ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the mobility perspectives associated with a variable that is immigration or ethnicity. For that, it first focuses on some important traditional and contemporary images of immigrants and ethnic groups, as well as on properties of American immigration which should be kept in mind when considering immigrants and their descendants. Between the immigrant and the host country, something in the nature of an implicit contract seems often to have operated. Next, the chapter discusses this implicit contract in detail and its qualifications, imageries of Americanization and pluralism, and nativistic imageries. It also discusses the first and second generation ethics, and examines the important question about ethnicity that perplexes many Americans, although most others only make unquestioned assumptions about it, is whether Negroes constitute an ethnic group. Finally, the chapter explores variable meanings of the American Dream of success held by different ethnic groups.
