Assimilation and integration in the twenty-first century: where have we been and where are we going? Introduction to a special issue in honour of Richard Alba

ABSTRACT

This introduction sets the agenda for a Special Issue dedicated to the life and works of Richard Alba. It opens up a dialogue on the continuing value of assimilation and integration perspectives today for studying social change in an era of increasing ethno-racial diversity. First, the evolution of new assimilationism is discussed through an exposition of the intellectual biography of Richard Alba, its leading proponent. Second, we highlight key ideas that contributors bring to a dialogue over assimilation/integration in the US and Europe. Third, we explore themes that cross-cut contributions, including the need to better understand: the importance of ethno-racial self-identification in shaping both outcomes and actual social processes of integration; the role of ‘culture’ and the adaptation of majority populations to immigration; the interrelationships between integration and racism as social processes; how histories of immigration matter; questions about the transferability of assimilation/integration concepts across distinct historical, cultural, and spatial contexts; and how assimilation/integration scholarship can respond constructively to insights from critical perspectives. In short, we aim to tease out critical junctures and disagreements within assimilation/integration perspectives, in the belief that this can provide suggestions about where the future research agenda needs to go.

KEYWORDS:

• Assimilation
• integration
• immigration
• discrimination
• racism

Introduction

Richard Alba’s name on the page has accompanied many of us throughout our careers and is almost synonymous with the evolving ideas around assimilation, the standard US terminology, and their close cousin integration, more often used by scholars on the European side of the Atlantic. For more than three decades, Alba’s path-breaking research portfolio has driven the agenda-advancing perspectives on assimilation and integration – a set of empirically grounded theoretical approaches that study the social processes of ethno-racial change among groups, and power inequalities underpinning them, which play an important role in transforming Western societies. Following Alba’s own pragmatic justification, we will use the broad concepts of assimilation and integration interchangeably as they address overlapping and similar social processes while recognising their distinctive US and European heritages as terms and applications (see Alba and Foner 2015, 5–8; Alba 2024). We provide definitions in the next section when discussing the intellectual evolution of Richard Alba’s own perspectives through his contributions over time.

Initially, the stimulus for a Special Issue dedicated to Richard Alba is that his formal retirement from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center presented an opportunity for some US and European scholars to think about his contributions and influences alongside their own personal intellectual developments and research.¹ As 2024, marks the 50th year of the publication of this journal, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS), it was also thought appropriate to mark the event with an edition on assimilation and integration issues that have been established to some degree and remain strongly debated within this academic forum. Richard Alba remains an editorial board member, contributor, and generous reviewer for JEMS, a relationship that continues, like his academic writing, beyond his formal retirement. Richard eschewed the idea of a traditional Festschrift, that has arguably become somewhat downgraded over the last decades, preferring something with more intellectual meaning and contemporary relevance than a eulogy to his greatest hits. The resultant idea was to bring together a group of scholars from the US and Europe, regions of Alba’s research, at different career stages, who work within a broad assimilation/integration perspective, but with different perspectives and approaches.

The overarching question framing the collection is: ‘Assimilation and Integration in the Twenty-First Century: Where Have We Been and Where are we Going?’ Clearly, this stands as a rhetorical question. Social science is seldom a good predictor of the future. But our question includes a strong hint that we think that understandings of the present and possible futures can build on insights drawn from historical experiences of and scholarship on immigration and ethno-racial diversity. These are important tools, even if the past does not repeat itself in exactly the same way. The contributors seek to advance knowledge within what we refer to as a broadly defined assimilation and integration dialogue but choose their own paths towards meeting this goal. Overall, the aim is to offer a diverse set of state-of-the-art contributions from the US and Europe rather than provide a single perspective or grand theory. Some authors directly address Alba’s theories and research as a core focus, while others make an original contribution to a specific question, field, or empirical case that fits, in an innovative way, within an assimilation and integration lens. The basic idea is that by bringing together the specific contributions, we can stimulate a renewed critical reflection about the value of assimilation and integration perspectives, not least their analytic utility for understanding today’s societal processes of ethno-racial change. The aim is to honour Richard Alba by presenting a set of contributions stimulated by the perspectives he has done so much to advance. He returned the favour by doing us the honour of being part of the collection, first, with an original written contribution (Alba 2024), and second, by providing insights into his personal and intellectual background, along with thoughts on contemporary assimilation perspectives and the direction of the field, in a published interview with Paul Statham, the JEMS editor, that also appears here (Alba, Statham, and Foner 2024).

Of course, we recognise that the terms assimilation and integration, and the understandings of societal change that they theorise, depict, and empirically study, remain a contested terrain that is open for critical re-evaluation, even among scholars who broadly self-identify with the paradigm. This Special Issue offers a set of scholarly contributions that tease out critical junctures and disagreements within assimilation/integration perspectives, in the belief that this collective effort can provide suggestions about where the future evolution of the research agenda needs to go. This still leaves scope for dialogue and disagreement across the contributions, but they all stand as attempts to push the boundaries of what assimilation/integration means, its conceptual and analytic utility, and its value as a social scientific lens for interpreting the social reality of ethno-racial change in Western societies, albeit in distinctive ways.

In the next section, we outline an intellectual history of the evolution of Richard Alba’s thinking on assimilation and integration over the last decades. After that, we introduce the articles and try to unpack their critical, theoretical and empirical contributions, by first presenting those by US scholars on the US, and then by Europeans on European countries. Finally, we conclude by outlining several themes that cut across the contributions and suggest critical junctures and future directions moving forward.

Richard Alba and the evolution of assimilation and integration perspectives

There is no better place to begin assessing the value of assimilation and integration concepts for studying twenty-first century immigration societies than the work of Richard Alba. He is one of the leading scholars, if not the leading scholar, on these topics, author or coauthor of seven books and countless articles that focus on issues of assimilation and integration. His writings have had a huge impact in shaping ethnic and migration studies in both North America and Europe; none are more influential than those elaborating a new theory of assimilation that analyzes the processes remaking immigrants and their descendants as well as the society they have come to live in. He has demonstrated the great value of a historical perspective in helping to understand the mechanisms underpinning assimilation and integration in the present and predicting future patterns, too. And while most of Alba’s work is concerned with the United States, his analysis of European societies makes clear how much the study of assimilation, integration, and racial and ethnic change can be advanced through systematic transatlantic comparisons.

The game-changing book, Remaking the American Mainstream (2003), co-authored by Alba and Victor Nee, set forth what has been called ‘neo-assimilation theory’ as a way to resuscitate the assimilation concept and avoid problems that plagued earlier assimilation ideas. Assimilation, as they define it, is ‘the decline of an ethnic distinction and its corollary cultural and social differences’. By decline, they mean

that a distinction attenuates in salience, that the occurrences for which it is relevant diminish in number and contract to fewer and fewer domains of social life. Individuals’ ethnic origins become less and less relevant in relation to members of another ethnic group. (2003, 11)

Boundary change is involved as ‘individuals coming originally from different sides of an ethno-racial boundary – one majority, one minority – no longer commonly think about each other, or treat each other, based on their category memberships but as individuals’ (Alba 2020, 146). In his contribution to this special issue, Alba (2024) treats integration as ‘approximately equivalent’ to the assimilation concept developed with Nee, although in other work he defines it as overlapping with but distinct from assimilation, referring to

the processes that increase the opportunities of immigrants and their descendants to obtain the valued “stuff” of a society, as well as social acceptance, through participation in major institutions such as the educational and political system and the labor and housing market. (Alba and Foner 2015, 5; see also Alba 2024)

In reworking ideas about assimilation, Alba and Nee (2003) emphasize that it is not inevitable or even irreversible. And contrary to earlier scholarly conceptions of assimilation, as well as many popular views, it does not mean the obliteration of all traces of ethnic origins. As Alba (2020, 146) has recently put it, assimilation is not an all-or-nothing proposition: Assimilation can be significant without erasing ethno-racial distinctions and differences, including many ethnic markers and features of ethnic culture, although over the long term, it entails the ‘decline of their social significance’.

