Assimilation

Burns 1 Andrew Burns Mr. Seliger ENGL 109H 1 December 2009 Assimilation Culture is competition. When cultures meet, cultural competition leads to conflict. To resolve this conflict, members of cultural groups choose accommodations—ways of defusing conflict. The United States—the nation of immigrants—has, for most of its history, resolved immigrant-based cultural competition through assimilation—a “melting pot” process whereby “peoples of diverse racial origins and different cultural heritages, occupying a common territory, achieve a cultural solidarity sufficient at least to sustain a national existence” (Park qtd. in Gordon 63).

Schools taught students English. Families that, upon arrival lived within ethnic enclaves, slowly drifted into American society. Old rivalries and cultural differences faded with a steady dosage of American media, American politics, and American freedoms. Since the 1960s, however, the United States has moved away from this assimilationist model, lured by the promises of pluralism—offers of American opportunity without American culture—common harmony without common values; but, a “house divided cannot stand,” and neither can a pluralistic society.

1. The Move Toward Cultural Pluralism Aside from witnessing the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, the 1960s witnessed another, less unifying movement—the Black Power movement. Some blacks were no longer satisfied with political and cultural integration into white society. Now, many black leaders like Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad described whites as “an evil and inferior race” and called for the creation of institutions specifically designed to serve only black people. These leaders promoted black culture and black education programs and accused whites of “promoting assimilation...[to] impose white culture on African

Burns 2 Americans” (Farley 180). The movement spawned violent black separatist groups like the Black Panther Party, which told blacks “that when whites use[d] violence against [them], [they] should fight back” (180-81).

Emulating the Black Power movement, some Mexican Americans developed a similar movement called the Chicano movement. So-called “Chicanos” formed groups like Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztl´an1 (MEChA)2 and the Brown Berets. Prominent “Chicano” leaders professed Chicano superiority and even advocated for la reconquista3 of Aztl´an4 (Boehm). The Chicano movement’s manifesto, El Plan Espiritual ´ de Santa Barbara, adopted by the First National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference in March of 1969, condemns assimilation as a plan “to dilute varied cultures into a gray upon gray pseudoculture of technology and materialism” and defines “Mexican American” as a term used to describe one “who lacks self-respect and pride in one’s ethnic and cultural background” (Boehm pars. 9-13). Another document, El Plan de Aztl´an, infamously proclaims: “Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.”—“For the Race everything. For those outside the Race, nothing” (par. 17).

Native Americans, a group already resistant to assimilation, radicalized in the late 1960s and early 70s, seizing the headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972. The following year, a federal standoff on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation wounded 1 and killed 2 (Farley 193; Banks 62-4). In 1977, Penguin Books published Leslie Silko’s radical anti-white book, Ceremony. Set on an Indian Reservation, the Native American author condemns American culture as filthy and describes whites as the products of a witchcraft that “seeks to achieve a cultural decimation and a human psychological toll that would make walking dead of everyone” (Rice 134). The main character, Tayo, rages against assimilated Indians (whom Silko presents as alienated drunks)—“he wants...to scream at them that ‘the white things they admired and desired so much—the bright city 1

Chicano Student Movement for Aztl´an mecha is Spanish for fuse 3 literally, the “re-conquest” 4 a region comprising a majority of the Southwestern United States 2

Burns 3 lights and the loud music, the soft sweet food, and the cars—all these things had been stolen, torn out of Indian land; raw living materials for their ck’o’yo [witch] manipulation’” (Rice 135).

By 1997, a full twenty years after the publication of Silko’s novel, Rub´en Rumbaut published a paper in the International Migration Review, describing assimilation as “value laden with arrogant presumptions of ethnic superiority and inferiority and fraught with the bitter baggage of the past and the fractious politics of the present” (926).

2. Political Arguments for Cultural Pluralism 2.1 Sweden A very significant goal of the modern democratic5 nation-state is political equality. Political equality is a condition whereby members of a society have proportional “say” or “influence” in the political process. One argument frequently made in favor of cultural pluralism is that it helps equalize an otherwise unequal, homogeneous political culture. According to pluralists, “if members of a racial or ethnic group develop shared identity, it can become a source of social and political power” (Farley 457). Thus, pluralist propose that by distinguishing themselves from society, members of particular ethnic and cultural groups are more politically motivated in general. To date, no empirical evidence has corroborated this lofty proposition. Quite to the contrary, study after study has shown political participation of non-assimilated groups is, as a rule, lower than that of the assimilated polity.

