps you are meaning “culture” more in the sense of a social/ethnic/tribal identity, whereas I tend to think of it more as an ideological system of norms.

Thanks for the opportunity for a good think, everyone — particularly kyledeb, who provided me the opportunity to sharpen my perspective on a number of issues.

Thanks for thinking to email me when you wrote this. Rather than respond at length to your post I’ll just write a sort of general argument. First of all these arguments are not new. This post reminds me very much of the arguments of Samuel Huntington’s book Who Are We?. I personally haven’t read the entire book but the arguments are very similar and Huntington’s.

I have to say that I find the arguments extremely problematic. First of all, much of what you are talking about can’t be empirically defined, and once you try even conceptually this idea of a dominant culture that you’re professing troubles me a great deal. What does that mean, that migrants have to assimilate into a white male dominated culture until more can be let in?

You see this concept of a dominant culture, or even one culture making up a society is inherently false for history shows that any community, take the U.S. for example, is made from competitions narratives and democratic reiterations of different groups. With the argument above the U.S. could have argued for the continuation of slavery to preserve the dominant culture, and we could view the civil rights movement as bad because it was the first time black people took their destiny into their own hands and forced the dominant culture to do something they didn’t want to do.

When did multiculturalism become a dirty word? That’s the beauty of the U.S. system it’s able to take people from all over the world and have them peacefully coexist within a system that does not recognize the worth of a person from a “dominant culture” over the worth of another.

My eloquence in refuting your arguments eludes me, but a quick search of samuel huntington should help you find rebuttals to your post. I hope all is well.

Back to what I think what is your concern….. NZ’s recent Asian immigrant population gains…. 10% of the total population and rising fast.  Yes we are creating near future problems for our society as the numbers are too high for us to assimilate. Do we need these pressures. Do the Asian countries allow mass, not to mention individual , immigration, into their societies ?  Before the misty eyed PC brigade reply with the obligitary PC cries of “red neck” crap etc pleaseand  note that I am happily married  to and have several young children with an Asian lady. She also endorses the above.  THE PROBLEMS OF ASSIMILATION LIES IN THE NUMBERS INVOLVED NOT IN THE ETHNIC GROUPING.

I don’t consider you racist or anything other than correct about the way immigration/assimilation works.

I will say that for incoming cultures that don’t mesh well with receiving cultures, the onus should be on the incoming culture to adapt to their “chosen” culture. Yes, it’s nice if the receiving culture tries to make assimilation easier for the incoming culture, but it should be expected for the incoming culture to adapt. Not to pick on one culture but, burkhas and such should only be worn on special religious occasions in westernized cultures. The same for any major religious difference. If in doubt, they should watch local television or read magazines to get some idea of how a particular culture dresses. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, etc.

However, all that is based on what you were, I think, essentially getting at–a shared set of community values (some might call them “cultural values”). The rights of women are a good example of this, with some cultures still treating them as property. That’s not acceptable in a Western culture, and a newcomer would have to understand AND accept that.

All of which gets at what you were saying that the culture and religion of the newcomer must not be antithetical the society they’re moving into. I’d obviously agree with that. My concern is that some people confuse difference with hostility. I don’t think that religious similarity, per se, is important; New Zealand, for example, has a Christian ancestry but is entirely secular. So, attracting fundamentalist Christians to New Zealand instead of secular Muslims (or Buddhists or whatever) would be antithetical even though some might see those people as similar.

Another issue you didn’t touch on, but which I think is equally important, is that immigrants mush have respect for the original inhabitants of the country they’re moving to, like the Maori of New Zealand or the Aborigines of Australia, for example. Assimilating into the culture that now dominates those countries is important, but understanding and respecting the original culture is also important. In the case of New Zealand, the entire society is based on the partnership between the original inhabitants and the first newcomers, and nothing makes sense without that understanding, nor can one ever truly assimilate without it.

As an American of European ancestry, I had a relatively easy time assimilating into New Zealand. People from African or Asian countries have a harder time due to appearance and language more than anything else (Kiwis, being not religious themselves, don’t care what someone else’s religion is). Those immigrants haven’t always had a very easy time, and Kiwis of longer tenure have had some trouble adapting, too. Personally, I think this could be eased with a tougher English language requirement (since it’s the dominant of New Zealand’s two official languages, and the one the country interacts with the world in). I stress that because I think that being able to communicate clearly would make it possible to get past many of those other things you mentioned.

I welcome this discussion, and thank you for being part of it. Too often the whole thing degrades into a battle of stereotypes, so it’s refreshing to see a more thought-filled approach. Thanks!