ABSTRACT
The way the authors think about assimilation is still largely determined by the experience of the great wave of European immigrants that arrived in the United States from the 1880s through the 1920s. There are many obvious differences between the last great wave of European immigration and the current wave of Latin American, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Caribbean immigration: race, culture, religion, language. But two other important differences have not been sufficiently noted. The first is the effect of two world wars in promoting the rapid assimilation of the earlier European immigrants; the second is the surprising change in American law and practice, starting in the 1960s, that makes multiple citizenship—and by implication, multiple national identities—more common and acceptable. The path to the assimilation of the last wave of European immigrants was punctuated by World War I, and further deeply affected by World War II.
