Pull and push factors influencing Assimilation of the Immigrant Indian Community in America
Immigration accounts for part of the significant growth of the population in the USA. Asian Indians constitute the third-largest immigrant group in the USA after the Mexican and the Chinese. Today there are more than 4,402,362 Asian Indians in the USA, constituting 1.3% of the USA population.
In terms of educational qualifications, 77% of Asian Indians (aged 25 and above) have undergraduate or higher degrees compared to 29% among the immigrant groups and 31% among the mainstream population in the same age cohort in 2015. Many of them are associated with the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professions.
Studies on ethnic immigrants have often invoked theoretical questions. This study explains the settlement and adjustment of Indian immigrants in the USA, invokes an appropriate theoretical perspective. According to the Assimilation perspective, in the process of adjustment to the host society, immigrants tend to give up their languages, ethnic identities, practices, and other cultural uniqueness to blend with the American mainstream population. The perspective further proposes that the residential mobility of the immigrants follows their pattern of acculturation and social mobility in the host nation. Furthermore, that they envision residential mobility as an essential step for more complete assimilation in the mainstream society.
As the immigrant stock to the USA became highly diverse over the years, the Pluralist perspective proved to be better equipped in explaining the adjustment strategies of the immigrants. The Pluralist perspective has evolved in contrast to the ‘melting pot’ or assimilationist approach. This perspective contends that immigrants form their self-sustaining ethnic communities in the host society and simultaneously engage in the polity, economy, and civil life of the mainstream society. Like the assimilation perspective, the pluralist perspective also entails a spatial dimension in proposing that immigrant communities form a mosaic of ethnic enclaves in the host society.
The pluralistic perspective is inadequate in explaining the adjustment process of recent immigrants who manage to ‘flourish at the outset’ and exhibit residential propinquity with the mainstream population and not with their co-ethnics. This takes us closer to the concept of ‘heterolocalism’ which has been used to explain such peculiar socio-spatial behaviour of recent immigrants.
The heterolocal model, highlights the peculiar tendency of the recent immigrants, of shared ethnic background, to enter an area from distant origins and promptly adopting a dispersed settlement pattern, yet maintaining close ties with each other through a variety of means.
This study is empirical and qualitative with observation and interviews as the main tools of data collection. Bengali immigrants and their families residing in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area were the subjects of the study. Open-ended interviews were conducted and finally, the website of the associations, their events and celebrations, and literary artefacts (magazines, articles, drawings, etc.) were studied for richer insights.
Many respondents considered their assimilation to American society to be distinguished by the limited presence of immigrants. While some immigrants considered themselves to be fully assimilated in their job environment, they did not consider this to be true in the social and political sphere. Because racism in the USA exists, it works as a deterrent to the assimilation of Indian immigrants into mainstream American society. The very fear of racially induced implicit social rejections keeps the immigrants close-knit. Both pull and push factors are together at work.
Article details:
Assimilation, Heterolocalism and Ethnic Capital: The Case of an Immigrant Indian Community in America
Anirban Mukherjee, Binay Kumar Pattnaik
First Published October 17, 2020 Research Article
DOI: 10.1177/0038022920956737
From Sociological Bulletin