ABSTRACT
A comparative review I wrote more than ten years ago of the main issues that informed the American sociology and history of immigration since the late 1960s (Morawska, 1990) identified two themes-arguments shared by these two disciplines. Combined, they have unsettled the classical paradigms that dominated American studies of immigration and ethnicity from their inception as an academic discipline until the mid-1960s. One of them was the assumption that in modern and, in particular, American society the socioeconomtc and the life course in general of immigrants and their offspring depended mainly on individual value orientations, skills, and motivations. The other, based on the underlying vision of modern (American) society, was the premise-curn-prescription of assimilation conceived of as the linear progressive weakening and ultimate disappearance of the primordial traits and of ethnicity as succeeding generations adopted the mainstream society's unitary system of cultural values and became absorbed in economic, social, and political networks that are blind to ethnic differences.
