Assimilation Impossible: What is assimilation, how do we measure it, and how do we know when it has been achieved?


Aryan Karimi, University of British Columbia; Rima Wilkes, University of British Columbia

Researchers commonly measure newcomers’ socioeconomic status (SES) mobility versus that of native-born majorities to say where the assimilation line is. But, in reality, would ticking all the SES boxes on education, employment, intermarriage, and proximity with native-borns (Waters and Jimenez 2005) mean that an immigrant is therefore becoming an assimilated insider? Certainly, immigrants’ stories do not always equate SES mobility with assimilation: “[as a British Muslim] I wear British clothes. I speak broken English but, still, I speak English and I have got a beard. That gives away my identity. Now, people ask me ‘why don’t you integrate?’ and I say, ‘how do you mean?’. And they can’t answer me because I go to schools, give talks about how to deal with racist incidents, and very often the teachers ask me, ‘why don’t Muslims integrate?’. I say, ‘what do you mean? I pay tax. I obey the law of the land’” (Antonsich 2012: 60). This anecdote epitomizes a puzzle: there is a disconnect between assimilation-as SES-mobility research and how individuals comprehend assimilation in day-to-day life (see also Gans 2007). Assimilation theory, as a sociological theory, strives to explain how majority and minority immigrant groups interact and become similar for national coexistence. In this genealogical paper we delve into more than a century of assimilation research to argue why, given the current state of the theory, immigrants can never quite measure up and actually “assimilate”. We do so by considering the elements that comprise any scientific theory, including assimilation: its outcome concept, its measurement variables, and its bar of attainment. In terms of the outcome concept, we find that the meaning of assimilation changes over time. In the early 20th century, ethnoracial passing was the assimilation outcome (Park 1928). In the mid-20th century, researchers reconceptualized assimilation to quantifiable SES mobility as a means to passing (Warner and Srole 1945). Since the 1980s, SES mobility has become the endpoint in itself. In terms of measuring assimilation, we find that the early assimilation research used a qualitative ethnographic approach while the contemporary streams mainly rely on SES-related variables that are not coherent and vary across studies. Finally, in terms of the attainment rate or when assimilation should materialize, we find that no rate of SES indicates that assimilation has taken place. Taken as a whole, these changing concepts, variables, and rates mean that it is not possible to hold one or some of these elements constant to test the theory and refine its toolkit (for other critiques see Karimi and Wilkes 2023, 2024; Favell 2022; Schachter 2016). In this presentation, in three sections, we discuss assimilation’s changing concepts, variables, and (the missing) attainment rate. To make our findings intuitive, we briefly compare assimilation theory with an example from Hard Sciences to show the difference between a provisional theory with changing elements and one with fixed and testable elements. We then propose that future research can engage the emerging longitudinal data and machine learning language modeling to revisit European ethnics’ assimilation, the factors that shaped their trajectories, and form hypotheses for the 21st century assimilation.  

This paper will be presented at the following session: