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Thoughts on Assimilation
As I have mentioned before (e.g., here and here), I am an immigrant and so is my wife. Actually, if you want to get real technical, I am a refugee, admitted to this country under a special 1970s policy that favored Soviet Jews. Unlike me, my wife is a real immigrant who actually benefited directly from the 1965 Immigration Act. So at least in that one respect I suppose I should be grateful to Ted Kennedy. My family came to the United States during the second half of the Carter presidency, at or near Peak Disco and deep into the post-Vietnam civilizational funk. But glimmers of the good old America were still plentiful back then.
After a very brief stay in Houston, we settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a tidy, deeply working class town of 110,000 populated predominantly by the descendants of German religious dissidents who arrived in the 18th century and used Eastern Pennsylvania as a staging area for the settlement of much of the Ohio Valley and the Great Plains beyond. The big industrial employer in town was the venerable Mack Truck, whose bulldog mascot was emblazoned ubiquitously on t-shirts and mesh-and-foam caps. Down the road in Bethlehem, the steel mills were slowly sputtering to a halt, but their death rattle was still a few years away. The Lehigh Valley Mall off US 22 was freshly built, but Hamilton Street downtown was still where you went for your haberdashery, five-and-dime, and personal grooming needs. Hess’ was the big department store there, still family owned. The only skyscraper in town was a 24-story Rockefeller Center-in-miniature owned by the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company. The stately but dubiously named Hotel Traylor down the street unselfconsciously imitated The Plaza in New York. Down on the other end of Hamilton Street stood the Zion’s Reformed Church, under whose floorboards the Liberty Bell was hidden from British troops during the Revolutionary War – a source of much civic pride. My parents could not have found a more paradigmatic specimen of post-WWII Middle America. Had we arrived in the late 40s or late 50s, I doubt the place would have looked or felt much different.
I showed up on the first day of fourth grade wearing sandals, dark striped socks and a cream-colored v-neck shirt with a picture of a sailboat and the words “Love on the Sea” embroidered underneath. The teacher – Mrs. Lewis – said, “Ooh, I like your sandals!” She explained, speaking through my dad, that she too was an immigrant, from Norway. She had come to Allentown as a little girl, she said, so she knew how I felt. Then she introduced me to the class, explaining that I was a very rare and special exotic bird from Soviet Russia with big, curly brown hair, who was to be treated with great care. It was an altogether horrible experience that I vowed would never be repeated.
There were no other immigrants in my school besides myself, and not many in town. The only other Russian Jewish family were sniffy, standoffish people who wanted little to do with us. We were so unusual, that one of the local papers profiled us for a series they were doing on local immigrants. It turned out to be a short series. Besides us, the ink-stained wretches at the Bethlehem Globe-Times were able to unearth only one other immigrant family to profile – boat people from Vietnam. I’m pretty sure the series ended with those two data points.
But we were not entirely on our own. The small Jewish community in town was close-knit, and they enthusiastically took us under their wing.
Looking back, I marvel at what an amazingly warm and welcoming place it was. I may have been called a “stupid commie” and told to go back to Russia once or twice, but that was about it. One time, walking home from school that first winter I was accosted by a much bigger boy. “Hey kid, who do you like in the Super Bowl, the Dallas Cowboys or the Pittsburgh Steelers?” I stared back blankly. My English was still shaky, and the only word I understood was the familiar and iconic “cowboy”. This, it turned out, was the wrong answer to give in Pennsylvania in January 1979. I got pushed around a bit, but I don’t blame it on anti-immigrant sentiment. The guy probably just thought I was a particularly clueless fourth grader. It was enough to sour me on football, though.
The following summer we moved to our own house in a nicer neighborhood across town and I started fifth grade in a different school. By that time I could “pass” well enough that nobody paid much attention to me. Plus, I was okay at sports, which helped in not getting beat up.
