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Chapter Title: Theoretical Overview
Book Title: Immigrant America
Book Subtitle: A Portrait
Book Author(s): Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut
Published by: University of California Press
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48
There is no comprehensive theory of international migration. Those that
exist tend to focus on manual labor migrants and then extend, haphaz-
ardly, to the origins and patterns of settlement of professional migrants,
entrepreneurs, and refugees. Existing theories can be organized into four
categories: (1) determinants of the origins of migration; (2) determi-
nants of its continuation and directionality; (3) uses of migrant labor;
and (4) patterns of migrant settlement and adaptation. In this chapter
we review and evaluate these theories and note their applicability to the
different types of migrant described in the prior chapter.
The Origins of Migration
Push-Pull
The most widely held approach to the causes of migration is that of
push-pull theories. Generally, these consist of a compilation of eco-
nomic, social, and political factors deemed to force individuals to leave
their native region or country and of a similar list of factors impelling
them toward another. This approach is employed mutatis mutandis to
explain movements other than physical-labor migrations. Thus, refu-
gee flows are frequently contrasted with labor migrations by noting the
greater importance of “push” factors in the former.1 Students of profes-
sional emigration have compiled polar lists of incentives, often termed
differentials of advantage, to explain the causes of the brain drain from
certain countries.2
Chapter 2
Theoretical Overview
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Theoretical Overview | 49
These theories of migration also emphasize the gap in wage incen-
tives between sending and receiving regions. The notion of unlimited
supplies of labor, employed in analyses of both internal and interna-
tional migrations, is based on the existence of a permanent large differ-
ential in favor of receiving areas. A well-known study of international
migration notes, for example, that “unlimited supply,” demonstrated by
the ease with which new labor flows are initiated when older ones are
cut off, is attributed to vast income advantages of advanced countries
over peripheral ones.3 The existence of an unlimited labor supply sug-
gests that the initiation of migrant flows depends almost exclusively on
labor demand in receiving areas. When such demand exists, migration
takes place. Thus, these theories shift emphasis from “push” factors to
the “pull” exercised by receiving economies.
This position is a common one among analysts of immigration to
the United States. In a study published in 1926, H. Jerome declared that
“the ‘pull’ was stronger than the ‘push’ since the size of the flow was
almost always governed by labor conditions in the United States.”4 The
same position was taken by Brinley Thomas in his study of transatlan-
tic migration. For Thomas overseas migration from Europe in the nine-
teenth century was accompanied by substantial flows of capital in the
same direction. A positive lagged correlation existed between the two
movements: capital investments in North America gave rise to labor
demand, which in turn stimulated migration from the old countries.5
Several problems exist with these theories. Lists of push-and-pull fac-
tors are drawn almost invariably post-factum to explain existing flows.
Seldom are they used to predict the beginnings of such movements. The
limitations of these theories boil down, ultimately, to their inability to
explain why sizable migrations occur from certain countries and regions
whereas others in similar or even worse conditions fail to generate them.
Studies of undocumented labor migration from Mexico to the United
States indicate, for example, that the bulk of this flow originated, until
recently, in a few Mexican states that are neither the most impoverished
nor necessarily the closest to the U.S. border. Mexican immigrants also
come from the urban working class rather than from the most impov-
erished sectors of the peasantry, where the gap with U.S. wages is pre-
sumably largest.6
Similarly, analyses of professional emigration from Third World
countries reveal that differentials of advantage measured in either eco-
nomic or social terms are poor predictors of the origins of such flows.
Professional migration tends to originate in mid-income countries rather
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50 | Theoretical Overview
than the poorest ones, where wage differentials are greatest. In addi-
tion, only a minority of professionals actually emigrate from the send-
ing countries, a fact that the theory cannot successfully explain since all
such individuals are presumably subject to the same “push” pressures.7
Modern history is replete with instances in which the “pull” of higher
wages has failed to attract migration from less developed regions. When
labor has been needed, it has had to be coerced out of such places, as in
the forced employment of native peoples from Africa and the Americas
in mines and plantations. The failure of push-pull theories to explain
migration flows adequately has led some scholars to propose an alterna-
tive interpretation, based on deliberate labor recruitment, according to
which differentials of advantage between sending and receiving regions
determine only the potentiality for migration. Actual flows begin with
planned recruitment by the labor-scarce (and generally more advanced)
country. Recruiters inform prospective migrants of the opportunities
and advantages to be gained by the movement and facilitate it by pro-
viding free transportation and other inducements.
Thus, the vaunted “pull” of American wages had to be actualized
in the early years of European migration by organized recruitment. In
the 1820s and 1830s, American migration agents were sent to Ireland
and the Continent to apprise people of “the better meals and higher
wages” available for work in the Hudson and other canal companies.8
Similarly, labor migration from Mexico, later attributed to the vast
wage differences between that country and the United States, was ini-
tiated by recruiters sent by railroad companies into the interior of the
country. Studies of Puerto Rican migration to New England also indi-
cate that this apparently spontaneous flow started with the recruiting
activities of large manufacturing concerns among the rural population
of the islands.9
Macro- and Microeconomic Theories
Closely related to push-pull theories are those proposed by orthodox
economists who analyze migration as an equilibrium-restoring mecha-
nism between labor-abundant but capital-poor countries and regions
and those in the opposite situation. As famously proposed by Sir Arthur
Lewis, areas where the marginal productivity of workers is near zero
benefit from out-migration to areas where they can find gainful employ-
ment. The flow is expected to continue until wage rates in sending
regions rise to a level comparable to receiving ones, at which point it
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Theoretical Overview | 51
ceases.10 Flows of both unskilled labor and highly skilled professionals
follow the same equilibrium-restoring logic. The theory focuses exclu-
sively on labor-market imbalances and does not address politically
induced refugee flows.
Paralleling this macroeconomic approach, there is a microtheory of
individual decision making based on cost-benefit analysis. According to
it, individuals move to places where they can maximize returns on their
human capital, adjusted for the costs of the journey.11 Borjas elabo-
rated a detailed model of this kind where “expected earnings” at places
of destination, computed as those corresponding to the actor’s skills
multiplied by the probability of employment there, are subtracted from
expected earnings at home plus the costs of the journey. If the balance
is positive for some defined period, the rational actor migrates; if not,
he or she stays.12
Economic theories suffer from the same empirical shortcomings as
push-pull ones, namely, that countries and regions in the less developed
world featuring comparable levels of underemployment and poverty
produce very different migration streams. Some are sources of sizable
flows while, in others, the population stays put. Since all such areas are
subject to the same equilibrium-restoring pressures, the theory leaves
unexplained why these empirical differences exist. Similarly, at the indi-
vidual level it is unclear why rational actors subject to the same cost-
benefit calculations in a potential migrant population exhibit differ-
ent behavior. Some leave, but many others do not. Only a minority of
Global South professionals and highly skilled workers actually become
migrants, despite all being subjected to the same, presumably decisive,
migration pressures.13
World-System and Dependency Theories
At the opposite end of the ideological continuum are a set of struc-
tural theories that view migration flows as a reflection of the ever-grow-
ing articulation of the global capitalist economy and its changing labor
needs. From this perspective the central difficulty with push-pull, econ-
omistic, and labor-recruitment theories is not that they fail to identify
important forces but that they do not take into account the changing his-
torical context in which they operate. For each of these theories migra-
tion occurs between two distinct, autonomous social units: that which
expels labor and that which receives it. The possibility that such flows
may actually be internal to a broader system to which both units belong
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52 | Theoretical Overview
is not contemplated. An alternative conceptualization of the origins of
migration requires a grasp of the character of this changing global sys-
tem and of the mode of incorporation of different areas into it.
A point of departure for this alternative approach is the fairly obvi-
ous observation that the pull of high wages has meant nothing in areas
external to the international capitalist economy, since such areas have
possessed their own internal economic logic and integration. Hence,
when dominant countries wanted to put the population of these outly-
ing regions to work in mines or plantations, force, not economic incen-
tives, had to be used. Labor recruitment worked only when the tar-
get population was sufficiently integrated into the capitalist system to
apprehend the significance of the inducements offered in relation to
their economic conditions.
