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Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation: The American Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2010

Gary Gerstle
Gary Gerstle
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
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Abstract

This essay offers a historical overview of processes of immigrant political incorporation in the United States. It identifies three dimensions of incorporation—legal, cultural, and institutional—and argues that the unevenness of progress among these three dimensions has rendered the process of incorporation fraught and frequently marked by contradiction. It also distinguishes between “acquiescent” and “transformational” modes of incorporation and stresses that the latter, though often perceived as threatening by the native-born, is often the more enduring and meaningful way of becoming American. Finally, it assesses the prospects for incorporation among immigrants in the United States today.

Type
Fixing America's Broken Immigration System
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , Fall 2010 , pp. 110 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2010

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References

NOTES

1. For the laws of citizenship, see Zolberg, Aristide R., A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Gerstle, Gary, “America's Encounters with Immigrants,” in In Search of Progressive America, ed. Kazin, Michael, Becker, Frans, and Hurenkamp, Menno (Philadelphia, 2008), 37–53Google Scholar.

2. Gerstle, Gary, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History 84 (September 1997), 524–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fass, Paula, “‘Americanizing’ the High Schools: New York in the 1930s and ‘40s,” in Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education, ed. Fass, Paula (New York, 1989), 73–111Google Scholar; Tyack, David, “School for Citizens: The Politics of Civic Education from 1790 to 1990,” in E Pluribus Unum? Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation, ed. Gerstle, Gary and Mollenkopf, John (New York, 2001), 331–70Google Scholar; Rumbaut, Rubén G., “Assimilation and Its Discontents: Ironies and Paradoxes,” in The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Hirschman, Charles, Kasinitz, Philip, and DeWind, Josh (New York, 1999), 182–85Google Scholar; Portes, Alejandro and Rumbaut, Rubén G., Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley, 2001), 113–46Google Scholar; Jacoby, Tamar, “The New Immigrants: A Progress Report,” in Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to Be American, ed. Jacoby, Tamar (New York, 2004), 23–24Google Scholar.

3. Ngai, Mae M., Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ, 2004)Google Scholar.

4. Daniels, Roger, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Gerstle, Gary, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ, 2001), chapter 3Google Scholar; Kayyali, Randa A., The Arab Americans (Westport, CT, 2006), 45–64Google Scholar.

5. Svonkin, Stuart, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Kurashige, Scott, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton, NJ, 2008)Google Scholar; Gutiérrez, David, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, CA, 1995)Google Scholar; Bukowczyk, John J., “The Transformation of Working-Class Ethnicity: Corporate Control, Americanization, and the Polish Immigrant Middle Class in Bayonne, New Jersey, 1915–1925,” Labor History 25 (Winter 1984): 53–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Gerstle, Gary, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Sanchez, George, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Bell, Thomas, Out of This Furnace (1941; Pittsburgh, PA, 1976)Google Scholar; Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

7. Ibid.; Andersen, Kristi, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928–1936 (Chicago, 1979)Google Scholar.

8. Gerstle, American Crucible, chapters 4–5; Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar; Denning, The Cultural Front; Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice; Schultz, Kevin M., “‘Favoritism Cannot Be Tolerated’: Challenging Protestantism in America's Public Schools and Promoting the Neutral State,” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 565–91Google Scholar.

9. Gerstle, American Crucible, chapter 5; Denning, The Cultural Front.

10. On challenges to Jim Crow and racial inequality in the South and the North in the 1930s and 1940s, see Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York, 2008)Google Scholar and Sugrue, Thomas J., Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008)Google Scholar.

11. For one such interpretation, see Gerstle, American Crucible, chapter 8 and epilogue.

12. Huntington, Samuel, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

13. For an argument in favor of a guest worker program framed in progressive terms, see Alejandro Portes, “The Fence to Nowhere,” The American Prospect, September 24, 2007, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_fence_to_nowhere, accessed June 10, 2010.

14. For an argument for the importance of bilateral negotiations, see Jeff Faux, “What to Really Do about Immigration,” The American Prospect, January 17, 2008, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=what_to_really_do_about_immigration, accessed June 10, 2010.

15. For an intriguing exploration of the influence of globalization on the cultural and affective experience of immigrants in contemporary America, see Levitt, Peggy, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape (New York, 2009)Google Scholar.

16. See Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, 113–46.

17. Andersen, The Creation of a Democratic Majority.

18. A comprehensive account of the Nashville English-only battle has yet to be written, but one can glimpse the different groups involved and the issues at stake in the reporting done by local newspapers. See, for example, Chris Echegaray, “Nashville's English-Only Measure Defeated,” The Tennessean, January 23, 2009, http://www.tennessean.com/article/20090123/PROMO/101230008, accessed June 10, 2010.

19. Some of the arguments for this point of view are set forth in Gerstle, Gary and Mollenkopf, John, “The Political Incorporation of Immigrants, Then and Now,” in E Pluribus Unum? ed. Gerstle, and Mollenkopf, , 1–30Google Scholar.

20. For a classic statement about the effects of poverty on the assimilation of the children of immigrants in contemporary America, see Portes, Alejandro and Zhou, Min, “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 (November 1993): 74–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.