ABSTRACT
In public discourse and political debates, the goal of assimilation - referring to the amalgamation of immigrants with the core of an immigrant society - is in ill repute. Since the 1960s it has been a debated and, according to some views, even politically and normatively incorrect term. In an age of multiculturalism and global diasporas, it is especially the normative prescriptions of amalgamation and the ideology of assimilation - assimilationism - that have been the constant target of criticism (Bauman, 1991, p. 102). In addition to social and civic integration, assimilation seems to demand the almost complete cultural adaptation of newcomers to the new country of immigration. There is also a rich literature on subcultures which suggests that such a concept depicting the core of a society to which immigrants can eventually amalgamate would be questionable. Even French policy-makers, who have been known to constitute the vanguard of upholding the idea of assimilation, have replaced this term with diffuse words such as insertion or integration
(Vermeulen, 1997). One may contend that the underlying French policies have not changed much. Nevertheless, even among hard-nosed representatives of assimilation in public debates, there has been a rhetorical sea change. However, a look at empirical, real world developments of immigrant integration raises doubts as to whether assimilation is really a phenomenon of the past. After all, empirical studies of the integration processes of labor migrants who have arrived since the 1960s in the USA and Europe do not contradict the projections of the assimilation model: One of the tenets of the assimilation model developed by the Chicago School of Sociology is that the first generation partly acculturates to the country of immigration, and that the second generation experiences full acculturation and social integration. Despite manifold exclusionary processes in the socio-economic and political spheres, empirical studies have usually confirmed some sort of assimilatory process (DeWind et al.; 1997, Esser and Friedrich, 1990; Brubaker, 2001). And even novel processes, such as the adaptation of recent immigrants to sub-cultural groups and not to the core of society - ‘segmented assimilation’ (Portes and Zhou, 1994) - do not contradict this general finding. How do we make sense of this puzzling situation? On the one hand, assimilation seems to be outdated as a practical concept guiding policies, but, on the other hand, analysts who study integration processes cannot do without some sort of assimilation model.