More recently, networks of trade and information across the world,
the homogenization of culture, and the extension of consumption expec-
tations even to remote areas have resulted in the “inexhaustible supplies
of labor” described in the economic literature. Countries at the center
of the system are today in the enviable position of requiring neither
force nor recruitment efforts to meet labor demands but simply regulat-
ing a permanently available supply at their doorstep. The gradual artic-
ulation of an international economic system has resulted in changing
forces underlying labor migrations. The effects of this articulation on
such flows have not been limited to the diffusion of new life standards
and expectations. More generally, the penetration of peripheral regions
by capitalist firms has produced imbalances in those regions’ internal
social and economic structures. Though first induced from the out-
side, such imbalances become internal to the incorporated societies and
lead in time to migratory pressures. As Massey et al. put it: “In essence,
world-systems theory argues that the penetration of capitalist economic
relations into non-capitalist and pre-capitalist societies creates a mobile
population that is prone to migrate. . . . International migration emerges
as a natural outgrowth of disruptions and dislocations that inevitably
occur in the process of capitalist development.”14
Hence the pull from advanced economies is based not primarily on
invidious comparisons of advantage with the outside world but on the
solution that migration represents to otherwise insoluble problems
internal to the sending countries. Studies of both manual laborer and
professional flows indicate that immigrants leave their countries not
merely to increase their earnings by a certain amount but to solve prob-
lems rooted in their own national situations. For immigrants these prob-
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Theoretical Overview | 53
lems appear as internal ones, but in reality they have been induced by
the expansion of a global capitalist system.15
The unbalancing of peripheral areas by this system ranges from the
outright imposition of hut taxes on the native African populations to
create a need for ready cash in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies to the maintenance of wage scales bearing little relation to costs
of modern-style consumption in contemporary less developed nations.
It includes, as well, the training of Third World professionals for career
expectations compatible with the advanced countries but divorced from
actual conditions in their own labor markets, a process we examined in
chapter 1.
Labor recruitment was a device used at certain periods in the expan-
sion of the capitalist world economy to make certain target populations
aware of the advantages of out-migration. The pull of the advanced
economies, insufficient to provoke migrant flows at that time, is today
more than enough to permit routine control of an “inexhaustible sup-
ply.” The changing character of “push and pull,” the obsolescence of
labor recruitment, and the “spontaneous” origins of recent migrant
flows are all consequences of the development over time of the interna-
tional capitalist economy and of the shifting modes of incorporation of
countries into it.16 These relational dynamics within a global order offer
the most adequate macrohistorical explanation for the origins of inter-
national migration.
The “New Economics” of Migration
Structural-historical and world-systems theories are able to account for
why migration flows originate in certain areas of the planet, depending
on the level of colonial and semicolonial penetration to which they have
been subjected. These theories are less successful in accounting for why
some communities and individuals in specific labor-exporting coun-
tries are more susceptible to these pressures than others. For this task a
more empirically grounded theory is necessary. The “new economics of
migration” was formulated to fill this gap. According to it, labor migra-
tion is not an individual, but a family, strategy to address the economic
uncertainties created by imperfectly developed markets in areas affected
by the penetration of capitalist corporations and other institutions.17
In rural communities of the less developed world, families have none
or extremely limited access to credit markets to finance investments,
future markets to ensure crops, or state programs to alleviate spells of
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54 | Theoretical Overview
unemployment. Their solution is to send some family members, com-
monly young sons and daughters, to urban areas in the same country
or abroad. Families plan diverse migration strategies to address vari-
ous uncertainties. The remittances that their young abroad generate can
provide the necessary capital for needed investments and a reserve for
economic contingences, such as crop failures or loss of wage employ-
ment at home: “In most developed countries, consumers have instanta-
neous access to credit through universal bank cards such as MasterCard
and Visa. As markets expand into domains formerly governed by non-
market mechanisms, consumers in developing countries often find them-
selves filled with a range of material aspirations acquired from the mass
media, but without access to the credit mechanisms that make mass
consumption possible. . . . Nascent demand for consumer goods creates
another motivation for migration abroad.”18
A related mechanism highlighted by the “new economics” is rela-
tive deprivation among nonmigrant families when witnessing the sig-
nificant improvements in the material situation of families with mem-
bers abroad. Thus, even when no migration pressures existed before, the
need to “keep up” with the rising migrant-fueled standards of consump-
tion among members of the community spurs other families to adopt
the same strategy. As we saw in the first chapter, relative deprivation is
also a powerful mechanism underlying professional out-migration as
underemployed but highly skilled workers compare their own economic
and work lot with more fortunate peers at home and abroad.19
World-systems and the “new economics” approaches complement
each other nicely, the first accounting for the broad macrohistorical
context producing major labor and professional flows and, the second,
identifying the microdynamics that propel specific families in migrant-
sending nations to adopt this strategy as a solution to the disruptions of
imperfect capitalist development.
Stability of Migration
A second aspect discussed by current theories of migration concerns
the directionality of these flows and their stability over time. Orthodox
economic analyses tend to view migration in fairly simple terms: peo-
ple leave their home country in response to economic or political con-
ditions, move to another with the hope of a better life, and struggle for
years or generations to attain equality within the new society. Once
initiated, the movement can be expected to continue as long as push-
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Theoretical Overview | 55
and-pull factors remain and as long as the receiving nation permits it.
Massive returns of immigrants to their home country only occur under
conditions of deliberate repatriation or severe economic recession.
Classic studies of immigration to the United States such as those by
Handlin, Thomas and Znaniecki, Child, Wittke, and others generally
assumed this basic process and proceeded to analyze the mechanisms
for survival among different groups.20 Such studies were concerned with
European immigrants— the successive flows of Germans, Irish, Italians,
Poles, Jews, and Scandinavians—coming to meet labor demand in an
expanding economy. While some references were made to returns to the
home country, these reverse flows were generally attributed to individ-
ual circumstances or to periodic recessions in the United States.
The experience of massive immigration from peripheral to advanced
countries in the post– World War II period has given rise to a differ-
ent theoretical emphasis. A large proportion of labor migrations in this
period has taken place under “guest worker” arrangements or as a sur-
reptitious movement. These immigrants have been labeled target earn-
ers, since they are assumed to be motivated by the accumulation of
money with which to fulfill goals in the home country. It has been noted
that a very high proportion of their earnings are sent home as remit-
tances, either to subsidize consumption needs or for investment.21
This “economic man” characterization was accompanied by an
emphasis on these immigrants’ lack of integration and their general
indifference to the institutions of the host society: immigrants seldom
speak the language of the receiving country and seldom take part in its
associations or in intimate relationships with members of the majority.
This divorce from the surrounding society enables them to concentrate
exclusively on monetary rewards and to perform jobs that they would
reject in their own country.
This theory has accorded central importance to the phenomenon
of return migration. Unlike earlier analyses, it views return to the
home country as part of the normal, patterned sequence of labor dis-
placements. While it acknowledges the settlement of vast numbers of
European immigrants in the United States at an earlier period, it con-
tends that permanence in the receiving country is not at present a sign
of immigrant success: “It is absolutely essential to dispel the notion that
seems to emerge in naive versions of this idea of settlement as success
that the essential aspect of success is income. Migrants tend to be target
earners, and the effect of rising incomes, all other things being equal, is
to increase the rate at which they return home. This late effect occurs
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56 | Theoretical Overview
because, in terms of the original motivations of migrants, settlement is
the product of failure.”22
This ebb-and-flow characterization of immigration advances our
understanding in comparison with earlier descriptions of a simple uni-
directional movement. The emphasis on return migration also agrees
with some aspects of contemporary labor flows to the United States, as
described by recent studies. Still, this alternative theory also runs into
difficulties. First, there is evidence that many immigrants do stay in the
host country precisely because they have been economically successful.