Alba’s early publications on Italian immigrants and their descendants captured both sides of the story. On the one hand, Alba wrote of the twilight of ethnicity among Italian Americans, with ethnic distinctions fading into the background over time. The use of and exposure to the Italian language was eroded over the generations, and the older communal basis of ethnicity – working at the same jobs, living in the same neighborhood, going to the same schools, and befriending and marrying one another – went into eclipse in the context of massive contact across ethnic lines among whites (Alba 1990, 302; see also Alba 1985). For a great many Italian Americans, what Alba calls the privatization of ethnic identity emerged as a prevalent pattern, with the expression of ethnic identity reduced to largely personal and family terms, for example, the preparation of ethnic foods in family settings on special occasions. Yet, on the other hand, his research in the late twentieth century showed that for at least some Italian Americans various communal forms of Italian ethnicity persisted. Moreover, a hundred years after the mass immigration from southern Italy and eastern Europe ended, ethnic identities among those of Italian origin – as well as many Irish and Jewish Americans – had become a way of claiming to be American, ‘a means of locating oneself and one’s family against the panorama of American history’ (Alba 1990, 319). Nor has prejudice against Jews and Italians entirely disappeared, as Alba is careful to note. Anti-Semitism as well as negative stereotypes about Italian Americans and organized crime still survive in some parts of the American population (Alba 2024). In general, invidious ethno-racial distinctions are anchored in cultural tropes, Alba argues, that ‘can survive for a long time, even as their relevance to the everyday lives of their targets dissipates’ (Alba 2020, 202).

How does assimilation happen? The short answer, in Alba and Nee’s (2003, 282) analysis, is that it occurs while people are making other plans, or as a byproduct of choices they make to improve their life chances or those of their children. Immigrants and their descendants in the US often move to better neighborhoods, for example, for superior housing and schools, seek out advanced education and hone their skills in English to enhance their occupational opportunities, and in the process frequently develop close ties to those in other national origin groups, sometimes resulting in marriage. Indeed, intermarriage, Alba and Nee (2003) argue, is the litmus test of assimilation, a high rate signaling that the social distance between the groups is small and that individuals of different ethnic backgrounds no longer perceive social and cultural differences significant enough to be a barrier to long-term union (2003, 90). If assimilation is generally not a deliberative or conscious process, it is also rare or extremely partial among the most recent immigrants who arrive as adults. Rather, more significant assimilation is mostly a second or even third-generation phenomenon, found among those born in the United States or who arrived at an early age and were mostly raised there (2003, 215–216).

One of the notable virtues of Alba’s research and writings is his acute sensitivity to history in seeking to understand the mechanisms that brought about assimilation and integration in the past and to assess the implications of earlier experiences of immigrants and their children for the contemporary period (as well as the years ahead). Several central questions are key in his work: How did assimilation happen ‘last time’ among those of eastern and southern European origin? Did it depend on specific historical conditions in the mid-twentieth century? What are the similarities with the past, and what are the differences? How, in other words, does the analysis of the past shed light on the processes operating in the twenty-first century?

Mass assimilation among the descendants of eastern European Jews and southern Italians, as Alba makes clear in many publications, was made possible by a number of social, economic, and cultural forces in post-World War II America. Socioeconomic mobility, or as he has put it more recently, status uplift (Alba 2020; Alba 2024), was critical, involving the growth of jobs in the middle and upper reaches of the occupational hierarchy in the postwar period of remarkable economic prosperity. Also important in this period: the large-scale expansion of public higher education, the rapid development of the suburbs which were a ‘crucible for mixing’ among whites of different ethnic backgrounds, and, Alba states (2020, 164–179), a moral re-evaluation of white ethnics emerging from their wartime role as well as their own collective actions to challenge exclusion by the majority group.

Alba is careful to remind us that the trajectories of the last second generation are unique in many ways and are unlikely to be duplicated precisely. This is not surprising; history rarely, if ever, repeats itself exactly (Alba and Nee 2003, 270). Remaking the American Mainstream cautions that assimilation, among other things, will not apply to all contemporary immigrant minorities to the same extent that it did in the past, with large numbers in today’s second generation experiencing limited or no social mobility, and racial and undocumented status playing a big role. A huge expansion of higher education like the one that facilitated upward mobility for the second generation after World War II is not in the cards. Nor is the extraordinary economic prosperity of the postwar years. Indeed, economic inequality is much higher today than it was in the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, Alba and Nee insist that the similarities between assimilation among immigrant minorities last time and today outweigh the differences (2003, 126). Indeed, evidence they marshal on language assimilation, educational and occupational attainment, residential change, and intermarriage show that assimilation remains a potent force affecting immigrant groups.

One reason this is so, Alba argues, has to do with demographic change that continues to allow for what he calls non-zero-sum mobility, a term he coined and described in Blurring the Color Line (2009). The concept of non-zero-sum mobility emphasizes how members of immigrant minority groups can ascend the socioeconomic ladder without affecting the life chances of or leading to significant downward assimilation among, those in more privileged groups. Whereas in the postwar period, significant economic and educational expansion was of great significance in facilitating non-zero-sum mobility, and thus assimilation, it is demographic change, the argument goes, that will provide a central mechanism in the contemporary era.

The basic processes are increasingly evident today. The large, overwhelmingly white, cohort of baby boomers born in the two decades after World War II is rapidly aging; as of 2020, they were between the ages of 56 and 74. At the same time, a growing number of children and grandchildren of post-1965 immigrants will have college and university degrees. As the baby boomers exit from the labor force and leadership positions, the shrinking number of native whites in the working-age population is bound to create opportunities for a substantial number of the descendants of the post-1965 immigrants to move up the occupational ladder at least for several decades to come, including into positions at the top tiers of the work force. Admittedly, this mobility is likely to be less sweeping and inclusive than it was in the mid-twentieth century, if only because of much higher levels of economic inequality today; nonetheless, there is every indication that it will be significant (Alba 2020; 2009; see also Alba and Foner 2015). Indeed, already by 2015, Alba shows, more than 30 percent of those under the age of 50 in the U.S. in the best-paying occupations were minorities, a high proportion of them Latinos or Asians of immigrant origin (Alba 2009, 184; see also Alba and Maggio 2022).