A big immigrant city like New York, Philly or Chicago would have been far less welcoming. Ethnicity matters much more in an urban setting than a rural or small town one. People who live in highly ethnically diverse urban environments are much more likely to self-identify by their ethnic descent than people who come from rural or otherwise homogeneous areas like Allentown. Historically, in the big northern cities you had to know what you were, so you would know which gang to join. In the South and in places like Allentown there weren’t many immigrants. Everybody was just black or white. If you had asked my fourth grade classmates what their ethnicity was, everybody, including the two black kids, would have answered “American” without thinking very hard about it. There wasn’t a hyphenated-American in sight. My wife, who came here from Korea when she was six-years-old, grew up in inner city Baltimore. She says she had a much harder time of it there with the local Polish and black kids.
Most Americans we met were touchingly naïve and easily flummoxed by ethnicity in the Old World blood-and-soil sense. A typical conversation would go like this:
Well-Meaning American: Oh, you’re from the Soviet Union. That’s interesting! I don’t think I know any Russians.
Dad: Actually we aren’t from Russia. We lived in the Ukraine.
WMA: Oh, I see. So you’re Ukrainian?
Dad: Actually we’re not Ukrainian. We’re Jews.
WMA: Okay… [Stares, grins, blinks.] What do you mean?
Dad: I mean, we’re Jewish.
WMA: You mean that’s your religion.
Dad: Well, yes, but we’re not religious.
WMA: [Blinks.]
Dad: You see, in the Soviet Union Jewish is a nationality, like Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, whatever.
WMA: Georgian? You mean like Macon?
Dad: No.
WMA: But isn’t nationality just what kind of passport you have?
Dad: Yes, but over there everybody has to carry around an internal passport that says what ethnicity they are. So everybody knows what everyone is. And there is a lot of anti-Semitism, so if you’re Jewish, they can keep you from attending university or getting promoted.
WMA: Oh, I see, because of their religion.
Mrs. WMA: I think my grandfather was from the Ukraine. Minsk, maybe. Or was it Pinsk?
What a beautiful thing it was, this naiveté. It didn’t matter who your ancestors were or what soil they tilled. You could just become American and leave the Old World behind.
I wanted desperately to be fully American for most of my childhood, going so far as to officially Anglicize my name when we were naturalized. Landing in a small, homogeneous place like Allentown was a big help, but still I’m only imperfectly assimilated. I have odd tastes. I enjoy being in the minority, on most issues. My close friends have always been foreigners of one kind or another. After Allentown, most of my formative years were spent in Chicago, yet I have never seen the Bears play at Soldier Field (probably a result of that brush with death in the winter of ’79), and my attendances at Wrigley Field can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I totally misunderstood what high school was all about and let that experience pass me by almost entirely. I skipped prom twice, even turning down a very pretty girl who asked me to go with her junior year. I’m not sure how much of this is poor assimilation and how much is my own personal lack of sociability.
The standard narrative about assimilation goes as follows. Every wave of immigrants that settles here works hard, plays by the rules, learns English and becomes American. That’s how it was with the Poles and Italians. Before them it was the Irish and Germans. Before them, the English and Scots. Now the immigrants are Mexicans, Hondurans, Pakistanis, and Haitians. They will do what all the other groups did before them. Assimilating immigrants is just what America does.
This is an appealing story. It’s true that in the past America has been good at assimilating immigrants. There is little question that the US does assimilation better than most countries, although it would be interesting to compare assimilation strategies and outcomes in other settler societies, such as Canada, Australia, Argentina, Israel, and others. I have never seen any rigorous analysis along these lines, although the literature must be out there. Most of the time we simply assert that we do it best and leave it at that. It’s American Exceptionalism or magical thinking – take your pick.
In any case, as they say on Wall Street, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. There are reasons to doubt the standard narrative. For one thing, we’re not as good at assimilation as we think we are. African Americans have lived in this country as long as anyone, but mass black migration – a kind of internal immigration – out of the Deep South and into the much more liberal North, Midwest and West, where the black population had hitherto been low, only happened during and after World War II. By many social measures, this immigrant population continues to live in a separate sub-culture. Yes, Jim Crow deliberately kept black Americans from fully participating in the national life, but the main goal of social policy for the past 50-plus years has been to assimilate this population into the American mainstream. As recent headlines show, these policies have failed. This is a nontrivial problem for the assimilation narrative.