Second, the movement in many cases does not involve a single coming
and going but a series of displacements, frequently involving a seasonal
pattern.23
More generally, this new theory, like earlier ones, is based on the per-
spective of the receiving country and, hence, fails to capture the pro-
cess in its totality. It does not take into account, for instance, the actual
nature of “return” migration, which may be either to the places of origin
or to others. Similarly, it does not consider common patterns in which
individuals alternate between internal and international migration or in
which households “assign” some members to travel abroad and some
to journey to cities within the country. These omissions stem from the
fact that this theory conceives of international migration as a process
occurring between two separate national units. An alternative concep-
tualization would again be based on a definition of the flow as internal
to the same global economic system. Migration has a dual economic
function: from the standpoint of capital it is the means to fulfill labor
demand at different points of the system; from the standpoint of labor
it is the means to take advantage of opportunities distributed unequally
in space.24
The complexity of international labor flows is a function not only of
the shifting locations of opportunities but of the fact that those locations
sought by individuals and families change over time. Opportunities for
wage earnings are often better in national and international capital-
ist centers, while those for investment in land or small enterprises are
often better in the places of origin. The progressive articulation of a
global economic order allows individuals and families in remote areas
to gain access to a much broader range of economic opportunities and
to “map” their use. Villages in the interior of Mexico today maintain
regular contact with ethnic communities in Chicago. Remote towns
in the mountains of the Dominican Republic are accurately informed
about labor market conditions in Queens and Manhattan.25
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Theoretical Overview | 57
The more recent theory of migrant transnationalism has been devel-
oped precisely to emphasize the resilient relations of migrants with their
places of origin and the complexity that these relations acquire over
time. These “multistranded” relationships lead a number of immigrants
into dual lives— traveling back home, sending remittances and making
investments there, and maintaining dual residences.26 Immigrants fre-
quently create organizations to formalize and stabilize such contacts.
These range from “hometown committees” formed by humble migrants
from rural areas to formal professional and alumni associations cre-
ated by the highly skilled. Recent research on transnational organiza-
tions has unveiled the important findings that migrant involvement in
them does not decline over time and actually increases with education,
income, length of residence, and security of legal status.27 We will have
more to say on the subject later on, but for the moment the crucial idea
is that immigration theory has left behind the image of these flows as
unidirectional escapes from misery and want and the parallel idea of
their occurrence among self-contained nation-states. The progressive
articulation of a global capitalist economy and the complexity of com-
mon people’s adaptations to it is more properly captured by the trans-
national perspective.
A related question is the perpetuation of migrant flows over time.
Regardless of the impulses and motivations that give rise to migration in
the first place, they commonly do not suffice to account for the sustain-
ability of such movements. To accomplish this, one must introduce the
concept of social networks. As Massey et al. put it: “Migrant networks
are sets of interpersonal ties that connect migrants, former migrants,
and non-migrants in origins and destination areas through ties of kin-
ship, friendship, and shared community origins. They increase the like-
lihood of international movements because they lower the cost and risk
of such movements.”28
Social scientists have long recognized the importance of networks in
the buildup of migration systems. This recognition goes as far back as
such classics as Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe
and America. Tilly conceptualizes migration as a process of network-
building that depends on and, in turn, reinforces social relationships
across space.29 The microstructures thus created not only permit the sur-
vival of immigrants but also constitute a significant undercurrent run-
ning counter to dominant economic trends.
This alternative perspective helps explain a phenomenon that escapes
earlier theories, namely, the resilience of migrant flows even after origi-
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58 | Theoretical Overview
nal push-and-pull forces have disappeared or after original opportuni-
ties for target earning have been removed. The fact that migrant flows
do not respond automatically to such changes is related to their organi-
zation through social networks. Once in place, these structures stabilize
such movements by adapting to shifting economic conditions and by
generating new opportunities apart from the original incentives. While
not indifferent to the broader context, the network structures of migra-
tion have frequently led to outcomes quite different from those antici-
pated by conventional economic hypotheses.
It is commonly recognized that pioneer migrants face the highest
costs because they confront the risks of the journey unaided. Once sev-
eral such trips have been successfully completed, however, the costs of
migration are significantly lowered for future migrants, who can draw
on the pioneers’ knowledge and experience. The ability to obtain such
information and assistance constitutes the would-be migrants’ “social
capital.”30 The pool of such capital increases with each additional jour-
ney, leading to the emergence of veritable migration systems. These sys-
tems can become self-perpetuating even after the disappearance of the
original incentives for migration because of the emergence of secondary
considerations, such as family events and obligations.
The durability of migration systems is not open-ended, however,
since they can be terminated by external circumstances. One such cir-
cumstance is the literal emptying of places of origin, aside from the
old and the infirm; another is a glut of migrants in places of destina-
tion, reducing chances for employment and taxing the ability of settled
migrants to assist newcomers. As de Haas has emphasized, the opera-
tion of such forces leads to the slowing down of migration systems in
such a way that the effect of social networks over time can be charted
as an S-asymptote— increasing sharply in the early years before reaching
a plateau and then declining rapidly.31
Other forces may also bring migration systems to an end. They
include fertility decline and sustained economic development in areas of
out-migration, as well as the investments and philanthropic initiatives
of transnational migrant organizations that may significantly improve
living conditions there. Paradoxically, social networks that, at an earlier
stage, underlie the emergence of migration systems may, at a later time,
undermine them through the developmental activities of expatriates.
Severe economic recessions in places of destination and the informa-
tion about them conveyed through social networks can also bring to a
halt ongoing migrant flows. Something to that effect happened to U.S.-
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Theoretical Overview | 59
bound migration from Mexico and Latin American migration to Spain
in the wake of the economic downturn beginning in 2008.32
The Uses of Labor Migration
Most contemporary theorizing on international migration has focused
neither on its origins nor on its directionality and stability over time.
Instead, these theories have dealt with the two remaining aspects: uses
of migration for the receiving economy and the adaptation of immi-
grants. The different theoretical positions on these issues are both more
complex and more controversial than those reviewed above, since each
lays claim to a supporting empirical literature.
The orthodox neoclassical economic perspective views immigrant
labor as a supplement to a scarce domestic labor force. Immigrants
are recruited to fill jobs in an expanding economy that has run out of
hands in its own population. This is the type of situation assumed since
the time of classical political economy. John Stuart Mill, for example,
defended labor emigration in those terms. He noted, however, that such
labor could be profitably utilized by capital in the new countries only
if immigrants were prevented from gaining access to land. In the latter
case immigrants would work only for themselves, denying their labor
to employers. In the last chapter of Principles of Political Economy Mill
had no qualms about abandoning laissez faire doctrines to advocate
government sponsorship of emigration. Only state power could prevent
migrants from turning into self-employed colonists of little or no use to
capital.33
The situation Mill studied was obviously one in which land was plen-
tiful. The actual mechanism by which labor scarcity and demand for new
labor were created in nineteenth-century America has been described at
length by Lebergott. The supply of cheap land then appeared inexhaust-
ible. The availability of the western frontier enabled domestic workers
to invest directly in land, abandoning wage labor for agricultural self-
employment. The same could be done by immigrants after a few years:
“In 1820, when lands were worth $50 per acre in Massachusetts and
one dollar in Ohio, the New England farmer improved his condition
by emigrating to Ohio, and when in 1840 the best lands of Ohio were
worth $50 per acre and those of Illinois one dollar and a quarter he
could again move with profit to Illinois; and again, in 1850 from lands
worth $50 in Illinois to the cheap lands of Minnesota and Kansas.”34
Westward emigration by natives and older immigrants maintained
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60 | Theoretical Overview
a downward pressure on the labor supply, helping to keep wages high
and attracting new immigrant flows. But why didn’t new immigrants
take immediate advantage of frontier lands? The answer was the com-
bined lack of capital and lack of experience in the new country. They
concentrated in eastern cities, and only after accumulating sufficient
savings and experience did some trek westward. This pattern explains
both the attractiveness of immigrant labor to eastern employers and the
rapid fluctuations of the flow corresponding to the ups and downs of
American labor demand.35
Orthodox economic theory explains the gravitation of immigrants
toward the worst jobs as a natural consequence of an expanding econ-
omy. In this view native workers move upward toward better paid,
more prestigious, or more autonomous positions. In the United States
the existence of a frontier played a central role in maintaining an “open”
economic structure and abundant opportunities for advancement. This
situation can occur, at least in theory, even in the absence of cheap land
through the expansion of an industrial economy. Because labor scarcity
occurs at the bottom, wages for unskilled and semiskilled workers tend
to rise as a result of employer competition. The dual consequences are
the attraction of prospective immigrants and the need for employers to
seek new sources of labor as means of controlling or reducing wages.