And this leads to an even broader contribution that Alba’s work makes to conceptualizations of assimilation: its emphasis on what one might call ‘the other side of assimilation’ (see also Jiménez 2017). The classic accounts of assimilation treated assimilation as unidirectional, with those of immigrant origin changing to assimilate while the majority culture would remain unaffected. The very phrase remaking the American mainstream gets at the fact that assimilation is a two-way process: mainstream American society and culture have been continually reshaped by the incorporation of new immigrant origin groups. Alba, joined by Jan Willem Duyvendak, defines the mainstream as consisting of institutions, such as the education system, economy, polity, and media as well as social milieus and cultural settings where the dominant group, whites at this moment in history, feels ‘at home’ (Alba and Duyvendak 2019). Assimilation, to put it another way, not only changes newcomers and their children, but, in the process, also changes the very nature of American society and culture.

One example that features prominently in Alba’s writings pertains to religion (see e.g. Alba, Raboteau, and DeWind 2009). If we go back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Protestant denominations in the United States were more or less established in that they dominated the public square, crowding out Catholicism and Judaism, both associated with disparaged immigrants and seen by nativist observers as incompatible with mainstream institutions and culture (Alba and Foner 2015, 134). On one side, the religions of Jews and Italians changed as they joined the institutional mainstream. Commonly mentioned is how Hanukkah, formerly a minor holiday on the Jewish calendar, became important in the United States to provide Jewish children with an equivalent to Christmas. At the same time, attitudes toward and the position of the Jewish and Catholic religion changed as well, owing in large part to the assimilation of Jews and Italian American Catholics. The boundary dividing Catholics and Jews from the Protestant majority, which once seemed insurmountable, moved to include their models of religious beliefs and practice (Alba and Nee 2003, 283–285). By the mid-twentieth century, Americans had come to think of a tripartite perspective of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, and by the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century, even many opponents of multiculturalism were referring to the country’s ‘Judeo-Christian heritage’ (Alba and Foner 2015, 134–135).

Another example is the redrawing of racial and ethnic boundaries in the twenty-first century, which is the focus of Alba’s most recent book, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream (2020). In arguing that assimilation is, once again, diversifying, and indeed expanding, mainstream American society, he now places great emphasis on the role of mixed unions in melding ‘many whites, nonwhites, and Hispanics’ and creating the ‘prospect of a new kind of societal majority’ (Alba 2020, 10).

Mixed unions of course, as he points out, are not the only factor expanding the mainstream in the contemporary context of large-scale immigration. Demographic shifts, which he highlighted in earlier publications on non-zero-sum mobility, are diversifying the top levels of the work force, with post-1965 Hispanic, Asian, and other nonwhite immigrants and their descendants a more notable presence. Long established white Americans also have growing contact, as social equals, with ethnic and racial minorities in colleges and universities and neighborhood settings, and the moral worth of minorities has been upgraded in cultural spheres, in literature, films, television, and popular music (2020, chapter 7; Alba 2024). This said, the enormous rise in mixed unions, and children resulting from them, are, Alba (2020) notes, a pivotal and transformative development. The figures are striking. About one in six marriages contracted in 2015 involved partners of a different race or ethnicity, more than twice the rate in 1980; most involved a White person with a minority partner. Equally revealing is another statistic: a little over ten percent of infants born in the United States in 2017 had one White and one Hispanic or non-White parent, a figure which has been growing steadily in recent decades and, like mixed unions, is expected to continue to increase.

Alba argues that the children of mixed minority–majority unions are ‘the most convincing evidence of mainstream expansion at least in part because they straddle visible racial boundaries … some entering social spaces shared with many whites and gaining acceptance there’ (2020, 202). This does not mean that they will necessarily, or even in most cases, come to be thought of, and think of themselves, as white. Their ethno-racial differences are still often noticed and may even be remarked on in offensive ways in some settings and situations (2020, 202). Ultimately, Alba predicts that the US could become a society divided between an increasingly multi-hued majority – that includes whites, most with mixed minority-white backgrounds, and some others of exclusively minority origins – and those whose lives are more determined by their minority status. In light of this possibility, he calls for the development of a new narrative that allows immigrants and their children to become part of the mainstream ‘us’ without complete abandonment of their distinctiveness – and that emphasizes the openness of the majority to Americans from different ethno-racial backgrounds (Alba 2020, 256–258; 260; 15).

Alba’s work mainly concentrates on the United States, but his analyses of European societies and, in particular, transatlantic comparisons, bring out the distinctive ways that societies meet similar challenges of integration. The comparisons highlight features of each country’s internal dynamics that might otherwise be taken for granted or overlooked. They provide additional insights into the processes of assimilation and integration by enabling us to spot where – and why – integration seems to be proceeding and where it is not. This comes out especially clearly in the book with Nancy Foner, Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe (2015), which identifies the barriers as well as possible bridges to integration for immigrants and their descendants in four European countries along with the United States and Canada (see also Alba and Holdaway 2013; Alba and Waters 2011). The conclusion is that there are no clear-cut winners or losers, but that each society fails and succeeds in different ways. The characteristics of the immigrant flows matter in understanding the particular pathways to integration in each country. So do demographic features and specific government policies and other social and economic trends. Perhaps above all, there is a broad range of historically rooted and durable social, political, and economic structures and institutions that impede or facilitate integration in distinctive ways in different receiving societies. Once more, a historical perspective is key.

For instance, Alba and Foner (2015) show that in every country the historically rooted system of education plays a critical role in the opportunities available to children of low-status immigrants and the barriers they face. In the United States, a big problem is that the educational system has long been marked by extreme decentralization of school funding and control, with the bulk of local funds coming from the property tax and thus dependent on community wealth. Add to this extensive residential segregation by socioeconomic status and ethno-racial origin, and the American system creates major inequalities among schools. The result is significant disadvantages for the children of low-status migrants who tend to attend schools with weaker funding. In Germany, to mention one European country, the highly stratified structure of the educational system is a source of educational disadvantage for second-generation students from low-status families. These students are disproportionally concentrated in the lowest track of a three-tiered system, the one providing a general education that is often followed by an apprenticeship for students destined for less skilled blue-collar jobs (Alba and Foner 2015, 173–176, 231).

Institutional histories and structures – specifically, the church-state relationship left behind in Western Europe by the histories of mainstream religions – also help explain why religion, specifically Islam, is a greater impediment to immigration integration there than in the United States (Alba and Foner 2015). To be sure, a much larger proportion of immigrants in Europe are Muslim compared to the United States where they are a tiny minority, and Muslim immigrants in Western Europe have a much lower socioeconomic profile. As Western Europeans are arguably, overall, more secular and less religious than Americans, they have more trouble recognizing claims based on religion and are more likely to view religious immigrants and their children with discomfort and suspicion. But historically based relations and arrangements between the state and religious groups also play an important role. Muslim arrivals and their second-generation children in the United States have benefited from the principles of religious freedom and prohibition of an established state religion enshrined in the Constitution since the nation’s founding; they also come to a religiously more open society that resulted from the mid-twentieth century incorporation of Jewish and Catholic immigrant groups. In Western Europe, the ways in which Christian religions have been institutionalized and given special privileges by the state have made it more difficult to incorporate new religions (see Alba and Foner 2015).

