How does assimilation work

Workshop discussions identified four areas in which better information is needed for the improvement of studies of federal programs and immigrant adjustment.

First, improved data are needed about income and employment dynamics. The Current Population Survey could benefit from special-purpose modules that include retrospective questions on changes in economic status. For the Survey on Income and Program Participation, it would be helpful to have a question on immigrant status included in an early wave of the interviewing and to include contextual variables in the survey data.

Second, comparative studies are needed on poverty and economic change for immigrants in different areas and cities. Workshop discussion suggested that it would be useful to have a set of comparative studies on immigrant adjustment, conducted with common variables, for a variety of metropolitan areas.

Third, more studies are needed of the different types of immigrants in order to note the comparative effect of assistance on economic adjustment.

Refugees political immigrants are eligible for different federal assistance programs than economic migrants, who enter the United States based on scrutiny of their ability to gain successful employment. A final area that warrants attention is the effect of the legal status, especially legalization, on immigrant adjustment.

A substantial proportion probably one-fifth or more of the current foreign-born population entered the United States illegally during recent decades, and many of these illegal aliens are seeking legal status under the general and special agricultural workers provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act.

Comprehensive studies are needed of the adjustment of this newly legalized population, compared with immigrants who entered legally.

Research is needed to improve our understanding of an important, contemporary public health enigma: the apparently better-than-average pregnancy outcomes among immigrant groups, regardless of socioeconomic status. Current health data on specific immigrant groups are limited national-level vital statistics data lack information on immigration status , and immigrants' ethnic groups are often reported only for pan-ethnic categories Asians and Hispanics.

Still, pregnancy outcomes as measured either by birthweight or mortality are better among babies born to immigrant than to native-born mothers Eberstein, Similar results have been reported for Spanish-surname mothers in California Williams et al. Guendelman et al. The risk of low birthweight was about four times higher for second-generation compared with first-generation primiparous women, and two times higher for second-generation compared with first-generation multiparous women.

Earlier, Yu reported that Chinese-American women have lower fetal, neonatal, and postneonatal mortality rates than women of European origin and those in other major ethnic and racial groups in the United States. Yu also reported that the superior health profile of Chinese-origin infants was observed at every level of maternal education and for all maternal ages. The results are noteworthy because the Southeast Asians had the highest rates of poverty and fertility in the state, had experienced very high infant death rates prior to their arrival in the Unites States, lacked English proficiency, and had the latest onset of prenatal care of all ethnic groups.

Other Asian groups Japanese, Chinese, and Filipinos and Hispanics mostly of Mexican origin also had lower infant death rates than whites, and much lower rates than those observed for Native Americans and blacks. The groups with below-average infant mortality rates consist largely of immigrants.

The evidence indicates that positive perinatal health outcomes among immigrant groups are a real phenomenon, worthy of further investigation. Are immigrant women superior health achievers, even when socioeconomic status is controlled and, if so, why? What are the effects on pregnancy outcomes of a wide variety of sociocultural and biomedical risk factors for foreign-born and native-born women of diverse ethnic and racial groups?

Although there are significant differences by nativity and ethnicity in pregnant women's histories of smoking, alcohol, and drug abuse during pregnancy—behaviors that are deleterious to the infant's health at birth and that appear to be more prevalent among the native-born—such variables do not explain other independent effects of nativity and ethnicity on outcomes.

There is considerable complexity to carrying out research in an area in which immigration, assimilation, and health interact. Existing vital statistics by themselves will not provide the research answers; alternative sources of data are needed and should include qualitative information as well as new studies based on comparative longitudinal designs e.

If we are to add significantly to the store of knowledge and to develop a larger set of intervention options, such research and data are essential. Intriguing questions have been raised by research on the mental health of ethnic minorities in the United States, including immigrants.

In a review of mental health prevalence rates reported in research over the past two decades Vega and Rumbaut, , studies suggest that rapid acculturation does not necessarily lead to conventionally anticipated outcomes, i. Instead, mental health studies suggest that assimmilation—in the various forms it can take—can itself be a traumatic process rather than a simple solution to the traumas of immigration.

Significantly, among Mexican-Americans, immigrants had lower rates of lifetime major depression than native-born people of Mexican descent; and among Mexican immigrants, the higher the level of acculturation, the higher was the prevalence of various types of psychiatric disorder Burnam et al. Furthermore, the native-born Mexican-Americans and non-Hispanic whites were much more likely than immigrants to be drug abusers. Other suggestions for future research emerged from the workshop discussions.

Research should take the social and historical contexts of immigrants fully into account, in terms of entries, exits, and assimilation. And among nonimmigrant ethnic and racial groups, studies need to distinguish between different American-born generations how many generations have passed since the immigration?

Moreover, research is needed to identify protective factors that appear to reduce mental health problems within diverse ethnic minority groups; recent findings show that certain immigrant groups exhibit lower symptom levels of psychiatric disorders than do majority group natives. Longitudinal studies are especially needed to characterize and investigate stress and its temporal patterning among immigrant groups, including patterns of immigrant adaptation to specific conditions of life change and their psychological or emotional sequence.

And, given the unprecedented racial and ethnic diversification of the U. The rapid surge of recent immigration has been accompanied by a rapid growth in the research literature on the educational attainment of immigrants; the research has concentrated predominantly on the educational levels of adult immigrants of working ages. Relatively little study has been given to the educational achievements of the U. The patterns of their educational attainment, language shift, and psychological adaptation cannot be predicted on the basis of their.

Research on the children of immigrants poses significant but so far unanswered theoretical and empirical questions. What factors account for variations in successful English-language acquisition for the children of immigrants? What is the role of family factors encouragement of regular study and the setting of education and occupation goals, for example for educational attainment?

