Ethnic Organizations and Adaptation: A Case Study of Indian Immigrant Engineers in the US

The United States has witnessed waves of immigration throughout its history, with the current immigration policies regulated by the reforms enacted under President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Immigrants now come from all over the world, with China and India supplying the largest numbers in science and engineering (S&E) fields. Although the US is seen as coping rather successfully with immigration from Europe, that is not the case with Asian immigration. Assimilation theorists have long argued that Asian immigrants face problems in adapting to the American culture and lifestyles; in contrast, multicultural theorists have hailed cultural diversity brought by Asian immigrants. Ethnic organizations can play an integral role in Asian immigrants’ adaptation and integration in the United States. Utilizing 40 in-depth interviews of Indian immigrant engineers working in the US technology companies, the present study examines if they belong to ethnic associations. If yes, why do they feel a need to belong to these associations? If no, why not? It further sheds light on their need to belong to such associations. The findings show that the need to belong to Indian associations varied with the stage of their lives, which can be depicted as a U-shaped curve.

Latinx Assimilation

Latinx is a gender-neutral, gender non-binary, gender non-conforming, and gender-inclusive label that refers to Latin American–origin groups in the United States. Since there are, by some counts, roughly thirty of these groups, Latinx, like Asian Pacific American, is a pan-ethnic label. Assimilation generally refers to a sociocultural process of absorption, of becoming more alike, and of boundary crossing (e.g., from margin to mainstream). When assimilation happens, the mainstream or the host society absorbs the minority or the newcomer, or the minority or the newcomer comes to resemble the majority or the host. In some instances, the majority or host takes on some of the minority’s or newcomer’s traits. Assimilation is widely seen as an outcome of immigration to the United States. However, before it was associated with immigration, assimilation was linked to efforts to “civilize” Native Americans and African Americans. Assimilation is sometimes used synonymously with acculturation, Americanization, incorporation, and integration. In the master narrative of immigration and assimilation, immigrants arrive and never look back. They change their names, learn English, acquire capital, and participate in mainstream institutions and culture. Within a couple of generations, their descendants blend in. Above all, assimilation is connected to ideas about who belongs in the United States. A pillar of the US nation-making project, it is a tool for distinguishing outsiders from insiders. More than a process of absorption, becoming more alike, and boundary crossing, assimilation is a relation of power. In some instances, groups are assimilated not as homologous peers but as distinct, subordinate, and even excluded others. These groups are, paradoxically, outsiders on the inside. Because Latinxs are a heterogeneous group and not all Latinxs are immigrants, there is no and has never been a single or homogeneous Latinx experience of assimilation. Some Latinxs assimilate in ways in which assimilation is generally understood: they move from margin to mainstream and blend in with the majority. Others are folded into a community made up of people from the same country of origin and have relatively little interaction with the dominant society. Others are assimilated as outsiders on the inside. Latinx assimilation is frequently studied in the context of language (specifically, English and Spanish), bilingualism, citizenship, naturalization, upward mobility, labor, entrepreneurship, education, conflicts and alliances between immigrants and US-born Latinxs, gender relations, and generational differences (especially between immigrant parents and their US-born children). In short, there are many ways Latinxs have or have not assimilated. Likewise, there are many ways to narrate the histories of Latinx assimilation. There is no single or definitive history of Latinx assimilation.

The “Negative” Assimilation of Immigrants: A Special Case

This chapter studies whether “negative” assimilation among immigrants living in the United States occurs if skills are highly transferable internationally. It outlines the conditions for negative assimilation in the context of the traditional immigration assimilation model, in which negative assimilation arises not from a deterioration of skills but from a decline in the wages afforded by skills coincident with the duration of residence. The authors use U.S. Census data from 1980, 1990, and 2000 to test the hypothesis on immigrants to the United States from English-speaking developed countries. They present comparisons with native-born workers to determine whether the findings are sensitive to immigrant cohort quality effects and find that even after controlling for these effects, negative assimilation still occurs for immigrants in the sample. They also find that negative assimilation occurs for immigrants from English-speaking developed countries living in Australia and for immigrants from Nordic countries living in Sweden.

Immigration, Identity, and Genealogy: A Case Study

This paper examines the life and experiences of a 19th-century immigrant from the British Isles to the United States and his family. It examines his reasons for immigrating, as well as his experiences after arrival. In this case, the immigrant chose to create a new identity for himself after immigration. Doing so both severed his ties with his birth family and left his American progeny without a clear sense of identity and heritage. The essay uses a variety of sources, including oral history and folklore, to investigate the immigrant’s origins and examine how this uncertainty shaped the family’s history in the 19th and 20th centuries. New methodologies centering on DNA analysis have recently offered insights into the family’s past. The essay ends by positing a birth identity for the family’s immigrant ancestor. Importantly, the family’s post-immigration experiences reveal that the immigrant and his descendants made a deliberate effort to retain aspects of their pre-immigration past across both time and distance. These actions underscore a growing body of literature on the limits of post-immigration assimilation by immigrants and their families, and indicate the value of genealogical study for analyzing the immigrant experience.

Reclaiming Filipino America through Performance and Film

Filipino Americans are the fourth largest migrant group in America and the second largest Asian population in the United States. Migration from the Philippines is constant and has increased dramatically in the last sixty years. Filipino Americans participate as the ‘Asian American’ identity/race but the specificity of Philippine-U.S. relations and migration pathways make this inclusion a misfit. As a former territory and with complex shifting migration policies, Filipinos have been considered by the U.S. government an ambiguous population, falling just out of reach of national visibility. As the population has continued to grow, Filipino Americans have shared narratives and begun conversation to address the constant cultural negotiation and struggles within the social and racial structures of America. Since the 1980s, a Filipino American cultural and artistic movement or ‘moment’, has emerged with artists, dancers, performers, and filmmakers. These artists make critical interventions that disavow the American empire. The works make comment upon the ramifications of being an unrecognized Asian colony and the systemic challenges of immigration assimilation. An example of a work from this cultural moment is Jose Antonio Vargas’ autobiographical documentary Documented (2013). The film, intended as an up close and personal account of an undocumented migrant in the United States, also serves as an example of current Filipino American cultural productivity and visibilization. By studying this artistic movement, one can approach deeper understandings of citizenship and national belonging(s) in the current transnational climate and the border crossings that circumscribe the Filipino American diaspora.

Immigration, Assimilation, and Conflict

This chapter examines the deployment of counter-incorporative strategies as a means to thwart potentially dangerous elements from entering the eating body. In particular, it examines how, through the language of disease and contamination that proliferates in the realm of immigration and its effect on culture, select national cultures are portrayed as under attack from foreigners and their filthy, debased bodies. Marked with cannibalism as the ultimate expression of savagery and human degradation, these bodies evoke anxiety and deep-seated fear of extinction in the national consciousness. Focusing on select texts by Edwidge Danticat, Andrea Levy, and Gisèle Pineau—works that have become entrenched in the canon of Caribbean women's writings thanks to their framing of food and eating as symbolic practices in diasporic identity formation—the chapter analyzes the national body as an ingesting, digesting, and excreting organism. It explores the twin phenomena of cannibalism, that is: taking in difference in order to neutralize its negative impacton the receiving body, and anthropemy—the elimination of sickening symptoms by vomiting the ingested foreign body.