Whether comparing Western Europe and North America or considering the United States on its own in the past and present, the groundbreaking theoretical frameworks and conceptualizations Alba has developed, along with his remarkably extensive and careful empirical research, have had a major role in shaping how scholars understand and study the processes of immigrant assimilation and integration and ethnic and racial change. As the contributions to this special issue make clear, his work, as it has evolved and developed over several decades, is helping to guide research and set the agenda for the future as immigration and the changes it brings – to immigrants and their descendants as well as the societies where they live – continue to be critical areas of study.

Critical agendas from the contributions: a dialogue with assimilation and integration

Here we place the Special Issue contributions in dialogue with core assimilation and integration ideas advanced by Alba and others to open up some critical issues within contemporary research. The first grouping consists of US scholars, who engage with the US immigrant and immigration experience that is fundamental to Alba’s assimilation thesis. The second involves European authors on European experiences, whose articles raise additional issues, about transferring assimilation and integration concepts and perspectives to different cases and contexts, and whether there are meaningful parallels between trajectories in the US and Europe.

Assimilation and integration: US perspectives

Richard Alba (2024) kick-starts the Special Issue with an original piece that adds to his current thinking by addressing the transformative role of popular culture in US assimilation processes. Specifically, Alba documents how today people he categorises as ‘not-white’² are increasingly present in popular films and television, as well as becoming producers in cultural industries. He argues that this diversification of resonant and visible cultural representations in mainstream American life is an indicator of social change towards greater assimilation. He interprets substantive shifts in mainstream tastes – evidenced by patterns of mass cultural consumption and production – as an increasing acceptance of diversity, especially by the dominant majority population. In a sense, Alba’s contribution reads like a missing chapter from his The Great Demographic Illusion (2020). The explicit focus on cultural processes allows scope for a deepening of his assimilation perspective.

Alba starts by acknowledging that social structural analyses underpinning traditional assimilation studies tend to have a blind spot on ‘culture’. Instead, here he makes popular culture a consequential domain for ethno-racial boundary shifts. As with most of his work, Alba’s interpretation of today draws historical insights from his understanding of the cultural transformation of the mainstream after WWII, by the ‘white ethnics’, Jewish and Catholic descendants of European immigrants. Fundamental is his concept of symbolic elevation, i.e. the transformation of beliefs by a significant proportion of the majority, so that it becomes easier for upwardly mobile minority group members to be valued morally on equal terms. He argues that transformative cultural processes are essential for all ‘successful’ assimilation outcomes because these processes shift profoundly the symbolic aspects of social boundaries between groups. This can increase the social esteem and perceived moral worth of ‘not-white’ minorities, by enhancing their sense of membership in society and its mainstream.

Empirically, Alba draws on the systematic research compiled in Hunt and Ramon’s Hollywood Diversity Reports (2021a/2021b; 2022) documenting the presence of ethno-racial groups in the contents and production of film and television over time. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of actors of ‘colour’ – racially non-white, Hispanic, or mixed – surged exponentially in English-language films, so that their proportions are now broadly equivalent to their share in the US population (estimated at 42% in the 2020 US Census). Ethno-racial minority screen writers and film directors also increased threefold in the same period to account for three out of ten. Importantly, the tastes of white majority audiences no longer appear to be a market or cultural barrier against this advancement. Ratings show that audiences from white households prefer television programs with diverse casts. Overall, this paints a picture of the remarkable diversification of American mainstream popular culture, especially over the last decade.

From this aggregate picture, Alba argues that mainstream understandings and tastes for popular culture are clearly changing, and quickly, especially among white audiences, towards accepting diversity as the American norm. These changes, in his analysis, allow symbolic elevation for minorities, notwithstanding that social structural opportunities are more restricted today for nonwhite minorities than they were for white ethnics in the past because of entrenched social and economic inequalities.

In their contribution, Paul Starr and Edward P. Freeland (2024) make an original empirical contribution to understandings and usages of the highly resonant category ‘people of colour’³ in the US. They raise important questions about the way ethno-racial groups are categorised by social scientists as well as how this labelling influences, and is influenced by, public understandings and political interventions by actors in the social world.

Today, the pan-ethnic term ‘people of colour’ is commonly used – often without caveats or reflexivity – by social scientists studying assimilation processes as well as members of groups asserting their political identities along ethno-racial lines. Starr and Freedland unpack and illuminate the contradictions behind these usages. As a political identity the term ‘people of colour’ is associated mostly with Black Americans. However, progressive social movements mobilise ‘people of colour’ as an identity for all people suffering racial oppression in the US, including Hispanics, Asian Americans, and indigenous peoples, alongside Black Americans. Also, neither the US state nor NGOs have defined who counts as a ‘person of colour’, unlike, for example, the census category ‘Asian American’, another pan-ethnic identity. Meanwhile journalists (and social scientists) often use ‘people of colour’ almost as a neutral synonym for ‘nonwhite’, in part driven by the progressive urge to avoid categories that take the white majority as its reference point.

Importantly, Starr and Freeland provide the first national US estimates for self-identification as ‘person of colour’ by individuals across ethno-racial groups. They measure the disjunction between self-identification and attributed identification as ‘people of colour’, as well as, more generally, how Americans understand boundaries around the notion of ‘people of colour’. Their headline finding is that only 27% of the population in their survey self-identified as ‘people of colour’, in contrast to the 39.2% figure arrived at from the US Census when all nonwhites and Hispanics are added together. This means that when social scientists use the term ‘people of colour’, they are applying a category that more than half of Hispanics and nearly two out of five Asian Americans do not see as part of their identity, partly for political reasons. These findings can be seen as something of a wake-up call for social scientists studying ethno-racial changes and are consequential for the study of demography and politics.

Jennifer Lee’s and Dian Sheng’s (2024) contribution similarly emphasises the importance of self-identifications for understanding ethno-racial groups, but they shift the lens specifically onto Asian Americans. The case of Asian Americans is crucial to contemporary understandings of US assimilation because they are commonly presented as the ‘success’ story, even outperforming the white majority on core social structural indicators. Lee and Sheng challenge and modify this viewpoint. They provocatively attribute what they see as a perceived failure to interpret the Asian American experience accurately to a conceptual deficit of new assimilation perspectives, an argument that Alba (2024) responds to directly in his contribution. For Lee and Sheng, the paradox of the Asian American assimilation trajectory should be understood as ‘high socioeconomic attainment coupled with low levels of perceived belonging and acceptance, and overwhelming identification as people of color’ (2024, 88). This interpretation requires bringing race and the social processes of racialization to the fore. Lee and Sheng argue that notwithstanding Asian Americans’ upward social mobility and high intermarriage rates, they face high racial barriers that mean they are unable to join mainstream society while it is essentially ‘white’. The basis for such claims is twofold: survey data on Asian Americans’ subjective perceptions of ethno-racial belonging and racism and qualitative accounts of historical and contemporary racism against Asians.

Regarding the survey, the key finding for the authors is that 63 percent of Asian Americans self-identify as ‘people of colour’ – a fact broadly corroborated by Starr and Freeland (2024). Lee and Sheng present this as evidence for racialization, arguing that Asian Americans ‘overwhelmingly’ identify as people of colour (2024, 88) even though their own data also show that four out of ten Asian Americans do not. While it is a relevant finding that a significant number of Asian Americans self-identify as ‘people of colour’, we need to know which Asian Americans self-identify – or do not identify – this way. Lee and Sheng add qualitative accounts to support a racialization thesis and maintain that new assimilationists fail to see the degree to which racism prevents assimilation. Their evidence for deep and continued US racism against Asians draws on discussions of centuries-old historic acts of anti-Asian legal discrimination as well as anti-Chinese racial violence stimulated in recent years by the COVID pandemic.

