Immigration Assimilation

671 Words3 Pages
What Good is Assimilation? “No American should ever live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like.” Mr. Obama emphasized his concern that the intact Arizona’s immigration law, “show me your papers”, could lead to racial profiling on June25, 2012 after announcing the Supreme Court’s decision. Immigration is one of the highly controversial issues in the U.S. Some people claim that immigrant assimilation is not occurring and that instead most immigrants are a burden on in the U.S. society. However, before the society requires assimilation and criticized the lack of immigrant assimilation into the U.S., any requirement for assimilating should be based on the true understanding of immigrants. And insightful analysis of the…show more content…
But in fact, assimilation can be much worse for immigrants’ well-being than it is for native citizens’. It is true that blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are at the bottom of the social hierarchy while European immigrants seem to assimilate and join white society in social and cultural terms. Even though very few of the immigrants of color can cross the line into whit-ness, most of them are forced to assimilate to a racially divided society in terms of social status. Aviva Chomsky, the author of “Thy Take Our Jobs!” And 20 Other Myths About Immigration, 2007, defines that “in contrast of white immigrants, for people of color assimilation means downward mobility.”(P109) She points out “the relationship between assimilation and downward mobility has been especially noted in studies of school-children.” For instance, Education professor Marcelo Suarez-Orozco has studied Latino adolescents. The study discovers that “the most recent immigrants tended to be the students with the highest aspirations and the strongest belief in the American dream.” “As they became more Americanized, they entered an oppositional inner-city teenage culture that valued money, drugs and reckless behaviors – the opposite of the hopeful and hard-working recent arrivals”(P106). The current structure of society often imposes immigrants into the vicious cycle of downward mobility, but if the structure were changed to allow for more flexibility in assimilation, the society will be

More about Immigration Assimilation

Open Document