In 1975, the Swedish government enacted revolutionary electoral legislation allowing foreign citizens to vote in local political elections (B¨ack and Soininen 29). The following year, 90 percent of all eligible voters cast ballots in the Swedish municipal elections, but only 60 percent of the newly enfranchised foreign citizens did the same (34). Political scientists had expected low foreign voter turnout for the first few election cycles and weren’t shocked by these statistics. Nearly twenty years later, only 40 percent 5

I use democratic casually to refer to a multi-party society with regular elections and a variety of civil, social, and political rights. The United States is a republic sensu stricto.

Burns 4 of foreign voters cast ballots in the 1994 municipal elections (34-5). Four years later, in 1998, Swedish sociologists Henry B¨ack and Maritta Soininen published the results of a study which sought to explain the extremely low and falling foreign voter turnout. Their key finding: electoral participation is positively correlated with both an immigrant’s participation in majority Swedish society and his or her cultural orientation. Immigrants who were integrated with majority Swedish society or whose cultures were more similar to Swedish culture were more likely to vote in the local elections than those who were not integrated at all, those who only integrated with their own group, or those with highly dissimilar cultures (38-9).

Eleven years after the publication of the B¨ack and Soininen paper, Stromblad and ¨ Adman published a study investigating whether the publically-subsidized ethnic affiliations increased Swedish immigrant political participation more than nonethnic affiliations. To assess political participation they used questionnaires measuring five forms of political participation: voting, party activity, contacting, political consumerism, and protests. These five forms were then fashioned as additive index variables such that when summed, 0 represented the minimum level of political activity and 1, the maximum level of political activity (4). Were cultural pluralists correct, Stromblad and ¨ Adman’s study should have found that immigrants affiliated with ethnic associations possessed political participation index values higher than those of immigrants with no such affiliations. However, their study made no such finding. While affiliation with nonethnic associations did increase political participation, affiliation with ethnic associations “[did] not produce [these] ‘regular’ positive effects on political participation” (5). Instead, “[m]embers in ethnic associations tend[ed] to receive fewer requests to take part in political activities and, as a consequence, their associational involvement [did] not render as much political engagement” (7).

B¨ack and Soininen and Stromblad and Adman illustrate the societal problems that ¨ cultural pluralism and lax assimilation policies can create. B¨ack and Soininen highlight

Burns 5 the shift in Sweden’s immigrant population during the two decades following the 1976 elections. While earlier immigrants had been Nordic workers, new ethnic groups were increasingly from ex-Yugoslavia and the Middle East, and came with far different cultures than the majority Swedish society (32-3). Stromblad and Adman reveal, that ¨ instead of instituting pro-cultural assimilation policies to incorporate these new immigrants as an active group in Swedish politics, Sweden facilitated immigrant political exclusion by providing government subsidies to ethnic associations and placing greater emphasis on multiculturalism and cultural pluralism (1). Consequently, “[d]espite the liberal Swedish citizenship legislation, approximately half of all foreign-born prefer[ed] to retain their original citizenship even if it limit[ed] their formal political rights” (B¨ack and Soininen 48). Isolated, unassimilated ethnic and cultural groups have no “skin in the game,” so to speak. Until they are assimilated into general society, we ought not expect them to participate heavily in the political process, nor should we, as Sweden did, promote the cause of their general political apathy as policy.

2.2 Africa And yet the political implications of cultural pluralism are not limited to the so-called general political problems of relatively peaceful western nations like Sweden.

In fact, for decades, sociologists have concerned themselves with the effects of cultural pluralism on the political stability of the troubled regions of the world, particularly the conflict-ridden African continent. These researchers and theorists not only looked for solutions, but hopefully, identified things to be avoided.