For Lee and Sheng, political perspectives that advance the idea of Asian Americans joining an expanded mainstream are basically conservative positions that reinforce the status quo. Their stated aim is to reclaim narratives of Asian Americans by ‘giving them voice’ through what they call a subject-centred approach. However, using Asian American as a subjective identification is not problem-free as Starr and Freeland (2024) indicate, given that it is a panethnic identity that includes people from a wide range of countries in the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent (Lee and Sheng 2024, 69). While Asian American is a useful construct for assessing the broad picture of assimilation trajectories compared to those of other large US ethno-racial groups, treating Asian Americans as a single self-identifying population risks reifying a highly diverse heterogeneous group of people – with distinctive national, ethno-racial, and religious origins, and who arrived as different types of immigrant, in distinct historical periods. The question arises as to whether a one-size-fits-all approach is adequate for understanding the experiences of race, racism, racialization, and discrimination among those categorised as Asian Americans. Perhaps a fuller understanding requires looking at what is happening behind the panethnic identity.

The contribution by Philip Kasinitz and Mary Waters (2024) addresses a core issue in contemporary debates over the value, or not, of assimilation perspectives moving forward; they inquire about the endpoint of assimilation or ‘integration’ for ethno-racial minorities – does this mean becoming white or becoming part of the mainstream? And if so, what would these ideas look like substantively as social processes of ethno-racial change in society, and can we see evidence for them today?

Kasinitz and Waters defend Alba’s perspective from criticisms of simply equating assimilation with ‘whitening’. First, they point out that new assimilationism always held a view that ethnic identity and racism would not simply wither away, a stance underpinned by Alba’s analyses of the historical assimilation of the so-call ‘white ethnics’ – Jews and European Catholics – in the last century. Second, they argue that Alba’s analytic descriptive accounts of demographic changes and the assimilation processes among post-1965 immigrants are misunderstood by critics who reject assimilation because members of ethno-racial groups often continue to subjectively experience discrimination and racism despite their upward socio-structural integration (see Lee and Sheng 2024). Kasinitz and Waters think this type of ‘race’ critique talks past rather than engages with Alba’s perspective. Instead, they propose a different idea of an ‘integration paradox’ as an alternative – one that sees ethno-racial minority groups’ feelings of exclusion as likely to increase as the integration of newcomer groups into mainstream social institutions advances, especially at the beginning of such processes (see Schaeffer and Kas 2023).

In their exploration of theories and literature on ‘whiteness’, Kasinitz and Waters note that the boundaries of who can be ‘white’ have been a concern for scholars, including some on the left who think whites should have a strong identity as ‘whites’ and recognize their white privilege. However, Kasinitz and Waters argue that while whiteness is an important marker of membership for many white Americans it has been a residual category – an empty signifier that is ‘oddly contentless’. For Kasinitz and Waters, this is actually a preferable outcome for society, because it points to a relative fluidity or flexibility of ethno-racial boundaries, rather than whites seeing themselves as a ‘privileged’ group, or alternatively from the right-wing of the spectrum, as a racial group that needs to remain ‘pure’. With regard to the future, they highlight that more research is needed on the best way to define the endpoint of assimilation and what would work well as a term ‘for encapsulating the identity created in the process’.

Applying a historical perspective, Nancy Foner (2024) shifts attention onto how immigrants and their descendants have radically transformed America over the longue durée. This follows her book-length exposition, One Quarter of the Nation: Immigration and the Transformation of America (2022). Foner argues that although it is standard today for perspectives to depict assimilation as a two-way process of adaptation and change, there remains an overemphasis on studying how immigrants and their children adapt and become incorporated into American society. To redress this balance, she studies how American society, politics, and culture have been changed or remade through immigration. Foner focuses on the half century since the US opened its doors to large-scale immigration in the mid-1960s. Indeed, starting from the fact that a quarter of US residents today are immigrants or children of immigrants, she discusses how immigration has transformed American society within three distinct domains: businesses and industries in the economy; national political party alignments; and popular culture and the arts. Her sensitivity to the significant creative contributions of immigrants in the past as well as the present acts as a useful corrective to the immediacy, contemporary (short-termism), and social structural orientation common to many assimilation studies.

Foner argues that immigration-driven transformations often involve other factors as well, among them opportunity structures. For example, the undisputed role of high-skilled immigrants and their offspring in the creation of high-tech companies should be seen in the context of a US financial system that supports entrepreneurship and the presence of world-class research universities. While Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk stand as poster-boys for the American immigrant dream, the process goes deeper; over half of start-ups valued at $1 billion or more have at least one immigrant founder. In addition, small-scale immigrant businesses have transformed highstreets and malls, with nail salons, fusion food, and other innovations that shape Americans’ experiences of everyday life. Overall, Foner presents a rich historical analysis, telling the story of how ‘re-making America’ is a constant churn of reinvention, hybridization, and transformation. What brings a great many Americans together – commonly perceived to be a constant fixed idea of national heritage – has also been in flux and a moving target (Foner 2022). In her contribution, Foner makes clear as well that changes created or stimulated by immigrants today are not a timeless replay of patterns found in earlier historical eras. Today’s experiences are distinctive in many ways and contextually bound. So, while her analysis of the recent past is, to a large degree, a story of optimism, there is no guarantee this will continue to play out the same way in the future.

The idea of a settled population culturally adapting to immigrants is at the heart of Nan Zhang and Maria Abascal’s (2024) contribution. Like Foner, they seek to demonstrate ‘the other side of assimilation’ (Jiménez 2017), in their case focusing on one historical example in which an established population adopted immigrant cultural practices. Using data from the 1860 Census – and naming as an indicator of the adoption of immigrant cultural practices – their original case study analyses the use of ‘American’ (rather than Hispanic) first names by the established Mexican American population (Mexican origin Californios) during the massive rapid inflow of Anglo immigrants in the 1849 California Gold Rush. Their findings demonstrate that children – especially boys – born to established Mexican Americans were significantly less likely to be given distinctively Hispanic names if they were born after 1849. Their replication of the study in areas that did not experience a rapid inflow of new American settlers failed to show similar patterns, confirming an immigration impact. Zhang and Abascal extrapolate from their study to speculate about its relevance for today’s scholarly debates over demographic change in the US. First, they argue that an established population’s motivation to acculturate to newcomers is likely to be influenced by the relative size of each group – and based on calculations about the established group’s possibility of ‘success’ in resisting, or accepting, the inevitability of becoming a numerical minority in the face of immigration. Second, power relations between ethno-racial groups help explain the likelihood of acculturation. Zhang and Abascal’s thesis is that those who retain significant power advantages are less likely to acculturate to immigrants than those who experience a decline in power and status. The latter are more likely to adapt to an ascendant immigrant group in what they call a defensive strategy. Zhang and Abascal’s historical contribution thus not only highlights the need to study power differentials between ethno-racial groups in social processes on the ‘other side of assimilation’, but also raises questions about whether, and to what extent, their findings are generalizable to other historical times, contexts, and cases of immigration that have occurred on different scales and at different speeds.