Both trends encourage further immigration.
As target earners, immigrant workers possess an additional desirable
characteristic, namely, their disregard, at least initially, of status consid-
erations. For native workers wages signal a position in the occupational
status system so that they shy away from the lowest-paid menial jobs.
Raising wage levels at the bottom to attract native workers triggers
structural inflation, as higher-status workers then demand higher pay
in order to preserve their relative standing. An abundance of unskilled,
cheaply paid foreign labor helps neutralize this danger.36
For orthodox economic theory, immigrant workers are not qualita-
tively different from native ones except that they are new entrants in the
labor force and have less experience and perhaps less education. With
time, immigrants acquire the experience and qualifications to move
upward as well, leaving the bottom of the occupational structure to new
labor flows. The process helps maintain three moving equilibria over
time: (1) between labor scarcity in some countries and labor abundance
in others; (2) between the needs of employers and the needs and skills
of workers; and (3) between workers’ aspirations and mobility oppor-
tunities in the economic structure.
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Theoretical Overview | 61
A second, and very different, theoretical perspective has focused on
the experience of those immigrant groups who have not come of their
own free will but who have been made to work under conditions of slav-
ery, servitude, or peonage. These colonized minorities also meet a labor
demand but one qualitatively distinct from that described by orthodox
theory. They occupy positions at the bottom of the occupational struc-
ture— not, however, positions vacated by domestic workers but rather
ones requiring a particular class of worker since no free domestic labor
can be found to perform them.
In his classic analysis of plantation economies, Edgar Thompson
noted the gradual development of this institution and its shift from white
indentured servants to black slave workers. In areas of open resources,
where land was far more abundant than labor, it was easier to recruit
a workforce than to keep it. Indentured servants were not motivated to
work for planters, since they were paid in advance, but they were highly
motivated to escape and work for themselves. Natives were also diffi-
cult to control. In the land of their birth, they would rebel or escape to
remote places rather than submit to the planter’s yoke.
It thus became necessary to locate a labor force fit for the hard labor
but so alien that it would become entirely dependent on the planter’s
providence. For such workers the plantation would not be a workplace
but a “total institution,” where laborers spent their entire lives and with-
out which they would lack the means of survival. Thus, the choice of
African slaves and the transformation of plantations into social and
political, as well as economic, organizations evolved together. Not until
these developments had taken place did a racial ideology emerge as a
means of legitimizing them.37
The incorporation of a colonized minority to a host economy has
been marked in general by two central features. First, the group is
employed in nonurban extractive tasks, primarily mining and agricul-
ture. Second, production is organized along precapitalist lines, where
labor is subject, under various legal arrangements, to the will of employ-
ers. The existence of labor under these circumstances gives rise, in turn,
to ideologies that justify the situation in terms of racial or cultural dif-
ferences and the need to educate and control the subordinate group.
For Blauner the colonization process is marked by five major events:
“First, colonization begins with a forced, involuntary entrance into the
dominant society. Second, the colonizing power acts on a policy to con-
strain, transform, or destroy the indigenous culture. Third, representa-
tives of the dominant power administer the law and control the govern-
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62 | Theoretical Overview
ment bureaucracy. Fourth, there is a separation of labor status between
the colonizers and the colonized. Fifth, racism develops as a principle
through which people are seen as biologically inferior in order to justify
their exploitation.”38
The shift from precapitalist unfree arrangements to fully capitalist
relations of production is experienced only in partial form by colonized
minorities. Though, in theory, these minorities come eventually to join
the “free” labor force, they are still relegated to the worst menial jobs.
This situation is strikingly different from that portrayed by orthodox
theory: when employed as wage labor, colonized minorities are not sim-
ply “new” entrants in the workforce capable of moving upward after a
period of time. For colonized minorities that mobility is blocked by a
variety of legal and informal mechanisms. Racial and cultural ideolo-
gies legitimize both their condition and the deliberate closure of oppor-
tunities to move out of it. No colonized minorities exist at present in
the United States, but the legacy of slavery and, to a lesser extent, the
colonization of the Mexican population of the Southwest left major his-
torical traces that last to our day. As we saw in chapter 1, the condition
of these groups— generations after their formal release from colonial
bonds and the end of legal discrimination— remains quite problematic
and challenging. This is what these theories attempt to capture.
The central feature of the colonial perspective on immigration is that
it regards the use of this labor force as useful for the dominant racial
group as a whole. The different classes of the dominant group benefit
from the colonial situation in different ways. Employers gain because
they have at their disposal a cheap and exploitable labor source to which
they can dictate their own terms. Dominant-group workers also benefit
in various ways. First, they gain symbolically from the existence of an
inferior group with which they can compare their own lot. This allows
them to entertain feelings of superiority and to identify vicariously with
the dominant classes. Second, they stand to gain materially through
three mechanisms: (1) the exclusion of the colonized from competition
for the better-paid physical and supervisory jobs; (2) the lowering of the
cost of goods and services produced with colonized labor that cheapens
their own consumption; and (3) the redistribution of part of the surplus
extracted from that labor by the employer class in the form of higher
wages and other benefits for workers of the racially dominant group.
This group thus endeavors to stabilize its monopoly of economic and
social advantages through mechanisms that reserve the best positions
for its members. In the United States, the formal end of slavery was
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Theoretical Overview | 63
accompanied by the creation of the Jim Crow legal system to perpetu-
ate the condition of the colonized; a set of similar practices emerged
in the Southwest to preserve the subordinate status of immigrants and
their descendants.39
A third perspective on the uses of migrant labor also stresses the sig-
nificance of racial and cultural differences and a racist ideology but
interprets the effects differently. Employing migrants from culturally
and racially distinct origins is identified here as a common strategy used
by the employer class against organizations of domestic workers. Hence,
the benefits brought about by a subordinate minority in the labor mar-
ket accrue not to all members of the dominant racial or ethnic group
but only to members of the employer class. Such benefits are extracted
precisely against the interests of the domestic proletariat, which is pitted
against the new source of labor.
Immigrant workers, whether free or coerced, are generally in a
weaker position to resist employer dictates than domestic ones. First,
immigrants lack familiarity with economic and social conditions in
places of destination, and they do not have the means to resist exploi-
tation. Second, they are separated from the domestic working class by
linguistic and cultural barriers and by the all-too-common prejudices
among that class. Third, conditions in places of origin are frequently
so desperate that immigrants willingly accept whatever kind of com-
pensation is given them. Fourth, an immigrant labor force is usually
brought under legal constraints that place it from the start in a vulner-
able position. While the character of these arrangements varies with the
country or period, their common effect is to render immigrants subject
to ready exclusion or deportation. Organizational efforts or protests
among immigrants can thus be defined as a police matter rather than
one involving legitimate class revindications.40
This theory of labor immigration does not necessarily contradict
the colonialist one since each applies to different historical periods.
However, this last perspective calls attention to an important outcome
neglected by most analysts of colonialism: a division of labor that works
to the direct advantage of certain classes within the racially dominant
group and to the direct disadvantage of others. In this model ideology
is employed less to legitimize the privileges of a race or cultural group
over another than to sustain the separation between two segments of
the working class and to fragment organizations based on class solidar-
ity. The widespread racism among native workers is thus, ultimately, an
ideology directed against themselves.
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64 | Theoretical Overview
This analysis directly contradicts predictions stemming from the
orthodox economic perspective on labor immigration. If foreign labor
is imported to serve exclusively as a supplement to the domestic labor
force, a strong inverse correlation should obtain between domestic lev-
els of unemployment and size of the immigrant flow: periods of eco-
nomic recession that bring about higher unemployment should produce,
within a relatively short time, a decrease in immigration. In contrast, if
the function of immigration is not solely to supplement the domestic
labor force but to discipline it, the result would be quite different. In
this case there should be a positive correlation over time between lev-
els of unemployment and immigration. An organized and militant labor
force becomes “useless” to capitalist firms, which then opt in favor of
hiring immigrant workers over domestic ones. The presence of this new
preferred source of labor has the effect of accelerating the displacement
of domestic workers, thus leading to higher levels of unemployment.