After the end of World War II, most political scientists ascribed to the “melting pot modernization” model6 of ethnic relations which held that ethnic conflict would eventually disappear with the rise of the modern industrial state. Karl Marx wrote that ethnic nationalism, along with religion, were part of a so-called “societal superstructure” 6

Melting pot modernization should not be confused with melting pot assimilation. Melting pot modernization proposes ethnic differences will cease to matter with increased modernization. Melting pot assimilation proposes ethnic differences become less pronounced as one ethnic group incorporates with the majority culture.

Burns 6 created by the dominant economic and political classes. Once modernization brought about the victory of the proletariat, ethnic nationalism would disappear, along with religion and other vestiges of class domination (Newman 453). Emile Durkheim argued that economic modernization would replace the “mechanically integrated society” with an “organically integrated society.” Mechanically integrated societies were organized by “primordial” identifications, like ethnicity. As society became more economically sophisticated, with an increasingly more complex division of labor, the interdependence of each citizen would eliminate ethnic identification (454). However, when European nations began decolonizing Asia and Africa, ethnic warfare broke out and political scientists scrambled to find a culprit (455).

In 1972, D. G. Morrison and H. M. Stevenson published a paper in the Canadian Journal of Political Science exploring whether cultural pluralism provided an explanation for the ethnic strife in sub-Saharan Africa. Previous social scientists had examined the problem from the same angle, but had yet to apply as rigorous a battery of statistical analysis to the problem. As part of their study, they made key distinctions between three different types of political instability: elite instability, in which the political elite in society resort to violence to depose those in power; communal instability, in which members of communal groups, that is, members of groups sharing a common ethnicity, language, religion, or territory, unite to use violence against another communal group to redistribute power; and mass instability, in which groups consisting of individuals ascribing to or associated with a particular political cause, such as a political ideology, unite to change governmental policy (85). They also strictly defined cultural pluralism as “the degree to which national populations are divided into mutually exclusive and culturally distinct groups” (86). Ethnic units, which are the base unit of ethnic groups, were distinguished using twenty-two different variables. The simple variance between the sum of each variable served as the measure of cultural pluralism within a region (90-5). To measure political instability, they recorded the national frequency of: coup

Burns 7 d’´etat, attempted coups, coup plots, civil war, rebellion, irredentism, and inter-ethnic violence (96). After performing a correlation analysis, Morrison and Stevenson found “converging evidence for the hypothesis that increasing degrees of cultural pluralism...increase the probability of both communal and elite instability in black African nations” (97).

Nearly three decades after the publication of Morrison and Stevenson’s findings, anthropologist M. A. O. Aluko published a paper in Anthropologist laying out the current research available on the ethnic problem in Africa. He begins his paper by acknowledging that “[o]ne of the most sensitive areas of social life in Africa is the problem of cultural pluralism” (93). Whereas recent researchers have tried to avoid identifying cultural pluralism as the central issue in the continued strife of Africa, Aluko justifies doing so by paraphrasing fellow Nigerian, Okwudiba Nnoli, writing: “Unless reality is fully understood it cannot be transformed in a way that is desirable” (94). And while Aluko’s paper is filled with the undesirable and seemingly intractable political and social problems cultural pluralism yields, he offers a glimmer of hope for the eventual resolution of the political instability and ethnic strife—assimilation: [T]here is yet no single or straight jacket models or prescriptions on how nations can tackle the ‘ethnic problem’....This notwithstanding, we will conclude by saying that multi-ethnic nations are not fixed entities...[s]uch nations may lose their plural character if the diverse populations find common ground, reduce discrepancies of power and opportunity, accommodate their divergent interests, and reduce the extent of ethnic differentiation (emphasis added) (99).

3. Economic Arguments for Cultural Pluralism Writing in Australia’s The Age, Matthew Albert and Samah Hadid argue that Australia “needs an identity that the world recognises as being global, and therefore, multicultural.” According to them, this “new identity will make [Australia’s] diversity a high-profile asset” (par. 2). The paper goes on to say that “Australia should move away

Burns 8 from aiming to be a melting pot or a mosaic. It should be...a chameleon nation� (par. 13).