Integration and assimilation: European perspectives

Frank Kalter and Naika Foroutan (2024) offer an original empirical study using data from the new National Discrimination and Racism Monitor (NaDiRa) in Germany. Their approach addresses a dilemma: while strong evidence supports the new assimilation thesis that children of immigrants increasingly achieve social structural advancement in education and the labour market, this is not matched by their acceptance by the dominant group and recognition from mainstream society. While engaging directly with the new assimilationist framework, Kalter and Foroutan add another component to the story by drawing on theories that contrast realistic threat, i.e. perceived loss of resources, with symbolic threat, i.e. perceived loss of core values and norms in society. They pitch their explanatory idea of outgroup mobility threat (OMT) – fear of being overtaken by intergenerational mobility – against what they see as Alba’s optimistic perspective⁴ on non-zero-sum mobility that they think underplays the potential for ethnic competition.

The authors use a vignette study to test their thesis with a German-speaking population who were presented with twelve occupations and asked to evaluate the presence of different categories of minority groups. Initially, they found support for Alba’s non-zero-sum mobility in that perceived labour shortage in an occupation works well in explaining the different patterns of aversion to minorities. But subsequent findings complicate this picture: first, attitudes of rejection towards immigrant groups persist after controlling for market demand in different jobs, with the negative attitudes especially strong against ‘Muslim’ minorities; and second, there is significantly more rejection of minority groups for the public and political occupations – such as judges, positions of high political office, and public professions representing the state, notably teaching – that shape societal norms and values in liberal democracies. Kalter and Foroutan argue that their OMT and Alba’s zero-sum-mobility perspectives remain compatible in that they speak to different aspects of the same social process: i.e. the non-zero-sum logic works for realistic threats, but not for symbolic threats. If members of minority groups ascend to key positions that influence and shape societal values and norms, thereby challenging the existing arrangement of mainstream resources, then this is no longer a zero-sum game, nor is it perceived as such by the dominant established German group. Kalter and Foroutan conclude by posing the question of whether their core finding may be a spill-over of the increasingly high salience of identity politics conflicts in Germany, that are especially strong in European liberal democracies over the presence of Islam.

Mirna Safi’s (2024) contribution seeks to unpack the relationship between assimilation and discrimination, first conceptually, and then empirically, by analysing a large cross-sectional representative sample of individuals in metropolitan France. According to Safi, we gain insights and knowledge about postmigration trajectories if we simply do not see assimilation and discrimination as forces that push in opposite directions. Starting from a position that discrimination is a social process that occurs beyond the migration field, she distinguishes between civic discrimination against migratory attributes and ethno-racial discrimination.

Safi’s research design allows her to look across generations. Using data on individual self-perceptions of discrimination in France, a key finding is that ethno-racial minorities’ perceived discrimination is higher in magnitude and more persistent as we move from the immigrant to the second and third generations. This is especially the case for people with non-European immigrant backgrounds and who are Muslim. Specifically, Safi finds that perceptions of discrimination on the basis of being an immigrant – i.e. nationality, origin, accent – decline over the generations, which is in line with the assimilation perspective. However, perceived discrimination on the basis of skin-colour and religion either remains stable or increases among the second and third generations. Again, ‘Muslims’ merit special consideration. First-generation Muslim immigrants perceive discrimination on the basis of skin colour, nationality and origin, but not religion. By contrast, their children and grandchildren, who have grown up and been educated and socialised in France, more often identify religion as the basis on which they face discrimination. More generally, Safi advocates that the study of immigrant intergenerational social attainment should be more broadly incorporated into understandings of and research on the intergenerational reproduction of inequality.

Paul Statham (2024) examines how ‘Muslim’ has become the brightest boundary marker for minorities of immigrant origin in Europe, driven by resonant public and academic debates on multiculturalism, and specifically a focus on the assumed or real challenge of Muslims and Islam as a religion to ‘liberal democratic values’. He specifically critiques the role of social science as a legitimating factor in what he calls the Muslimification of Muslims. In discussing the Muslimification of Muslims, he criticizes an overfocus and bias in research on: (1) group boundaries between ‘Muslims’ and ‘Majorities’ (national non-Muslim, or Christian/secular) to the exclusion of other boundaries such as ethnicity, race, class, and gender; (2) religiosity to explain Muslims’ behaviour and attitudes, at the expense of other cultural or socio-economic variables; and (3) value conflicts over gender, religion and freedom of speech, etc. to explain social relations between Muslims and Majorities, rather than examining other forms of socio-cultural interaction (e.g. friendship and neighbourhood ties and shared identities) that cut across group boundaries.

In his original contribution challenging this dominant set of assumptions, Statham applies the same method (analysis of survey data) that is often used to ‘find’ and ‘explain’ supposed Muslim differences from majority populations. The empirical findings are clear-cut. First, not all ‘Muslim’ groups are the same. Ethnonational origin such as ‘Pakistani’ or ‘Turk’ matters for how people who are Muslim see boundaries with national majorities over ‘liberal democratic values’. Second, religiosity has a very modest impact in shaping Muslims’ perceptions of their differences with majorities over ‘liberal democratic values’ and even this modest impact is reduced when (non-religious) cultural factors are taken into account. Third, when Muslims are split by family ethnonational origin group, religiosity is statistically significant only for Pakistanis.

Statham argues for a de-Muslimification of academic thinking. Scholars should not shy away from using ‘Muslim’ because it does remain a valid and salient category of social practice. But Statham makes a number of suggestions. One is a need for greater reflexivity and awareness of the highly politicised context when using ‘Muslim’ as an analytic category. Also, it needs to made clear that today the phrase or concept ‘liberal democratic values’ is usually an ethnocentric construct that anti-multiculturalists deliberately mobilize to target and culturally ‘other’ Muslims in public debates. Academic thinking that starts from such problematic assumptions can reinforce stereotypes and legitimate negative views of Muslims – which are most likely not accurate depictions of the social world.

In her theoretical contribution, Lea Klarenbeek (2024), also calls for more intersectional academic thinking. She picks up on the recent strong criticisms of ‘integration’ perspectives and counter-critiques within European migration studies. Ultimately, she advocates a pragmatic middle-road stance by proposing that ‘integration’ be conceived as a subset of relational inequality.

More specifically, Klarenbeek proposes to start re-framing thinking on integration so that integration problems are re-conceived as a subset of relational inequalities, i.e. the sets of inegalitarian relations amongst people which constitute social closure, social hierarchies, and generate and justify inequalities in the distribution of freedoms, resources, and welfare. Crucially, she argues for a focus on ‘integration’ among all people, rather than the integration of some, i.e. migrants or minorities, into a social entity. According to Klarenbeek, this new type of theorisation can side-step the undesirable one-sided normative expectations placed on migrants by the old-style integration perspectives, while still keeping the door open for studying inequalities that result from immigration and its social consequences. In short, this perspective seeks to expand the frame of analysis by viewing immigration and its social consequences as affecting the whole of society, including analysing how all members of society see themselves and affect the regulation of institutions. The emphasis is on inequalities in society, based on the claim that migrants and their children can be best served if they are conceived on equal terms with other members of society, rather than being defined as a problem. To what degree this call for intersectionality can be a blueprint for large-scale empirical research or speak to the specific needs of immigrants and their children remains an open question. Nonetheless, Klarenbeek’s approach invites dialogue in a European migration field that has been increasingly polemicised in recent years.