As we saw in chapter 1, this was the motivation that undergirded the
shift by industrial employers in the Northeast and Midwest from white
European to southern black labor starting in the mid-1910s.
This historical experience was given theoretical form by Edna
Bonacich. She labels her thesis “a split labor market interpretation.”
During the decades following World War I, southern black migrants
constituted a “preferred” labor force because of their willingness to
work at menial jobs for low wages, their lack of organizational experi-
ence, and their deferential attitude toward bosses. The strategy through
which capitalists targeted this migrant labor force against the organi-
zational efforts of white workers took three forms: (1) strikebreaking,
(2) replacement of white workers with lower-paid black labor, and (3)
a policy of paternalism toward black workers and organizations that
cemented their alliance with employers against all-white unions.41
As we also saw in chapter 1, European workers had been used before
blacks to fill a similar role. In 1832 the directors of the Delaware and
Hudson Canal, confronted with demands for higher wages, found that
“against this evil the only effective remedy was the introduction of addi-
tional miners from abroad.” Immigrant labor was imported as promptly
as possible and to such an extent that a recurrence of the “evil” was not
experienced for some time. More recently, Galarza described a similar
process involving the use of Mexican immigrant labor against orga-
nizational efforts of domestic farmworkers, most of them Mexican
Americans in California and throughout the Southwest.42 In this man-
ner the role of southern black and Mexican workers shifted from that
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Theoretical Overview | 65
of colonized minorities to that of being the core of a split labor market
developed against the organizational efforts of the native working class
in the first half of the twentieth century.
The fourth perspective on immigrant labor combines elements of the
preceding two, though it focuses primarily on the post– World War II sit-
uation. Different versions of this perspective exist, but the most coher-
ent one is that based on an analysis of the increasing segmentation of
social relationships of production under advanced capitalism. The core
of this “dual economy” thesis is the observation that advanced econo-
mies generate an oligopolistic segment in which control of the different
facets of production and commercialization is far more extensive than
among earlier capitalist firms.
The emergence of oligopolies in different segments of the economy is
a process common to all industrialized capitalist countries. These firms
are said to control a significant portion of their respective markets, rely
on capital-intensive technology to enhance productivity, and are able to
pass on part or all of the increases in the wage bill to consumers through
their control of markets. Their social relationships of production have
several distinct characteristics determined both by requirements of firms
and by past struggles between management and labor for control of the
production process.43
A prime goal of corporations in this oligopolistic sector is stability
in labor relations, and the main strategy to accomplish it is bureaucra-
tization of the production process and the creation of so-called inter-
nal markets. Bureaucratization means the substitution of a system of
control based on direct personal command by one based on adherence
to impersonal rules. Internal markets means the division of work into
finely graded job ladders. Hiring is generally at the bottom, and access
to higher positions is usually through internal promotion rather than
external recruitment. Stability is promoted by the fact that workers do
not confront the arbitrary orders of a boss or managerial superior but
rather a set of explicitly laid-out rules. More important, job ladders
offer incentives to remain with a particular firm, since seniority and
training are rewarded with increases in pay and status. Oligopolistic
corporations are able to create internal markets because of their size and
because they can compensate for increases in labor costs with increases
in productivity, higher prices for the final product, or both. Wages in this
sector of the economy are thus higher and fringe benefits and work con-
ditions more desirable.44
A second segment of the economy is formed by those smaller com-
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66 | Theoretical Overview
petitive enterprises that more faithfully reflect the structural conditions
under early industrial capitalism. Such firms operate in an environment
of considerable economic uncertainty. Their markets are usually local
and regional, they do not generate their own technology, and they often
depend on labor-intensive processes of production. Firms in this sector
do not have internal markets. Because they also lack a monopoly posi-
tion, they face greater difficulties in passing on increases in their wage
bill. The conditions of production in this sector thus lead to a strong
downward pressure on wages. Control over workers cannot depend on
the incentives attached to job ladders or be based on impersonal rules.
Instead, discipline is imposed directly, and it is often harsh. Firing is a
permanent threat and a common practice, since most labor employed
by these firms can be replaced. Wages are not only lower than in the oli-
gopolistic sector, but their distribution is flat over time.
For workers in the secondary sector, seniority is not a guarantee of
higher-income or job security. High labor turnover in these firms is a
joint consequence of employer dismissals and of worker dissatisfaction.
The viability of these relationships of production depends on the pres-
ence of a labor force that is both abundant and powerless. Otherwise,
labor costs would go up, and the existence of firms, as presently struc-
tured, would be threatened.45 Differences in conditions of employment
in a dual economy do not depend primarily on the requirements of the
job or on the qualifications of the worker. Advantages in income and
security enjoyed by those in the oligopolistic sector are the direct out-
come of earlier class struggles that resulted in an eventual accommoda-
tion: organized labor gained advantages and security, while firms gained
control over the work process in a manner that promoted stability and
minimized disturbances in production. Hence, it is perfectly possible
that jobs with equal requirements are unequally rewarded depending on
the segment of the economy in which they are situated.
Entrance into the oligopolistic labor market is primarily a function
of the requirements of firms and not the qualifications of workers. As
part of its control over the work process, management has systemati-
cally opted for capital-intensive technology that reduces expensive labor
costs. The supply of qualified workers for available positions in the oli-
gopolistic sector thus consistently exceeds demand. Hence, it is per-
fectly possible that individuals with equal qualification are rewarded
unequally depending on the segment of the economy in which they
are employed.
The class struggles that led to the bifurcation of relationships of pro-
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Theoretical Overview | 67
duction into a dual labor market in the United States were conducted
when most workers were white. They involved both white Americans
and older European immigrants. The final consolidation of a protected,
unionized labor force in this segment of the economy took place only
after the New Deal and World War II. Subsequent entrants into the
labor market confronted a situation of progressive closure of oligopo-
listic corporations and employment restricted to the competitive sector.
These new entrants were, for the most part, unorganized and therefore
vulnerable. They included white women, white teenagers, and white
rural migrants, as well as black and Puerto Rican migrants and immi-
grants.46 Hence, the same minorities that had previously served as the
mainstay of colonial and split-labor regimes now found themselves con-
fined to the secondary sector of the dual labor market.
Students of immigration in the United States noted the increasing
reliance of competitive firms on immigrants, primarily unauthorized
ones, as a source of labor. This process accelerated in the mid-1960s
(coinciding with the end of the Bracero Program) and reached both
numerical importance and notoriety during the 1970s. It coincided
with the exhaustion of certain other labor sources— teenagers and rural
migrants— and the increasing resistance of women to accept condi-
tions of employment in these firms. The analysis offered by dual-econ-
omy theory and its predictions concerning labor immigration are more
complex than both the colonialist and split-labor-market theories. This
complexity is not necessarily a function of shortcomings in the other
perspectives but derives from an emphasis on the more recent transfor-
mation of advanced economies.
The dual-economy thesis agrees with notions advanced by the two
preceding perspectives but in a modified form. It agrees with colonial-
ist theory in that the incorporation of a subordinate racial or cultural
minority into the labor market can benefit both employers and work-
ers among the dominant group. This prediction is valid if we limit the
definition of domestic labor to those in the primary market. Workers in
this sector benefit from the labor of subordinate immigrant groups for
all the reasons advanced by colonialist theory: lower costs of goods and
services, the possibility of sharing in the surplus extracted from immi-
grants, and the symbolic rewards of a superior status.