Available results from the limited studies available are suggestive. In a study of students in the San Diego high schools, lower grade point averages were noted for Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, and blacks than for all other students.

With the exception of Hispanics, immigrant minority students from non-English-speaking families had higher grade averages than either majority native-born students or immigrant minority students from English-speaking families.

The highest grade point averages were those of students in immigrant families from China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

More remarkably, Hmong students whose parents are largely illiterate peasants from the Laotian high-lands and Cambodian students whose parents are mostly from poorly educated rural areas were outperforming the average native-born student. Other research has reported similar findings among immigrants of lower socioeconomic status from Central America, Southeast Asia, and the Punjab, and similar studies have found that Mexican-born immigrant students do better in school and are less likely to drop out than U.

Studying the adaptation process of immigrant children—patterns of language acquisition, educational attainment, cultural and psychological adjustment, ethnic identity, and acculturation strategies—can best be approached through comparative longitudinal research designs in a variety of community contexts, supplemented by intensive ethnographic field work.

Parental socioeconomic status and individual human capital can certainly be expected to have a strong effect on every aspect of the adaptation process, but those characteristics and related demographic variables cannot by themselves provide a completely satisfactory explanation. For that purpose, existing data sets are not adequate to the research tasks. Skepticism about whether new arrivals can assimilate into American society was a key concern in the presidential election and remains an ongoing theme in the public debate on immigration policy.

This controversy is not new. The U. Henry Cabot Lodge in The immigration debate raises a fundamental issue: Are immigrants able to successfully integrate into American society by adopting the economic, social, and cultural norms of native-born Americans? Or are they likely to remain an alien presence inside our borders long after they settle here? This argument typically generates more heat than light. Many people have opinions on the subject, but relatively little empirical evidence is available on how fully and quickly immigrants assimilate into U.

By the early 20th century, some 15 percent of the U. In our previous work on immigration, my co-authors and I looked at occupation data of immigrants who arrived during the Age of Mass Migration. We found that story to be largely a myth. On average, long-term immigrants and natives held jobs at similar skill levels and climbed the occupational ladder at about the same pace.

We did find considerable variation though. Immigrants from richer countries, such as England or Germany, often worked in higher-skilled occupations than natives, while those from poorer countries, such as Italy or Russia, often were in less-skilled occupations. But, regardless of the starting point, the initial gaps between immigrants and natives persisted throughout their lives. These findings provide useful data on the experiences of immigrants in the U. Measuring cultural assimilation is a challenge because data on cultural practices—things like food, dress, and accent—are not systematically collected.

But the names that parents choose for their children are collected, offering a revealing window into the cultural assimilation process.

For example, people with names like Hyman or Vito were almost certain to be children of immigrants, while youngsters with names like Clay or Lowell were likely to have native parents. Giving a child an American-sounding name is a financially cost-free way of identifying with U.

Other than marriage, citizenship is one of the most significant factors in assimilation. Thus, immigration debates focus not only on the number of immigrants that should be admitted into a country and the processes of incorporation but also on how citizenship should be extended and to whom. Proponents of immigration often argue that new residents will help to build and enrich American democracy , while opponents counter that the identity and legitimacy of the nation may be challenged and perhaps even threatened by immigrants.

Questions of citizenship in relation to illegal immigration is a particularly controversial issue and a common source of political tension. The majority of immigrants have tended to settle in traditional gateway states such as Florida, New York, California, Illinois, Texas, and Massachusetts, where immigrants find large existing populations of foreign-born people. Recently, however, immigrants have increasingly been settling in areas outside these gateway states.

Sociologists Mary Waters and Tomas R. Jimenez have suggested that these geographical shifts may change the way researchers assess immigrant assimilation, as immigrants settling in new areas may encounter different experiences than immigrants settling in more traditional gateways.

Specifically, Waters and Jimenez identify three distinguishing characteristics in more recent, less traditional, immigration patterns: less established social hierarchies , smaller immigrant population size, and different institutional arrangements. The theory of segmented assimilation for second generation immigrants is highly researched in the sociological arena.

Segmented assimilation, researched by Min Zhou and Alejandro Portes, focuses on the notion that people take different paths in how they adapt to life in the United States.

This theory states that there are three main different paths of assimilation for second generation immigrants. Examples of assimilation include:. Another common example would be how children learn about different types of animals. A child might begin with a schema for a dog, which in the child's mind, is a small, four-legged animal. As the child encounters new information in the world, the new information can then be assimilated or accommodated into this existing schema.

When the child encounters a horse, they might assimilate this information and immediately call the animal a dog. The process of accommodation then allows the child to adapt the existing schema to incorporate the knowledge that some four-legged animals are horses.

In each of these examples, the individual is adding information to their existing schema. Remember, if new experiences cause the person to alter or completely change their existing beliefs, then it is known as accommodation.

Piaget also believed that as children learn, they strike a balance between the use of assimilation and accommodation. This process, known as equilibration, allows children to find a balance between applying their existing knowledge and adapting their behavior to new information. According to Piaget, the learning process involves attempting to interpret new information within the framework of existing knowledge assimilation , making small changes to that knowledge in order to cope with things that don't fit those existing frameworks accommodation , and eventually adjusting existing schemas or forming new ones in order to adjust to a new understanding equilibration.

Assimilation and accommodation are complementary learning processes that play a role at each stage of cognitive development. During the sensorimotor stage , for example, some information is assimilated, while some experiences must be accommodated. It is through these processes that infants, children, and adolescents gain new knowledge and progress through the stages of development.

Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Learning to perceive in the sensorimotor approach: Piaget's theory of equilibration interpreted dynamically. Front Hum Neurosci. Miller, PH. Piaget's Theory: Past, Present, and Future.