Finally, in his ambitious and innovative contribution, Maurice Crul (2024) also seeks to re-frame and expand the reference group for European understandings of integration/assimilation. He self-consciously stands on the shoulders of new assimilation theory and segmented assimilation theory to offer an outline of his own ‘integration into diversity’ perspective. While new assimilation and segmented assimilation theories have been built around interpreting US experiences, Crul turns his attention to European cities. His starting assumption is that many cities and neighbourhoods across Europe are now majority-minority social contexts, where people without a migration background form a numerical minority. Although some might question the degree or factual validity of this claim, this does not detract from Crul’s approach of trying to see how people respond to increasingly diverse social contexts and where this might take understandings of integration. Increasing diversity is a socially experienced reality for all living in European metropolitan contexts, so there is great value in analysing what it means, where it leads, and for whom.

Crul’s primary focus is on the other side of assimilation and how people without migrant background – whom he calls the ‘former majority group’ – respond to the challenges of building a life within this new diverse reality. He aims to outline societal processes of adaptation that are bi- and multi-directional, with those in the former majority group also needing to make efforts to adapt to diverse school, work, and neighbourhood environments. In addition, he asserts that it is no longer correct to assume that positions of power are in the hands of the former majority group. A specific query central to Crul’s discussion is how members of this former majority group adapt to reversed power relationships relative to people with migrant backgrounds. His empirical survey-based findings suggest a strong division between those, on one side, who embrace diversity and gain in feelings of belonging and safety, and those, on the other side, who do not embrace diversity and tend to see themselves under threat. Also, the effects of diversity were stronger at the level of workplace and neighbourhood social relations but had little traction when it came to socio-economic outcomes.

There is clearly more research to undertake on this integration-into-diversity perspective, not least the degree to which city-level institutional frameworks and contexts continue to reinforce existing power asymmetries between migrants and non-migrants and between those in different ethno-racial groups in the face of increasing diversity. Nonetheless, Crul provides new insights as he addresses important societal changes of theoretical concern through an innovative empirical research agenda.

Cross-cutting themes and future agendas

This collection aims to stimulate thinking at the cutting-edge of assimilation and integration perspectives. We believe that by putting different scholars and perspectives alongside one another it is possible to generate new conceptual insights and stimulate new research across topics, approaches, and contexts. Transatlantic dialogue on immigration and its consequences, in our view, is an important meeting point for doing this, and indeed Richard Alba is a pioneer in contributing to dialogue of this kind. In this spirit, we look across the contributions to highlight a number of general themes that merit attention moving forward to advance ideas about assimilation and integration and to deepen our understanding of the processes associated with them.

The first theme is the self-identity of ethnic, racial, religious, and other minorities⁵ in relation to how they are identified by others, which includes being culturally defined as ‘groups’ in the social world as well as for purposes of academic inquiry. How those of immigrant origin identify themselves and are identified by others not only can affect assimilation and integration outcomes but also are shaped by the very processes of assimilation and integration. Pertinent here is Kasinitz and Waters’s (2024) discussion of the ‘integration paradox’, that is, the fact that greater integration of newcomer minority groups into high-status mainstream institutions – involving more exposure to the racial majority – commonly heightens perceptions of marginality, ‘outsider status’, and prejudice and racism.

Several contributors argue that we should give more space to minorities’ own voices and experiences of boundary-marking by using data that capture subjective aspects of their experiences and sense of belonging (see Starr and Freeland (2024), Lee and Sheng (2024), and Safi (2024)). In this regard, a question arises about the validity of using categories for ethno-racial groups that are drawn – often unreflectively – from state-legitimated Census categories or from majority-dominated public and political discourse (Statham 2024). Individuals of course can identify with and be categorised by others as belonging to more than one ethno-racial group. Pan-ethnic identities merit special attention. For example, two common pan-identities for minorities, ‘people of colour’ in the US (see Starr and Freeland 2024) and ‘Muslims’ in Europe (see Statham 2024), can mask distinctive ethnic, racial, religious, and national origin backgrounds and hierarchies among them. Which identity matters most – for analysis of assimilation processes and outcomes, and in the everyday social world – varies across institutional and social settings, time, spatial contexts, and by the scale of analysis.

A second theme concerns culture. Several contributors criticise what they view as an overemphasis on social structural indicators in standard assimilation and integration analyses, and a relative lack of attention to cultural factors and processes. Here Alba’s (2024) use of patterns of production and consumption of popular culture as an indicator of social integration and changing acceptance of ethnoracial diversity and minority groups is one possible way forward. Another direction is to deepen our understanding of societal-wide immigration-driven cultural change (see Foner 2022; 2024). A related point highlighted by several contributors is the need for more studies of culture’s role in boundary drawing from the perspective of dominant majority groups (Crul 2024; Foner 2024; Kalter and Foroutan 2024; Kasinitz and Waters 2024; Statham 2024; Zhang and Abascal 2024). Although assimilation is almost always conceptualised as a two-way process, most research still focuses strongly on minority adaptation and much less on the ‘other side of assimilation’, that is, how majority and dominant groups adapt to the presence of ethno-racial minorities and immigrants. Among the reasons that examining majority group viewpoints matters is that they are highly consequential in defining the terrain for minority self-identification as groups and the chances for assimilation among those of immigrant origin.

A third theme deserving attention is the relationship between assimilation, on one side, and racism and anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiments, on the other. Often there is an implicit assumption in the academic literature, as well as in common everyday understandings, that assimilation and racism relate to one another in a zero-sum way. In other words, that increasing minority assimilation and integration will lead to a decline in racism, or the other way round, that increasing racism by majorities will lead to a decline in assimilation. However, some contributions here support a different interpretation, i.e. that assimilation and racism are relatively distinct social processes, with different drivers – and can co-exist over periods of time (see, for example, Kasinitz and Waters (2024) on US assimilation processes). In the European context, Statham (2024) argues that the strong ‘othering’ of Muslims in Europe through dominant public debates and populist politics over ‘liberal democratic values’ means that majorities are likely to remain oppositional to Muslims and Islam, which, he maintains, can be relatively independent of the degree to which Muslim minorities acculturate in their social actions on the ground. In their contribution, Kalter and Foroutan (2024) find high barriers among the German majority against the inclusion of Muslims into professions that shape societal values and norms – what they call a symbolic threat. Their analysis suggests that anti-Muslim sentiments over ‘value conflicts’ appear to have become entrenched and are likely to be difficult to dislodge, at least in the near future, despite a considerable degree of Muslim integration. Whatever the particular argument, there is analytic traction to be gained by considering racism (including Islamophobia) and assimilation/integration as separate, though often linked, social processes, and examining how and when they combine and interact.

A fourth general theme is the importance of histories of immigration. While acknowledging that history does not repeat itself precisely, several contributors argue that we can gain insights into contemporary social processes through analyses of earlier historical periods of immigration (see Foner (2024), Zhang and Abascal (2024), and the summary of Alba’s work in this chapter). This includes analyses of factors facilitating the assimilation and integration of earlier immigrants and their descendants and cultural and institutional changes driven by large-scale immigration in the past.