The dual-economy analysis also agrees with split-labor-market the-
ory in its characterization of immigrants as a “preferred” labor force
used against the organizational efforts of domestic workers. This pre-
diction is valid if we limit the definition of domestic labor to those in
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68 | Theoretical Overview
the competitive sector. The increase in illegal immigration during the
last decades of the twentieth century and its employment by competi-
tive firms were strategies intended to discourage the resistance of the
domestic-minority workforce to accept low wages and harsh treatment
and its effort to improve its lot. The situation in this case is somewhat
different from that described by Bonacich because it does not pit vul-
nerable immigrant labor against a unionized working class in the for-
ward sectors of the economy. Instead, immigrants were used to undercut
domestic workers who were themselves weak and frequently unorga-
nized and who were employed by the most technologically backward
firms. Oligopolistic labor, most of it white, was largely insulated from
the competition of unauthorized foreign workers and could actually
profit from their presence.
The rapid deindustrialization of the American economy, described in
the first chapter, has significantly altered the portrait of the labor mar-
ket and the uses of migrant labor outlined by dual-economy theory.
Large swathes of what had been previously portrayed as the primary
labor market disappeared, as formerly oligopolistic firms were forced
to cope with increasing foreign competition. They did so by ditching
the “historic pact” with organized labor in the post– World War II era.
The process of industrial restructuring in effect did away with much
of American industry through massive plant closures and relocation of
production facilities abroad. Predictably, vast segments of the formerly
protected primary workforce just melted away.
The new service economy that replaced the old industrial system and
the accompanying “hourglass” labor market depicted in figure 2 have
had predictable effects in the uses of migrant labor. Industrial restruc-
turing and labor flexibility opened the top of the hourglass market to
highly qualified foreign workers. As we saw in chapter 1, the H-1B
program was explicitly designed to facilitate their arrival. Menial jobs
in services and agriculture at the bottom of the hourglass continued
to attract unskilled workers from Mexico, Central America, and the
Caribbean. They actually became the preferred labor source for this sec-
tor because of their vulnerability and willingness to perform harsh jobs
for low pay.47
In the absence of legal channels for entry, the bulk of this immi-
gration arrived clandestinely. More recently, as we saw in chapter 1,
the H-2A program has been significantly expanded to attract migrant
workers needed in U.S. agriculture and services but who are increas-
ingly unwilling to brave the risks and the costs of a clandestine journey.
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Theoretical Overview | 69
The expansion of this program contains the seeds of a temporary labor
system to address the needs of labor-intensive firms on a regular basis.
The Entrepreneurial Path
Theories of the uses of migrant labor have covered in detail different
aspects of the historical experience of migrant workers. These theo-
ries have neglected, however, an important alternative to wage work,
namely, self-employment. Since the late nineteenth century, students of
immigration have noted the high propensity of migrants to go into small
business. In chapter 1 we saw that entrepreneurs represent one of the
main types of contemporary immigrants to the United States, and we
explored some of the consequences of this alternative path.
Several theories have been advanced to explain the phenomenon of
immigrant entrepreneurship. The best known is probably Ivan Light
and Edna Bonacich’s theory of minority disadvantage. As immigrants
find themselves handicapped by generalized discrimination and lack of
knowledge of the host language and culture, they turn to small busi-
ness as an alternative means of economic survival. The early experience
of Chinatowns in California and Japanese small businesses throughout
the West Coast, related in chapter 1, provide evidence in support of this
theory.48 But important anomalies do exist. Other equally discriminated
foreign groups have been unable to reproduce the dense entrepreneur-
ial networks created by Jewish and Japanese immigrants at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century or by Koreans, Cubans, and Chinese in its
last decades.
Further, independent entrepreneurship has turned out to be not
merely a survival alternative but a path toward rapid economic mobil-
ity in many instances. The creation of business enclaves by Russian
Jews in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and by the Japanese in San
Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle allowed these groups to ascend rap-
idly on the economic ladder, leaving other immigrant minorities com-
posed mainly of wageworkers behind. The more recently established
Cuban enclave of Miami, Koreatown of Los Angeles, the Chinatowns
of New York and San Francisco, and the Little Saigon area of Orange
County have yielded, by and large, similar results.49
The concepts of social networks and social capital, discussed ear-
lier in connection with the origins of immigrant flows, can be invoked
again for the explanation of these economic phenomena. It is clear that
entrepreneurially oriented foreign groups make use of intraethnic net-
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70 | Theoretical Overview
works and cultural solidarity to compensate for the barriers posed by
discrimination and lack of business contacts in the outside world. As
will be illustrated in greater detail in chapter 4, the ethnic community
can become in these circumstances a source of capital, labor, and market
information supporting business success. In a sense immigrant entrepre-
neurs compensate for their lack of financial capital with the extensive
social capital created by ethnic solidarity.50
Yet this theory also falls short because social networks and solidarity
are common among all minority groups, immigrant or otherwise, but
only a few of them have managed to create viable economic enclaves.
An extensive literature on African American inner cities, for example,
has demonstrated the existence and vital role of social networks and
social capital as means for personal and family survival. But the opera-
tion of these mechanisms never managed to lift these areas out of a situ-
ation of permanent poverty and social marginalization. The areas where
these groups concentrate, as those created by most immigrant minori-
ties, develop into ethnic neighborhoods, not economic enclaves.51
The key element for collective business advancement lies in the pres-
ence of a critical mass of migrants with business expertise acquired in
their country of origin and brought along into the host society. As we
saw in chapter 1, every experience where entrepreneurship has led to the
emergence of a viable enclave has been marked by the presence of indi-
viduals skilled in industrial and commercial trades.52 Broad human cap-
ital resulting from a general liberal education does not suffice; instead,
the key factor has been specific expertise in organizing and operating
different types of firms. When a class of such persons exists in an eth-
nic community, businesses emerge in sufficient numbers to provide an
alternative path to wage employment in the outside economy. In time,
managerial and investment knowledge disseminate from the early entre-
preneurs to their coethnic workers, providing a platform for sustained
economic mobility. Zhou concludes her well-known review of ethnic
enterprise in the United States on the following note: “The central idea
of the enclave economy concept is that the enclave is more than just
a shelter for the disadvantaged who are forced to take on either self-
employment or marginal work in small businesses. Rather, the ethnic
enclave possesses the potential to develop a distinct structure of eco-
nomic opportunities as an effective alternative path to social mobility.”53
As we will see in chapter 7, this path also has significant effects for
the educational and occupational achievement of the offspring of these
immigrants— the second generation. Although the enclave path is excep-
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Theoretical Overview | 71
tional, it possesses significant theoretical implications as a means to
escape the secondary labor market and the bottom tier of the present
economic “hourglass.”
Immigrant Adaptation
The last set of theories deals with the social relationships between immi-
grants and members of the native majority and their cultural interac-
tions. Different perspectives on immigrant adaptation correspond to
different theories on the uses of immigrant labor. Thus, the theory that
views immigrants essentially as a supplement to the domestic labor force
is complemented by a first perspective on adaptation in terms of social
and cultural assimilation. The assimilationist school, as these writings
are collectively known, comprises most of the classic studies of immi-
grants in the United States. These include the work of such sociologists
and historians as Handlin on the urban Irish, Child on second-genera-
tion Italians, Wittke on the Germans, and Blegen on the Norwegians. It
also includes an array of subsequent scholars, from Milton Gordon to
Thomas Sowell.54
The assimilationist perspective defines the situation of immigrants
as involving a clash between conflicting cultural values and norms. The
native majority represents the “core,” while immigrants are the “periph-
ery.” Assimilation occurs by the diffusion of values and norms from core
to periphery. By osmosis, as it were, these new cultural forms are gradu-
ally absorbed by immigrants, bringing them closer to the majority. The
process, sometimes called acculturation, is generally seen as irreversible
though it may take different lengths of time for different groups.55
In the most extensive treatise on assimilation, Milton Gordon defines
acculturation as a precondition for other forms of assimilation. Next in
line comes structural assimilation, or extensive participation of immi-
grants in primary groups of the core society. This is followed, in a loose
sequence, by amalgamation, or intermarriage, between immigrants
and natives and by identificational assimilation or the development of
a common national identity based on the symbols of the core group.
Attitudinal assimilation reflects the absence of prejudice toward immi-
grants, while behavioral assimilation represents the absence of discrimi-
nation. According to Gordon, there is no necessary linear relationship
between different types of assimilation past the stage of acculturation.