Perhaps the writers are not aware that the chameleon is not native to Australia, or that its native habitats are extremely poor regions of Africa. I suggest they quickly find a melting pot to toss the chameleon in, for rather than promoting economic vibrancy, cultural pluralism overwhelms prosperity and produces prejudice and discrimination.

Section 3.1 Macroeconomic problems In a 2008 paper published in Macroeconomics, Benjamin Bridgman explored why most ethnically diverse countries are relatively poor. Building off earlier research by Easterly and Levine, he hypothesized that the redistribution, resource diversion, and civil war accompanying ethnic division distorted investment decisions, reducing capital accumulation and generating general impoverishment and underdevelopment.

To test this hypothesis, Bridgman created mathematical models simulating the effects of ethnic diversity on household utility, government taxation, product output, and war. After running data from 193 countries, as expected, he found: “ethnically divided countries are significantly poorer than homogeneous countries. GDP in the most heterogeneous example is less than half the level of the least heterogeneous example�

(10). Moreover, according to his models, ethnic division produced three forces to depress GDP: war damage, resource diversion, and investment distortion (10). Ethnically divided countries waged more wars and thus lost more resources to war damage. To wage these wars, ethnically divided countries raised armies, diverting the labor force toward the war effort. Finally, the monies central governments of ethnically divided nations spent on both military goods and army wages distorted investment decisions by greatly increasing the tax burden on the larger minority ethnic group (10). Even when no wars were fought, the threat of war continued to distort investment decisions: the ruling group maintained large standing armies to deter potential coups and the non-ruling group knew it would be taxed heavily by the ruling group to raise such armies (11).

Four years after succeeding Jomo Kenyatta as president of Kenya, Daniel arap

Burns 9 Moi announced a new initiative, the District Focus for Rural Development, to decentralize administrative control of Kenya: “We will henceforth be looking upon each district as a basic operational unit...each district team will become the major force and instrument for the design of rural development. This will create for the people and their chosen representative a whole new world of opportunity” (Moi qtd. in Barkan and Chege 431). Accounting for only 0.5 percent of Kenya’s development budget, researchers Barkan and Chege concluded the decentralization plan was “pursued to achieve a desired political outcome,” primarily to “protect the ethnoregional interests of K.A.D.U. [Kenyan African Democratic Union]” (450). Moi’s decentralization policy represents the kind of government policy Bridgman accuses of distorting investment decisions.

Moreover, it represents what Pierre van den Berghe referred to as “ethnic nepotism.”

Van den Berghe, who primarily approached ethnic relations from the biological perspective, introduced the concept of “ethnic nepotism” to describe the “behavioral predisposition ‘to react favorably toward other organisms to the extent that these organisms are biologically related to the actor” (Vanhanen 56). Though political motivations approximately explain why Daniel Moi allocated K£6,900,000 for the District Focus plan and why ethnically diverse localities in the United States have larger public employment roles, Van den Berghe’s ethnic nepotism helps explain why such ethnic patronage is a nearly universal phenomenon (Barkan and Chege 448; Bridgman 3). But regardless of its universality, the fact remains that any form of ethnic nepotism amounts to a redistribution of wealth—it distorts investment decisions and decreases economic competitiveness. Lamentably, rather than emphasizing cultural unity so as to diminish these distorting practices, countries across industrialized world are emphasizing cultural pluralism, cultural preservationism, and multicultural education. Celebrating differences does nothing but aggravate biological predispositions, multiplying the number of ethnic and cultural groups to whom public resources must be redirected and holding private capital hostage. Yeoh Kok Kheng quite concisely summarized the

Burns 10 general relationship between the public sector and cultural pluralism when he wrote: The activities of government in a multiethnic environment tend to convert private economic competition among individuals in markets into political conflict between ethnic groups....Rationing criteria which can be almost exclusively racial in multiethnic society tend to turn public goods into the private preserve of the politically advantaged group (34).

Emphasis on group differences and “specialness” creates a demand within groups for a special portion of the government largess. Private assets—assets that might otherwise have been used to promote economic expansion—are seized by central governments, in the name of public welfare, and redirected to pacify “politically advantaged groups” at the expense of economic competitiveness.