The second, closely related, reason is that the most successful period of assimilation happened before we had the Great Society and its spawn. As I have argued elsewhere, welfare state politics make assimilation almost irrational, since welfare benefits are closely connected to racial and ethnic bean-counting and depend on the cultivation of grievances. Rather than assimilate, immigrants instead face strong incentives to lobby for their own separate census category. As a result, Americans are no longer as naïve about blood-and-soil ethnicity as our friends in Allentown were nearly 40 years ago. Because of the balkanization brought about by the welfare state, we are becoming more and more like… well, like the Balkans. Not a good development.
Third, even in the old days, assimilation was both a policy and a function of exogenous events – not just something that happened entirely naturally. At the turn of the last century, the United States was still in the process of nation-building. There were public schools that taught immigrant kids that to be American was a good and noble thing. There were the crucibles of the two world wars that took these children of immigrants and forged a nation through shared purpose and sacrifice. Later, there was the draft, which continued the process of homogenization by bringing together people from different parts of the country and walks of life. Analogous processes are not at work today.
Finally, it’s impossible to assimilate when there is not one dominant culture to assimilate into. When immigrants come to this country, they naturally look to the tastes, preferences and prejudices of the country’s elites for guidance. Our elites are cosmopolitan, anti-American, and thoroughly marinated in a globalist ideology that looks down on the nationalist values that in the past were the feedstock of assimilation.
It is unrealistic to expect that the United States can ever again be as homogeneous as it was during its post-WWII golden age. It may not even be desirable. But assimilation is hard work, both for the assimilator and the assimilee. The idea that assimilation is something that America is uniquely good at is long overdue for some serious rethinking.
Published in Immigration
Sadly, ugly resistance to new immigrant populations is part of the experience, too.
I am happy to have you here.
Fascinating story. I’ll have to take a while to assimilate the part quoted above, though. Traditionally, small towns are where everybody knows and judges you, and big cities are where you go for anonymity. I’ve seen (in small towns of the same era you speak of) that ethnic minorities are welcome when they remain very much a minority, and not so much otherwise. So reconciling that observation with your own observations is going to take a little work.
What a wonderful post and an important topic @oblomov. I think you’re on to something in regards to the ‘Big City’ small city dynamic. My Father emigrated from Poland to Chicago in the early 1950’s. Like many city dwellers moved to suburbs and was welcomed and truly assimilated into the local community and was well regarded till he passed away.
Odd how there was nothing ‘written down’ – he still liked his ethnic food and we still celebrate many of the Christmas traditions from ‘the Old Country’, but the expectation was assimilation.
My wife works at a university – I stopped by for some thing she worked on and was shocked at how they have ‘promoted’ diversity to a fault – its disgusting really. There is nothing unifying going on there. Everyone is ‘hyphenated’.
As a Jewish child of the ’70s and ’80s, I experienced this same dynamic from the other side. Our synagogue actively sought out volunteers to help the Soviet Jews navigate their new community. I distinctly recall stories of people who brought new immigrants to the supermarket for the first time. The immigrants, not used to such plenty, did what they had done in the Old Country: Pile up the shopping cart with what’s available (because next week, it might not be). They had to be coached to wait for sales, look for coupons, and expect the shelves to still be full next week.
There’s a paradox here, in that it was our particularist Jewish minority that helped immigrants assimilate into American schools, American jobs, and American society generally. The particularism gave us the motivating drive to help our brothers and sisters become American.
A very interesting and well-written post. There is a strong undercurrent of sadness here as I think you have put your finger on something that has largely been lost. There is an America that is vanishing. That naiveté that you describe has been steadily smirked out of existence by our Postmodern cultural trendsetters. You bring this to light in a disarmingly poignant way.
Thanks for posting this.
All of us who love this country are Americans.
Some of us just happened to be born elsewhere, but we got here as quickly as we could.