Learning the norms and values of the society may lead to a reduction
of prejudice and discrimination, with minority and majority choosing
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72 | Theoretical Overview
to remain apart in terms of social interaction. Identificational assimi-
lation might occur in the absence of amalgamation and even of exten-
sive structural assimilation. Nevertheless, it is the latter process— exten-
sive primary-level interaction between immigrants and members of the
native majority— that Gordon defines as central to assimilation.56
This view is shared by other sociologists of the same school, such
as Warner and Srole. For them assimilation is a linear process, but the
speed at which immigrants gain access to closer interaction with mem-
bers of the core group is affected by three variables: race, religion,
and language. The more similar an immigrant group is to the white,
Protestant, English-speaking majority, the faster it will be assimilated.
The process may take many generations for immigrants different from
the majority in all three variables. For Warner and Srole race is the pri-
mary criterion, and nonwhite groups are those whose assimilation is the
most difficult.57
Gordon examines three alternative ideological tendencies, or view-
points, on assimilation: Anglo conformity, the melting pot, and cultural
pluralism. As the label indicates, Anglo conformity refers to the com-
plete surrender of immigrants’ symbols and values and their absorption
by the core culture. The process culminates in identificational assimila-
tion, though it may not lead to structural assimilation or to the total
elimination of discrimination and prejudice. The melting-pot thesis
holds that assimilation results in a blend of the values, norms, lifestyles,
and institutions of the different groups, both core and peripheral. This
is manifested, for example, in the incorporation of multiple foreign cui-
sines into “American” food, in the adoption into English of a number
of foreign expressions, and in the integration of symbols and festivities
brought by different immigrant groups into American culture. Cultural
pluralism refers to a situation in which immigrants are able to retain
their own culture, modified by contact with the core group but still pre-
serving its distinct character. Under pluralism these differences do not
result in prejudice and discrimination: each group is allowed to function
in a plane of relative equality, with limited structural assimilation and
amalgamation among them.
While cultural pluralism is the option favored by most immigrants,
Gordon asserts that it has never really existed in the United States. In
his view the acculturation process has led to outcomes best reflected in
the Anglo-conformity thesis: basic values, norms, and symbols taught to
immigrants and fully absorbed by their children correspond to those of
the dominant American culture.58 Other assimilationists, such as Sowell,
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Theoretical Overview | 73
argue that the more benevolent melting-pot imagery is actually more
empirically accurate. American society and culture are a distillate of
many national contributions, of which the Anglo-Protestant tradition
is the most significant but by no means the only one. Sowell asserts
that “the American culture is built on the food, the language, the atti-
tudes, and the skills from numerous groups. . . . Features of American
culture . . . are a common heritage, despite ethnic diversities that still
exist. Budweiser is drunk in Harlem, Jews eat pizza, and Chinese res-
taurants are patronized by customers who are obviously not Chinese.”59
While rejecting such statements as superficial, other writers believe,
nonetheless, that the melting-pot concept is useful as a description of
more fundamental processes: rebuffed in their attempts to translate
acculturation into structural assimilation, second- and third-genera-
tion “immigrants” have developed their own melting pots segmented
along religious lines. Kennedy and, subsequently, Herberg elaborated
the notion of a triple melting pot, in which primary-level relations
and intermarriages occur within broad groupings defined by religion:
Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. While ethnic identities might persist
within each of these broad segments, the general tendency is toward the
emergence of an undifferentiated “American” population within each
of them.60 Gordon endorsed this typology, concluding that Anglo con-
formity in the culture and segmented melting pots in the social struc-
ture are the basic tendencies of immigrant assimilation in the United
States. Other authors, particularly Glazer and Moynihan, have added
to this triple melting pot a fourth segment separated from the others
not by religious but racial lines. Blacks and perhaps other nonwhites do
not readily “melt” into the broader society or any of its subsegments,
although they have also been acculturated in the dominant values.61
Despite the many qualifications and typologies that pervade the
assimilationist literature, its basic insight is that contact between a for-
eign minority and an established majority will lead, through a series of
stages, to an eventual merging of values, symbols, and identities. This
integration into a single society and culture, or perhaps into several
subsegments, is held to be a good thing. For the majority this merging
represents a guarantee of social stability and the enrichment provided
by selective elements of foreign cultures. For the minority it offers the
possibility of accessing positions of higher prestige and power and the
promise of a better future for their children.
The assimilationist model reflects a view of society as a consensual
structure. Social change consists of attempts to restore equilibrium dis-
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74 | Theoretical Overview
rupted by external forces. The massive arrival of individuals with for-
eign languages and cultures represents such a disruption. Assimilation
is the process by which equilibrium is restored. As immigrants learn
the new culture and language, they shed traditional preconceptions and
early feelings of alienation. As they come to know and understand mem-
bers of the majority, they adopt a more positive attitude toward them.
This process of apprenticeship is rewarded, in turn, by greater openness
of the host society and greater opportunities for economic and social
advancement.62
The internal colonialist, split-labor-market, and dual-economy per-
spectives on uses of migrant labor correspond to a very different analy-
sis of immigrant adaptation. From these alternative viewpoints greater
knowledge of the core language and culture by new immigrants and
greater familiarity with members of the dominant group do not neces-
sarily lead to more positive attitudes and more rapid assimilation. Such
conditions can lead to precisely the opposite, as immigrants learn their
true economic position and are exposed to racist ideologies directed
against them as instruments of domination. This perspective on immi-
grant adaptation emphasizes ethnic resilience as an instrument of resis-
tance by oppressed minorities.
Studies of ethnicity typically begin by noting the persistence of distinct
cultural traits among groups formed by immigration despite extensive
periods of time in the host society. This situation can only be explained,
from an assimilationist perspective, by the insufficient diffusion of the
culture of the core to peripheral groups. This kind of explanation runs
contrary, however, to the actual experience of many immigrant groups
who have been in the receiving country for several generations. These
groups have learned American English, are thoroughly familiar with the
values and lifestyles of the majority, and are completely integrated into
the economic structure. Still, they have not abandoned their distinct
cultural traits and self-identities and often resist further assimilation.63
At this point the ethnic resilience literature splits into two cur-
rents. One notes the functional advantages of ethnicity, ranging from
the moral and material support provided by ethnic networks to politi-
cal gains made through ethnic bloc voting. It “pays” to preserve eth-
nic solidarity, which is often the only edge that immigrants and their
descendants have for advancement in the broader society. This line of
argument is associated in the United States with the works of Greeley,
Suttles, and Glazer and Moynihan. Research supporting this position
has dealt primarily with the experience of “white ethnics,” the descen-
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Theoretical Overview | 75
dants of European immigrant groups, though it has been extended to
nonwhite minorities.64
Glazer and Moynihan concluded poignantly that “the point of the
melting pot is that it did not happen.”65 For Greeley ethnic resilience
is not a cultural “lag” from premodern times but rather the communal
basis on which modern social structures rest. Far from constituting a
“social problem,” ethnic bonds represent one of the few sources of emo-
tional support and social solidarity left in the modern urban context:
“The ethnic groups . . . came into existence so that the primordial ties
of the peasant commune could somehow or other be salvaged. . . . But
because the primordial ties have been transmitted does not mean that
they have been eliminated. . . . They are every bit as decisive for human
relationships as they were in the past.”66
The positive consequences of ethnic resilience and solidarity receive
additional support from the literature on ethnic enclaves and other
forms of immigrant entrepreneurship. As we have seen, this economic
path could not exist without the social capital flowing from social net-
works and ethnic solidarity. From this standpoint rapid acculturation
and structural assimilation, as advocated by Gordon, Warner and Srole,
and other authors of the same school, is not necessarily a boon to the
mobility chances of immigrants and their offspring because it weak-
ens the bonds that undergird coethnic social capital. Instead, selective
acculturation that combines instrumental learning of the host languages
and culture with retention of cultural traditions brought from the home
country offers the most effective path for entrepreneurially oriented
immigrants.67
A second current of the ethnic resilience literature generally agrees
with these statements but focuses on the origins of ethnic solidarity for
oppressed minorities. It emphasizes the experience of immigrant groups
that, though thoroughly acculturated to dominant values and norms,
have been rebuffed in their attempts to seek entry into the mainstream.
