ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews educational policies and practices towards recent immigrants to the United States and focuses on the extent to which such policies foster or inhibit cultural pluralism. It provides careful investigation of resettlement procedures and educational programmes for three recent immigrant groups: Hungarians, Cubans and Vietnamese. Such an exercise allows us to identify United States policy and its continuity over recent decades and the ways in which domestic and international politics as well as the nature of immigrant populations themselves influence educational policies. Hungarians, the earliest of the immigrants considered in the chapter, were not the focus of specialised educational programmes, bilingual or otherwise, within the American school system. Rather, they were given individual educational assistance in the form of direct grants to be used for college for Hungarian youth who were college students at the time they came to the United States. The type of education designed for Vietnamese immigrants reveals the essence of American policy towards immigrants.
