Elliott Robert Barkan - Immigration, Incorporation and Transnationalism

Of course, one can find failures and alienated individuals and groups in America and even those native-born Americans, such as Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who are willing to resort to extreme acts of violence. But, immigrants coming to America have entered a nation where by and large ethnic diversity was readily acknowledged and newcomers felt themselves less obviously visible because of their differences and where expectations of mobil-itythe presence of opportunitiesseemed synonymous with the new nation. It is likewise true that the disaffected, disenchanted, and defeated couldand often didmove on or return home, just as it was true that immigrants were probably involved in the Chicago Haymarket bombing that killed nine policemen in 1889, in various riots sparked by the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), and much later on in the 1992 Los Angeles Riot. America all along has been largely identified with opportunity and yet there have been episodes of disaffection and alienation resulting in such actions, or in the formation of gangs, or, as Nina Bernstein reported, second-generation Muslims, who also feel victimized, resentful, and alienated as well as politically excluded. Clearly, they felt bypassed by the forces and opportunities for entry into mainstream opportunity or, in other words, incorporation. And yet, observed Bernstein, in Jersey City, New Jersey, more than a third were foreign-born but there are no hard edge ethnic enclaves.

Hard edgeas in boundaries markedly defining ethnic turf. Gangs define boundaries; whites long demarcated boundaries setting apart African Americans from whites and, in places, Chinese and Mexicans from whites. In contrast, most (European) immigrant groups have encountered borders rather than boundaries, separations that eventually blurred, giving way to those who crossed those less rigid lines for economic, cultural, social, and then political motives. With so many peoples and communities in the United States, boundaries and borders have varied considerably in their permeability, durability, and origins, whether they were of the groups making, such as for religious purposes, or the host societys doing, especially against racially-defined populations. Many variables come into play here, which could be summed up as the context of migration (or of exit) what drove a people to emigrateand the context of receptionthe political, economic, social, cultural, and racial conditions shaping the responses to the newcomers in the host/settlement society.

And there are also the critical intervening variables, such as the transportation and communication facilities most readily accessible. The state of the global economy and military conditions likewise affect the extent of contact that people are able to establish and maintain with their homelands or with sister communities located in other countries, or the ties between themselves and those who never left.

The combination is critical in shaping the fundamental processes of incorporation as experienced particularly by immigrants and their children (as well as by such others as Native Americans, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans, who, though all American nationals, have migrated, respectively, from reservations, out of the South, and from their island homeland). Gary P. Freeman posed the questions, does such incorporation include economic, social, political, and cultural processes and are they fundamentally interactive, to which he suggested, Interactive yes, but not necessarily correlated as part of a more cohesive process.

But those measures come with the understanding that such actions are taken initially by individuals and their families and cumulatively impact the group. That is, collectively they come to form group patterns in the same manner that assimilation is basically the consequence, or outcome, of actions taken by individuals. Groups do not assimilate, people do. Thus, in defining my own model of assimilation, I point out that Integration and assimilation are foremost the actions of individuals, although there are clearly consequences for their ethnic groups. Moreover, ethnic groups have not advocated the assimilation of their group members (although particular community leaders sometimes do), for that would represent a community decision to dissolve itself. These points apply as well to the broader process of incorporation. The prominent sociologist, Alejandro Portes, more recently made a similar observation regarding transnationalism that likewise applies here to incorporation: The combination of actions of transnational activists and other migrants adds up to a social process of significant economic and social impact for communities and even nations.