What’s curious about American history is that the immigrants tended to stay together when they first arrived … and yet, instead of bonding together permanently to establish the group’s power, those groups went out of their way to send their members out.
Pardon me for showing my pride, but a lot of that was a conscious decision and policy of the Catholic Church. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, the bishops took “mainstreaming” the immigrants as the mission for the American church. Parishes and schools would both welcome immigrants, and yet at the same time, give them the tools needed to assimilate – mostly through education. The basic rule was that those who arrived first helped the ones to arrive next, and that responsibility rolled through generation after generation.
In a way, the church sowed the seeds of its own weakness, since they succeeded in teaching the immigrants to become American … but it diluted into secular American.
In the old days, society as a whole handled immigration. The church/community/state all worked together. Now the federal government wants to be the sole agent of immigration, and you can see how well they do the job.
Great post, thanks!
Assimilation isn’t hard, jmho, it’s natural. But immigrants assimilate to what is, not what people like to believe there is. It’s an unsentimentally accurate mirror.
Yes, but what we are constantly forgetting is that it almost always took more than one generation. The turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant population on the Lower East Side spoke Yiddish; their kids integrated into American life. Ditto for Chinatown, Little Italy, etc.
In the 1980s I advocated in our church for getting involved with immigration resettlement, e.g. of refugees from southeast asia. Not everyone agreed, and we didn’t do anything. On the one hand I regret not having pushed harder and done more myself. But on the other hand, the national church groups that were organizing refugee resettlement became more and more the agencies of the federal government, so I no longer care to take part.
Large-scale immigration and the welfare state, in combination, aided by the multiculturalism worshiped by Democrat dominated urban centers is how we got where we are now. Even the formerly oppressed Southern blacks who migrated north and west to large urban centers got caught in the same tangle of influences that inhibit assimilation. Wide-spread and overly generous state welfare is an enabler for non-assimilation of immigrants.
I’m finishing up David T. Beito’s (2000) book, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967. I’m now at the part where the Great Society is putting the old fraternal societies out of business, such as in the Mississippi River Delta region. This is on page 198:
The federal money didn’t exactly go away, but the prediction was otherwise accurate. In the old system black people in this region were maintaining their ethnic identity (for better or worse, whether they wanted to or not) but integrating into the national economy and culture. In the new system it’s different.
(I’m a multi-cultural diversity kinda guy, more in favor of cultural integration than complete assimilation. Our centralized welfare system hinders both.)
An interesting post, thank you.
I am an historian of US Immigration (Central and East European in particular). Having studied the topic of assimilation quite a bit, I can affirmatively say that there are no hard and fast rules. You see all kinds of behaviors dependent on when people came, why they migrated, from what country, their social class, and so on… Speaking of, say the 19th c. immigrants (most of whom were Europeans): Some came to the US and affirmatively rejected assimilation. These usually did not stick around. They came here to make money and take it back home. Others came, decided to stay, and embraced American culture and values. In turn, these were often eager to spread American values back to their homelands if they could. While this group did embrace assimilation, they also fiercely held on to their native identity. A more complete assimilation usually occurred only by the third generation or later. Other Immigrants came to the US and wanted to bring Europe to America. Unfortunately, 19th c. immigrants played a predominant role establishing socialism in America.
You can look at American immigrants and find pretty much any paradigm you want, depending on how you look at it.
It’s an important factor in understanding the history of Minnesota and North Dakota politics, as you probably understand much better than I do.
More the latter than the former. Before the large welfare state, social welfare for immigrants was largely organized by…the immigrants themselves through ethnic fraternal organizations. If anything, the welfare state, by pushing these organizations out of the way, eliminated what was one of the primary sources of immigrant ethnic cohesion.
There are certainly ethical concerns related to immigration and the welfare state, but assimilation isn’t one of them.
Yep. Ditto for understanding urban politics in much of the Northeast and Midwest.
I seem to remember some issues related to internal migration within the US raised by California before the rise of the Great Federal Society. It seems California had more generous state services than most other states (at least many) so they drew much of the internal migration seeking to take advantage of state benefits. California pushed hard for federal involvement and greater equalization and standardization of welfare benefits. Maybe such an attraction works for immigration from other countries as well.
