Theories of International Mobility and the Incorporation of Immigrants
Class 6: Immigrant Adaptation and Incorporation
Key issues making it difficult to understand what happens to immigrants after they arrive:
- normative vs. descriptive views
- stories and myth-making
- scale: intra-individual, individual, family, population
- intra- vs. inter-generational
Benet-Martínez 2018
Can individuals simultaneously hold two (or more) sets of cultural meaning systems (i.e., norms and values, attachments, and behavioral repertoires)?
Cultural Frame Shifting
- shifting between different cultural registers in response to contextual cultural cues
- requires relevant cultural schemas to be:
- cognitively available (i.e., relevant cultural values, norms, attitudes, etc. have been internalized)
- cognitively accessible (these schemas have been recently activated by explicit or implicit contextual cues)
- applicable to the situation
Acculturation
- integration/biculturalism (engagement with both cultures)
- separation (engagement with the ethnic culture only)
- assimilation (engagement with the dominant culture only)
- marginalization (lack of engagement with either culture)
Bicultural Identity Integration
- degree to which biculturals “perceive their mainstream and ethnic cultural identities as compatible and integrated vs. oppositional and difficult to integrate”
- cultural harmony vs. conflict
- cultural blendedness vs. compartmentalization
Yiu 2013
Theories of Incorporation
- Straight-line Assimilation
- Segmented Assimilation
- Structural/Institutional Context
- Multiculturalism
- Interculturalism
Dimensions of Assimilation
- Linguistic
- Spatial
- Economic
- Cultural
- Political
- ...
Bosnian Settlement in US
Segregation
- systematic spatial differences across groups
Residential Segregation
- Consequences
- Causes
- Policy connection
- Measurement
Exposure
Role of Policy
- Admissions policy
- Integration policy
- Sanctions and enforcement
- Expulsion
- Discrimination/anti-discrimination policy
- Education policy
- ...