Section 3.2 Microeconomic problems Human migration has delivered millions of diverse peoples to the shores of the United States and other industrial nations. Prior to the 1960s, we would expect most of these immigrants to culturally assimilate to American life. Perhaps initially they lived in ethnic enclaves—regions with high concentrations of an ethnic minority and often with a separate ethnic economy—but eventually they moved out and up into majority society, adopting American cultural attributes and participating in the larger American economy. Since the 1960s, however, immigrants, here and abroad, have increasingly resisted cultural assimilation, and have adopted the rhetoric of cultural pluralists to rationalize their decision not to participate in the larger society.

In 1998 Washington Post Staff Writer William Branigin interviewed a Mexican immigrant family living in South Omaha for his series “America’s Racial and Ethnic Divides.” Maria Jacinto, wife and mother of five children, spoke only Spanish, and “stress[ed] a need to maintain the family’s Mexican heritage” (par. 2). Despite having received her U.S. citizenship a month earlier, “she seem[ed] resistant to the idea of assimilating into U.S. society,” remarking: “In the Hispanic tradition, the family comes

Burns 11 first, not money. It is important for [my] children not to be influenced by the gueros [blondies/whites]...I don’t want [them] influenced by immoral things” (par. 11). This sort of philosophy, bluntly articulated by Mrs. Jacinto, has become more common since the inception of cultural pluralist movements in the United States and other parts of the industrialized world. Mrs. Jacinto’s decision to speak only Spanish at home and to shelter her children from American capitalism will only serve to hinder their economic assimilation—an assimilation contingent upon three factors: dominant language fluency, adoption of dominant economic philosophy, and possession of a useful occupational skill.

Section 3.2.1 Language Even most cultural pluralists admit achieving fluency in the host society’s dominant language is paramount to successful participation in that society’s economic system. Debra Suarez, a linguistic pluralist, has written numerous papers advocating minority groups resist the pull of English language hegemony, but, nevertheless, she grudgingly concedes that “English as the language of usefulness is unquestioned” and that to even successfully resist the linguistic hegemony of English, “one must ‘buy into it,’ or acquiesce on some level” (515). Numerous economic studies have confirmed that a failure to linguistically assimilate to the dominant language of a host society severely hinders economic mobility.

In a 1985 paper published in Contemporary Policy Issues, Walter McManus analyzed the 1975 relative wages of immigrant men, assimilated native men (”reside in English-only households”) and non-assimilated native men (”either do not report English as their childhood language or currently do not reside in an English-only household, or both”) belonging to 11 different ethnic groups (79). The study found that in every case, non-assimilated native men earned less money and received less education than their assimilated counterparts (78-82). In particular, non-assimilated native-born Hispanic men’s wages were 12 percent lower than those of their assimilated

Burns 12 counterparts, and just 3 percent greater than immigrant Hispanic men (78-9).

Non-assimilated native-born Hispanic men received 1.6 fewer years of education than assimilated native-born Hispanic men, and just 0.4 years more than immigrant Hispanic men (82).

Christian Dustmann has shown what is true with acquisition of English in the United States is true of German in Germany. In a 1994 paper published in the Journal of Population Economics, he analyzed the earnings of migrants to West Germany based on their German language fluency. He used the German-language proficiency surveys of 1030 female and 1256 male immigrants collected by the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in 1984 (135-6). Dustmann measured two different indicators of language fluency: fluency in speaking and fluency in writing. After performing correlation and regression analyses, Dustmann made two major findings: (1) That migrants who spoke German well or very well earned more than the base migrant group (7.1 percent more for females, 6.9 percent more for males) and (2) that migrants who wrote German well or very well made considerably more than the base migrant group (15.3 percent more for females, 7.3 percent more for males) (152-3). Additionally, he found that intermediate proficiency was not sufficient to improve earnings much above those with no German speaking or writing skills (152-3).