History helps, too, in understanding how assimilation and integration processes play out in different national and spatial settings This comes out most clearly in this collection in the contrasts between contributions based on Europe vs. the US. Public understandings of histories of immigration are relatively culturally specific to national contexts. A commonly heard public narrative in the US emphasizes the history of immigration that goes back to the founding of the nation and earlier immigrants’ significant role in building it. At the same time, US scholarship about immigration, including contributions here, has highlighted how immigration re-makes America, including the ‘other side of assimilation’ where established communities culturally adapt to immigrants and mainstream cultural tastes are transformed by new diversity. Viewed though this lens, American society is seen as in a dynamic flux of transformations, driven in good part by substantial demographic changes, so that contemporary US mainstream society and ethno-racial divisions have been analysed by some scholars, Alba prominent among them, as open to challenges to include immigrants and their children, even if they also recognize exclusionary elements and barriers that persist, as well. While the state in the US is, to a large degree, non-interventionist when it comes to immigrant integration, scholars generally see immigration and immigrants as important demographic and economic drivers of societal change. This contrasts with their European counterparts who tend to view immigrant integration through a lens of state interventions, policies, and obligations that are designed to manage and shape immigrant adaptations towards a goal of social cohesion.

Although today’s European societies and populations are significantly built on immigrants past and present, this is not how Europeans define themselves in mainstream public cultural representations and institutional politics. Unlike in the US, immigration has not been a core part of nation-building processes in Europe, and large-scale immigration from outside the European continent is mainly a post-World War II phenomenon. A combination of postcolonial guilt and denial also shapes how immigration, ethno-racial diversity, and contemporary immigrants are understood in Europe today. Public narratives in Europe focus heavily on specific ‘integration problems’ of ethnic, racial, and religious minorities for the state to address – seen as a result of past large-scale postcolonial and guestworker immigrations in the 1950s/60s – while the state seeks to close the door on newcomers by defending a fixed idea of a homogeneous exclusive national identity. In contrast to the US, European governments usually focus on state interventions and obligations for integrating ethnic and racial minorities – often viewed as permanent fixed minorities. European scholarship often frames research questions around how ethnic, racial, or religious minorities can adapt (with state support) socially and culturally to become more like majority national populations. Although it is standard for European scholars to acknowledge that integration is a two-way process, there is still a tendency – implicit or explicit – to see the majority population as a fixed, permanent, culturally homogeneous reference point for measuring integration outcomes. Compared to the US, there is less research on ‘the other side of assimilation’ and the demographic expansion and diversification of mainstream society. These differences have a lot to do with the fact that US and European scholars are working in societies with different historical backgrounds and cultural contexts of immigration and distinctive state institutional frameworks.

This leads to a fifth theme: the transferability of assimilation and integration concepts across distinct historical, cultural, and spatial contexts. We remain strong advocates of the benefits of cross-national comparative approaches that encourage researchers to think ‘out of the box’ regarding their specific national settings (Alba and Foner 2015; Koopmans et al. 2005). For example, US-based topics and concepts, such as ‘the other side of assimilation’ and ‘majority-minority’, would make for innovative research questions in European countries, something that Crul (2024) pioneers here. Even if scholars share theoretical, conceptual, and analytic common ground, however, the contributions to this Special Issue indicate that those in the US and Europe tend to view assimilation and integration issues through different lenses. Partly this is because scholars in the US and Europe belong to different academic and wider political communities that define and legitimate distinctive interpretive frameworks for analysing assimilation/integration. Specific national histories and public narratives of immigration play a role, too, in shaping which research questions are selected as meaningful, the language in which concepts are framed, and whether and how findings are seen as socially and politically relevant. Although assimilation and integration perspectives have a degree of universality as theoretical ideas and analytic approaches, just how they are interpreted and used (or if they are used at all) by scholars tends to depend, at least in part, on the history and culture of immigration and nature of migration studies in the specific society where they are based and do research. This is relevant for scholarship on immigration in world regions beyond the North Atlantic, for example, Singapore or Thailand in Southeast Asia, that have different immigration histories, national cultures, and institutional frameworks and traditions that influence the study of ethno-racial diversity. In the future, scholars can do more to bring academics from postcolonial and developing societies into the conversation, which will help us to understand how applicable assimilation and integration perspectives are to societies beyond the ‘wealthy West’.

A final theme concerns criticisms that assimilation and integration perspectives face from critical race and postcolonial theories. Fortunately, not all scholars influenced by critical theories see the value of integration and assimilation perspectives as an all or nothing choice. In recent years, there have been increasing examples of critical theorists whose work seeks to inform, influence, and transform the ways that integration and assimilation are theorised and studied. Indeed, Lee and Sheng’s (2024) focus on race and racialization processes among Asian Americans is a case of an assimilation perspective being inspired by race theory. In Europe, the call for a de-migranticization (Dahinden 2016) of ethnic and migration research has gained salience as a critique: in this view categorising migrants as ‘migrant groups’ in social science can lead to their marginalization by reinforcing their subordinate status, so it is argued that studies should apply other broader intersectional categories. In a similar vein, Lea Klarenbeek’s (2024) contribution here, arguing that integration should be conceived as a subset of relational inequality, aims to better include immigrants in broader studies of relations that affect all people in a society. While greater (non-migrant-specific) intersectional analyses may well be a source of new insights, it remains unclear how migrants’ experiences can be fully understood or their social needs served if they are not categorised as migrants, not least when the problems they face, such as low status, discrimination, and legal issues, result from asymmetric power relations and inequalities that confront them specifically as ‘migrants’. In trying to grasp inequalities in increasingly superdiverse societies there are no straightforward easy answers. Wherever one stands in theoretical debates, it is important that there be ongoing dialogue. Ideas about assimilation and integration are not fixed or static or uniform; scholarship on them continues to evolve, driven by critiques and counter-critiques, not to mention empirical findings. This is the way forward for the academy, a collective effort that tries to unpack and better understand the messiness of the social world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See the CUNY news tribute to Richard Alba https://www.gc.cuny.edu/news/immigration-and-race-scholar-who-bucks-conventional-thought and the event celebrating his retirement (https://www.gc.cuny.edu/events/celebrating-scholarship-richard-alba).

2 Directly influenced by Starr and Freeland’s (2024) contribution, Alba (2024) applies ‘not-white’ for individuals who are not members of the white, European-descent majority group because they have socially visible African, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern or Indigenous ancestry, though they may be regarded as racially white by skin tone. For Alba’s comments on this see his interview in this Special Issue with Paul Statham (Alba, Statham, and Foner 2024)

3 Here, we use ‘people of colour’ but recognise following Starr and Freeland (2024) this is interchangeable with ‘person(s) of colour’. Please also note that we are required to keep a uniform usage of language throughout the text and will therefore use English rather than US spelling, except when US usage is in a direct quotation.

4 For Alba’s own view on this type of claim about his normative ‘optimism’, see his interview in this Special Issue (Alba, Statham, and Foner 2024).

5 In the remainder of this introductory chapter we use ‘ethnoracial’ to cover these diverse groups to make the text flow more easily, except when specific reference to a minority group is required.