ABSTRACT
Immigration studies have generally been guided by historical and structural models and methodologies (see Bean and Tlenda 1987; Pedraza 1990; and Portes and Rumbaut 1990, for overviews of immigration research with special emphasis on immigration to the United States). Historical and structural approaches have also predominated in studies of the persistence of ethnicity as a critical aspect of social life and politics worldwide (see Connor 1992; Olzak 1983; Smith 1993; and Tiryakian and Rogowski 1985, for overviews of this literature). A limitation of these treatments of immigration and ethnicity (and of the relationship between them) is the tendency to ignore processes by which the effects of history and social structure occur at the individual level. 1 Many scholars call for social psychological analyses that show how history and macro-social features of the environment produce individual modes of adaptation to immigration, including the construction and reconstruction of ethnicity as one of the modes. A social psychological analysis would tie macro-social characteristics to micro-social characteristics of immediate social contexts in which individuals, families, and groups live. Particular economic conditions, state policies and procedures, size and dispersal/concentration of groups across states and regions affect likely modes of adaptation because they heighten or lessen social categorization and salience of group boundaries, and because they increase or decrease opportunities for intragroup and intergroup contact, communication, competition, cooperation, and social comparison.