Can anyone here tell me if I’m imagining or misremembering these events?
A great disappointment to me this election cycle was that Bobby Jindal’s message didn’t get more traction. Jindal responded to anti-(legal)-immigration sentiment by saying forcefully that the problem is really one of assimilation. Whether he’s right or wrong (FWIW I found his case persuasive), it is an angle that deserves more attention. Also FWIW I think it can be an electoral winner, a way to be pro-immigration while simultaneously advancing pro-American policy and values.
As a culture watcher and sometimes warrior, I have used a similar line of thinking to explain our culture rifts. For a number of decades Americans could safely assume immigrants came in large part to become American because we projected an image of an American that was agreed to by a great majority.
As the country split along the lines of core values, the country projected different definitions of being American. Following the Me generations, is it surprising immigrants come for reasons that do not include assimilation? What messages have we been exporting in our massive media outpouring?
Perhaps it has been “Come and get what you want.” No strings like work hard and obey the rules are attached. A couple married just after WWII would barely recognize American values in 2016.
Oblo,
I think this is the culprit. America has been assimilating people from the beginning, not just after WWII. The “nothing exceptional going on here” attitude makes assimilation problematic. Of course, something exceptional is going on here in America and sooner or later that fact will return to our consciousness. Let’s hope we won’t need an event the size of WWII to make us fully appreciate the USA.
Regards,
Jim
Do you have any Polish cookie recipes?? My mother’s side was Polish – my dad and she were divorced when I was a baby and I was raised by Ukrainian aunt and my dad. I “found” cousins from my mother’s side and I don’t know much about my Polish heritage.
O – I loved (understatement) your story!!! So awesome! I grew up in a small suburb of Pittsburgh – we had the local Jewish deli, Italian bakery, Syrian classmates, Irish Pub. I came from Polish and Ukrainian heritage – Christian, but no shortage of wonderful food and traditions. Our community was a total mixed bag. I think you are so right – those same communities are hosting a new round of immigrants – I am not sure how they are assimilating, but the bottom line is the American Spirit! We have been taught to be ashamed of our American heritage. We have not been perfect, but it’s still the country that so many are trying, in the most dire of conditions, to get to. Our history, our culture, our blending of cultures from all over the world are what make us so wonderful. I am glad you landed in Allentown!!
On another note, I lived in various neighborhoods in Pgh, and I saw in grocery stores, the concentration camp numbers tattooed onto the wrists of fellow shoppers, I saw Menorahs side by side with Christmas trees in store windows, I saw the Sukkah hut built on the grounds of a Temple, near a Catholic Church that portrayed a Creche at Christmas. Neither were ever vandalized or disrespected. It was all beautiful and loved by the community as a whole. We should have progressed as a country by now….yet the antisemitism and African American conflicts have increased. It’s not the citizens…….
I posted this in the morning, then was out all day and came back to all these great, thoughtful comments. Thanks everyone! Lots to chew on here.
I just meant that in small cities and rural areas it’s easier to identify as “American” as an ethnicity. It seems to me that in big cities, there is much more of an us-versus-them dynamic between the different groups and it’s harder to cohere into a single national identity.
Yes, the Jewish community in Allentown was incredibly helpful and generous. In part we got all the attention because we were one of only two families, so we were minor celebrities. But there were genuine lifelong friendships there.
Try a subscription to the Polish-American Journal. You will end up with more recipes than you will be able to deal with or could ever imagine. Immigrant memoirs, language lessons, cultural events are all kept going – as well as a 4-page polka section in every issue. It’s almost enough to make me want to live in town.
Oblomov: Lots to chew on here.
Yes, thanks for the thought-provoking post. It’s completely American.
Oblomov – I am getting ready to read Poland by James Michener – have you read? The timing is right – my sister sent it to me – she picked it up at a book sale – it was voted #1 bestseller of 1983 – have you read it?
oops – I’m so sorry, wrong thread . Apologies