Section 3.2.2 Economic Philosophy Social scientists were growing increasingly discouraged by the mid-twentieth century with the slow rate of Native American acculturation. Since Coronado arrived at Zuni in 1540, western attempts to coax the American Indian population toward western cultural and economic assimilation had gone on in earnest (Vogt 138). Yet though over four hundred years had passed, acculturation was not progressing as quickly as earlier hoped for or believed. Evon Vogt, a noted anthropologist of Native American peoples, lamented “how completely the inventories of material culture in Indian households [were] composed of white American culture, and, yet, how relatively slow the rate of

Burns 13 change [was] in social organization and religion in the same community” (137). By the 1960s, Native Americans’ recalcitrance toward American cultural assimilation edged into violence with federal standoffs and gunplay. Literature by noted Native American authors like Leslie Silko evinced growing hostility toward American culture, particularly the American market economy and American consumerism. Native American’s adherence to a non-property oriented communalism, however, left them industrially underdeveloped and technologically stunted. In 1970, Native American per capita income stood at a mere $6,500, half that of the average American (Keohane 9).

The traditional model of slow assimilation into American culture would not suffice for full Native American integration, primarily because complete economic assimilation required a great “leap across a spark gap”—away from communalism and toward capitalism (Vogt 145). Fortunately, they began leaping in the late 80s and early 90s. Thereabout, Native American tribes began embracing the “capitalistic principle of industry and commercial enterprise” (Mika 32). The benefits of adopting the dominant economic philosophy soon paid off. Tribal economies surged ahead and quality of life quickly improved. In 1995, gross revenues of tribally owned casinos stood at $5.5 billion.

Revenues doubled in the next 5 years to $11 billion. “By 2004, 367 tribally owned casinos in twenty-eight states took in $19.4 billion in revenues” (Keohane 10). Between 1990 and 2000, median household income rose 35 percent on gaming reservations and 36 percent on nongaming reservations, compared to a 4 percent rise among all Americans (10). In 2002, Native American businesses employed 201,387 employees and produced gross revenues of nearly $27 billion, more gross revenues per capita than blacks or Hispanics (United States).

The flourishing economic conditions on Native American reservations testifies to the benefits of economic assimilation. Whereas cultural pluralists would have had Native Americans continue to cloister themselves on poverty-ridden reservations, pro-development Native Americans identified the benefits adopting capitalism could

Burns 14 bring tribal peoples.

Section 3.2.3 Ethnic Enclaves Industrial clustering refers to the tendency for the establishment of one firm in a particular area to lower the costs of entry of other firms dealing in similar goods or services. As early as 1920, Alfred Marshall recognized that ”the agglomoration [sic] of firms engaged in similar or related activities generates a range of localized economies that lowers costs for clustered producers” (qtd. in Werbner 675). In the late 1980s, sociologists Kenneth Wilson and Alejandro Portes applied theories of industrial clustering to the ethnic labor market creating the economic ethnic enclave hypothesis.

They hypothesized that the establishment of one firm run by a particular ethnic group in a particular area lowers the costs of co-ethnics to establish firms in that area and benefits co-ethnic workers: Foremost, the vertical integration between ethnic firms, as well as the firms tendency to draw labor from co-ethnics, creates major advantages for the ethnic group: (1) profits were invested within the enclave rather than beyond it, (2) the labor market within the enclave remains robust, and (3) internal trading among co-ethnic establishments perpetuate growth opportunities (Werbner 676). Additionally, whereas foreign work experience and educational qualifications add little if anything to human capital in the traditional labor market, within the ethnic enclaves, they argued, foreign human capital investments are returned as earnings commensurate with equivalent domestic work or educational qualifications (Werbner 676).

A few years after the publication of Wilson, Portes, and Martin’s studies, Sanders and Nee analyzed the earnings of Cuban and Chinese immigrants in the enclave economies of San Francisco and Miami. They used the 1980 Census five percent public use micro-samples of both Florida and California to select sample locations and collected data from self-reports from mailout questionnaires (“Limits” 748). For business statistics, they used the 1977 and 1982 “Survey of Minority-Owned Business Enterprises” from the U.S. Census Bureau (“Limits” 749). According to their analyses: “[r]egardless of whether

Burns 15 the enclave is defined by place of work or residence, employees in the enclave report lower earnings, less education, a lower rate of U.S. citizenship, a higher incidence of recent immigration, a lower level of English mastery, and a smaller concentration in executive, administrative, or managerial occupations” (“Problems” 415). Moreover, when Sanders and Nee examined the finances of firms operating in the Chinese and Cuban enclave economies of San Francisco and Miami, respectively, they found that, rather than growing, the gross receipts actually fell during the time period evaluated by Wilson and Portes (“Limits” 749-50).

