Immigrants’ Sociocultural and Civic-Political Assimilation: Different Groups, Different Contexts, and Different Trajectories

Abstract

In this chapter we comparatively examine the patterns of sociocultural and civic-political incorporation into the host, American society of members of our eight immigrant groups. The findings on their residential locations, modes of economic incorporation, and reception by native Americans reported in the previous chapter are treated here as circumstances contributing to particular trajectories of immigrants’ socio-cultural and civic-political assimilation.¹ The typology of assimilation patterns used in the earlier analysis is also applied to the examination of immigrants’ sociocultural integration. Here, it denotes mainstream and/or ethnic-group dominant and subsidiary “profiles of cultural orientations” (Kluckhohn 1950), reference frameworks, location of social relations, identities, and commitments which usually assume the features of class-position and social milieus of their actor-carriers’ everyday participation.