As we have seen, assimilation theories have also noted these experiences
but do not draw from them any implications beyond the “triple segmen-
tation” of the melting pot. In this second current of the ethnic resilience
model, this rejection is a necessary consequence of the subordinate posi-
tion of certain immigrant minorities in the labor market and of the ide-
ologies employed to legitimize it.
Blacks and Mexicans, like Chinese and Japanese, or Poles and
Italians before them, have been kept “in their place” because they have
formed, each in their time, the mainstay of a segmented labor market.68
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76 | Theoretical Overview
As colonized minorities or fresh labor supplies for the secondary sector,
they constituted an indispensable component of the economic structure.
Granting such groups admittance into mainstream society on the basis
of merit would jeopardize their utility to employers and to the entire
ethnically dominant group. Learning the “right” values and behavioral
patterns is, therefore, not enough for these minorities to gain access to
the core society.69
The rejection experienced by immigrants and their descendants in
their attempts to become fully assimilated constitutes a central ele-
ment in the reconstruction of ethnic culture. As several authors have
noted, this culture is not a mere continuation of that brought by the
original immigrants but is a distinct emergent product. It is forged in
the interaction of the group with the dominant majority, incorporat-
ing some aspects of the core culture and privileging those from the past
that appear most suited in the struggle for dignity and economic ascent.
“Nationalities” may thus emerge among immigrants who shared only
the most tenuous linkages to the old country. They are brought together
by the imputation of a common ethnicity by the core society and its use
to justify their exploitation.70
The central insight of the ethnic-resilience perspective is that the same
racial ideology employed to justify the subordination of colonized and
other groups can be eventually turned around as an instrument of soli-
darity. As they discover assimilation to be a deceptive path, minorities
come to rely on in-group cohesiveness and cultural reassertion as the
only effective means to break out of their situation. The emergence of
ethnicity as the central identity among these minorities is aided by their
common fate both inside and outside the workplace. They tend to work
in the same industries and jobs and to live in the same areas. In both
spheres they suffer the pervasive effects of discrimination. This unity of
work and life, of production and consumption, greatly facilitates intra-
group interaction. For this reason, when discontent finally turns into
political mobilization, the rallying symbols for these groups are those
of race and culture rather than those of a universal proletarian class.71
The critiques advanced by the various strands of ethnic-resilience
theory severely weakened the assimilationist perspective, confining it
to near oblivion. Recently, there has been an attempt to revive assimila-
tion as a “master concept” by grounding it not on the work of Gordon
or Warner and Srole but on the earlier Chicago School. This attempt,
led by sociologists Richard Alba and Victor Nee, asserts that cultural
and linguistic assimilation has been the dominant experience of immi-
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Theoretical Overview | 77
grant groups in the United States, leading to their incorporation into the
social mainstream that is, in turn, modified by them. To buttress their
case, Alba and Nee revisit the history of European immigrant groups
and their descendants, as they gradually abandoned their language and
culture to join a broadly encompassing American society. For these
authors assimilation is “something that happens” to people as they
engage in other pursuits. Following the lead of Robert Park and other
classic authors of the Chicago School, the new assimilationism accepts
that the process can take many different forms and even not take place
at all. The thrust of the argument, however, is that, on the whole, cul-
tural and social assimilation to the American mainstream has been the
dominant or “canonical” path.72
On the opposite side other authors have reinforced ethnic-resilience
theory by documenting the experience of groups that, though thor-
oughly acculturated, have remained confined to a subordinate economic
and occupational status for generations. Based on a detailed study of
Mexican Americans across generations, Telles and Ortiz advanced a
racialization thesis that reproduces, in all its essentials, the earlier eth-
nic-resilience argument: Mexican American youths are racialized by the
dominant white society that associates their phenotypical traits with an
inferior educational potential and a subordinate status in the labor mar-
ket. Mexican American youths react by rejecting the conventional path
of social mobility through education and rallying around the symbols
of an injured common ethnicity.73
Ultimately, the controversy between these opposite perspectives
revolves around a differential emphasis on cultural versus structural
indicators of assimilation. The basic emphasis of Alba and Nee’s neoas-
similationism revolves around the overwhelming evidence of accultura-
tion, linguistic and otherwise, among descendants of immigrant groups.
They are less mindful that this process may not necessarily translate into
structural mobility in the hierarchies of wealth and power. Thus, despite
being thoroughly acculturated, minorities— such as descendants of ear-
lier Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Caribbean migrants— are still confined
to an inferior socioeconomic position and continue to be racialized by a
predominantly white mainstream.74
The experiences of successful immigrant groups, including those
that have developed economic enclaves, also weaken the neoassimila-
tionist model because they show the importance of ethnic resilience for
structural mobility. For these successful groups, coethnic solidarity has
not been so much a reaction to outside discrimination as a proactive
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78 | Theoretical Overview
means to carve a viable economic niche. For Alba and Nee the American
“mainstream” can encompass all these options, both positive and neg-
ative, but from the immigrants’ point of view it makes a great deal of
difference what paths of assimilation they and their offspring follow.
Those able to move upward educationally and occupationally readily
join the middle class, while racialized minorities are confined to an infe-
rior socioeconomic status for generations. The contrasting experiences
of children of professional and entrepreneurial groups in the past and
present and of descendants of colonized minorities provide additional
support for this critical perspective.75
Conclusion: Transnationalism
and Assimilation
The transnational model, described previously as the latest approach to
the directionality of migrant movements, also bears on immigrant adap-
tation. To the extent that immigrants adopt a pattern of back-and-forth
movement across international borders, the question of assimilation
versus ethnic resilience is cast in a new light. In principle transnation-
alism may be seen as retarding assimilation, to the extent that it keeps
alive contacts and memories of the old country. Interestingly, however,
the reality is more complex: research on the topic has shown that active
participants in transnational activities and organizations are usually the
more established and better educated immigrants.76 These are precisely
the candidates for a more rapid and more successful integration into the
host society.
The process at play seems to be one in which newly arrived migrants
concentrate on carving a niche for themselves, without taking much
time to look back at events in their places of origin. It is only when they
have become relatively secure and have reached a measure of occupa-
tional success that they can consider engaging in regular transnational
activities or joining transnational organizations. These findings rede-
fine, among other things, the meaning of citizenship acquisition. From
the assimilation perspective, acquiring the citizenship of the host nation
represents a decisive step in the process of acculturation and integration.
From the transnational model, however, the greater legal security stem-
ming from citizenship acquisition functions to facilitate further cross-
border travel and contacts abroad.77
Transnationalism highlights the possibility that preserving ties to
the home culture and language may be compatible with acculturation.
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Theoretical Overview | 79
Indeed, economically successful immigrants have commonly practiced
this mix of the old and new. The practice of selective acculturation has
not been inimical to their structural economic advancement but has
generally supported it. For first-generation immigrants regular contact
with their places of origin often translates into the possibility of access-
ing unique economic resources. As recent studies have shown, most suc-
cessful businesses established by immigrants include a transnational
component.78
This novel perspective suggests that the opposition between assimi-
lation and ethnic resilience that has dominated scholarly debates in the
past may be overdone. Under certain conditions ethnic resilience in the
first and second generations can lead to successful assimilation. When
this happens, the likely consequence is the loss of salience of ethnic
markers in future generations, precisely the opposite outcome of reac-
tive ethnicity among permanently subordinate minorities. It will be clear,
then, that transnationalism and its conceptual cousin, selective accultur-
ation, are not the same as multiculturalism if the latter is understood as
the preservation of culturally distinct and institutionally complete com-
munities across generations. On the contrary, transnationalism offers a
viable bridge and platform for successful integration. The fate of immi-
grant groups that have been unable to make use of the resources offered
by this path stands in stark contrast, showing the dangers of premature
assimilation without the means for educational and economic advance-
ment. In the following chapters we elaborate on these theoretical con-
siderations by showing how they apply to the condition of different
immigrant minorities and their descendants in today’s America.
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