Subsequent research by other leading sociologists have further undermined the ethnic enclave economy hypothesis. Ivan Light found the hypothesis to be irrelevant, since most individuals in the ethnic economy are self-employed and don’t work for any single ethnic firm; Roger Waldinger denied the very existence of the vertical or horizontal integration fundamental to the proposed benefits (Werbner 676-7). The attempts by cultural pluralist disguised as sociologists to legitimize occupational and residential segregation as profitable have been fumbled...for now.

Section 3.2.4 Occupational Skills and “Split Labor Market” Mass immigration and lax assimilation policies have created a surplus of non-assimilated workers in many developed and developing nations. These non-assimilated workers, rarely possessing any technical skills, enter the work force and aggravate existing economic stratification. In many sectors of the economy, non-assimilated workers displace assimilated workers and create an ethnic occupational niche, characterized by near complete saturation of a particular occupation with low skill, non-assimilated workers of a particular ethnic group. Non-assimilated workers make their labor more attractive to prospective employers by working for lower wages.

The rates they are willing to work at depress wages across the entire occupation, forcing assimilated workers out of the occupation; non-assimilated, low-skill workers now predominate (Semyonov and Herring 246-7). The wage depression divides the labor

Burns 16 market in two: the high-skilled market of assimilated and assimilating workers and the low-skilled market of non-assimilated workers. This labor market division is known as a “split labor market.”

In 1972, sociologist Edna Bonacich proposed an explanation for race prejudice and discrimination within the labor market. Rather than relying on such theories as the Adorno’s “authoritarian personality” or arguments about ethnocentrism, Bonacich approached the issue as a product of ethnic competition, arguing that race prejudice and discrimination begins when a “labor market split[s] along ethnic lines...[and] contain[s] at least two groups of workers whose price of labor differs for the same work, or would differ for the same work, if they did the same work” (549). Bonacich proposes ethnic competition within the labor market creates “ethnic antagonism,” a catch-all term for any “intergroup conflict, including ideologies and beliefs (such as racism and prejudice), behaviors (such as discrimination, lynchings, riots), and institutions (such as laws perpetuating segregation) (549).

According to Bonacich, each group enters a labor market with resources and motives, both of which affect their initial price of labor. Resources are divided into three different groups: economic resources (access to money or capital), informational resources (access to information about the general condition of the labor market), and political resources (access to the benefits supplied by group organization) (549-50).

Motives are divided into two categories, though these are largely irrelevant to this discussion (550-2). The non-assimilated workers usually lack economic and informational resources so they make their labor attractive by supplying it for lower wages (554). The assimilated workers have access to all three resources and see the non-assimilated workers as a threat to their earning capacity (553-4). Too many non-assimilated workers drive down the wages as employers use them to produce a product or supply a service more cheaply (553). To counteract wage depression, the assimilated workers resort to one of two practices: exclusion or caste (554-7). Exclusion

Burns 17 generally involves cutting off possible sources of non-assimilated labor, usually by petitioning for restrictive immigration policies against ethnic groups particularly notorious for resisting assimilatory processes (554-5). The caste system, however, allows non-assimilated workers to enter, subjects to restrictions on employment and acquisition of skills (555-557). The non-assimilated workers grow to resent the assimilated workers and push further away from the assimilatory processes. The continued failure of the non-assimilated workers to assimilate angers the assimilated workers and they press for harsher restrictions. What begins as economic competition morphs into ethnic antagonism and ethnic conflict.

Conclusion E pluribus unum—From many, one. The structure of the motto is not too difficult for the average American. (ablative) From many, out of many, made from many, etc. (accusative) One, single, a unity, etc. Many individuals, many cities, many states. One people, one culture, one nation. It is assimilation distilled. To betray its fundamental principle is to invite the troubles of cultural pluralism: apathy, instability, inefficiency, unintelligibility, poverty, prejudice, and discrimination. “A house divided cannot stand,� and neither can a pluralistic society.

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