The Assimilated and the Visitor: An Immigrant Moral Economy of Assimilation

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 6: Status, Legitimacy, & Legitimation

Abstract

Much of the general public, and political and academic discourse on immigrant integration agrees on the idea that immigrant assimilation is a good thing. What remains widely debated is the nature, or extent of the expected assimilation. But how much assimilation is “right” according to immigrants themselves? How do they navigate assimilationist norms? This study draws from 70 in-depth interviews with immigrant parents and their children across a wide range of national backgrounds and racialization experiences, living in the Chicago area. The paper is theoretically anchored in the critical literature on assimilation(ism). Applying such a framework to analyze the discourses of immigrants in the U.S., I highlight how immigrant families navigate often contradictory expectations around assimilation and cultural maintenance in a context usually described as that of a multiculturalist “country of immigrants.” Interviewees conceive of assimilation based on the requirements of their living conditions (e.g., language skills for work) as well as normative discourses that either emphasize the necessity to fit in, or that challenge the very existence of a cultural mainstream to assimilate into. This cultural balancing act is made more evident by the specters of the (non)assimilated. Immigrants regularly position themselves against the counterexample figure of “the Assimilated” having gone too far and, in some cases, distance themselves from “the Visitor”—those non-assimilated on the other end of the spectrum. These two “failed” immigration figures not only delineate the contours of a “successful” integration trajectory according to U.S.-based immigrants. They also expose the elusive nature of the assimilationist norm for immigrants who must walk a fine line between cultural maintenance and Americanization. Ultimately, I argue that exploring the moral economy of assimilation from immigrants’ perspective highlights the nature of assimilation as a relational, and paradoxical moral obligation that otherwise obscures a larger context of racialized assimilationism.

Author

• Sonia Blanche Planson, Brown University