Assimilation among today's mostly Latin American and Asian immigrant groups looks a lot like it did generations ago, when most immigrants came from Europe." Assimilation is a vitally important outcome for immigrants and their descendants, but Europe and the United States have vastly different experiences. This is what creates mass confusion and perpetuates the identity crisis (and ignorant comments from television news personalities). What I am saying is that the American culture is depraved. To ascertain this, we must first understand three major theories of immigrant and ethnic-group integration. What does assimilation mean these days? Assessing present levels of assimilation among today's immigrant groups requires considering the possibility that the process itself may be changing. Our workplaces, consumers and communities are multi-cultural, multi-generational, multi-gender, multi-skilled – we each have different needs, personalities, strengths, experiences and temperaments. In this paper, U.S. Census Bureau survey data are used to investigate how well the assimilation process is working for today's immigrants. Frequent intermarriage is one of the strongest signals of social assimilation by an ethnic group. To determine how different the famine-era Irish immigrants were from earlier Irish immigrants, contemporaneous immigrants from Britain and Germany, and US-born adult men, we started by comparing In today’s narrowcast world, pluribus triumphs over unum. We all talk about Millennials and Gen Z – two generations that, combined, will be the largest workforce population of our time. Nonetheless, opposition to immigration today is whipped up by conservatives who claim that assimilation is not occurring and that instead most immigrants are a burden on our society. Integration is occurring fastest in the areas of citizenship and homeownership, with high school completion and earnings also rising. It generates two different kinds of assimilation in today’s immigrants: one is superficial, and it takes place when immigrants find jobs, make money, and start living on the outside like other Americans. The longer immigrants are in the United States, the more integrated they become—a fact that remains consistent across the nation, regardless of whether they came from Mexico and Central America or from other countries. Many Americans fall prey to the presumption, largely unconscious, that “immigrants are like Peter Pan—forever frozen in their status as newcomers, never aging, never advancing economically, and never assimilating…people who perpetually resemble newcomers.” Seeing the data on immigrant advancement may be surprising and should help dispel the illogical Peter Pan fallacy. This is not idealism, but a new reality that we continue to ignore and are thus unprepared to act upon. After a few generations in the United States, so much intermarriage had taken place among the descendants of earlier European immigrants that most white Americans could choose among multiple ancestries or ethnic identities. There are now 14 states that have foreign-born populations greater than the national average share of 12.5 percent. This makes sense when you consider that the Cultural Demographic Shift is in full-force in the United States. The word has its roots in the Latin ‘‘simulare,’’ meaning to make similar. The share of foreignborn men earning above low-income levels in our country, for example, rose to 66 percent in 2008, the last year for which complete data is available, from just 35 percent in 1990 when the immigrants were recently arrived. Indeed, in Arizona—the state that now has immigrants in the crosshairs of its law enforcement officials—Latino immigrants have proven much more successful than some assume. What is the American Way in 2019? Some may have arrived with a strong desire to assimilate, but little knowledge of how to do so. The Next Step | Small Business Video Series, Amazon Readies To Take Over The Post-Pandemic World, The Vaccine Is Bringing Back Simple Pleasures, How Companies Can Avoid A Crisis Created By CDC’s New Mask Guidelines, Interview With Larry Ackerman, Founder And Partner Of Identity Dynamics Institute, Healthcare Leaders Explore Lessons Learned To Prepare For The Next Pandemic. The story of immigrants in our nation is about newcomers integrating into our society and then strengthening our culture and especially our economy. The cultural assimilation of Native Americans was a series of efforts by the United States to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream European–American culture between the years of 1790 and 1920. Whether you are from a diverse background or not, we are ALL battling the gulf between assimilation and authenticity. Soccer is now a national pastime, at least among youth, and millions of sports fans cheer the hundreds of immigrants who are members of Major League Baseball. The high rate of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews is considered both an indication and source of Jewish-American assimilation. The Irish immigrants left a rural lifestyle in a nation lacking modern industry. People waste more time being what others want them to be rather than what they seek to be themselves. It can involve speech patterns, dialect or accents associated with certain regions, but it is often about actual spoken language differences. shores today are following closely in the path of their predecessors, assimilating rapidly just like they did in the past—as most Americans witness every day in one way or another. As the CEO of one of the largest cancer centers recently told me, “inclusion is a survival strategy.”. Whether you like it or not, America will never look like and will never operate like it did 20 years ago. The attitudes and behavior of the second generation in comparison to its immigrant parents reveal the extent of its adaptation to America and commitment to a … No matter how the Supreme Court rules on the Arizona law, this problem of assimilation will remain. As of today, only 112 of the roughly 300 original Native American languages are still spoken. Today in the U.S. many people want Latina/os to throw off their rich heritage and assimilate to Anglo-American culture, almost as a prerequisite for gaining social acceptance and U.S. citizenship. The lack of modernized ideologies, systems and inclusive methods to build trustworthy relationships has made it difficult for people to pull themselves forward. The results show that assimilation is happening across our nation. 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