Assimilation or Transnationalism? Conceptual Models of the Immigrant Experience in America

Americans are immigrants—people whose origins are various but whose destinies made them American. Immigration—voluntary or involuntary—is what created all multiracial and multicultural nations. The United States is a prime example. Sometimes the migrants moved freely from the area of origin to the area of destination. Such was the experience of the European immigrants. Sometimes their movement was coerced and resulted from processes not of their own making. This was the experience of enslaved Africans as well as of Mexicans, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans, whose history began with conquest and annexation. Sometimes their movement was semi-coerced and semi-free— the experience of indentured servants (whether Japanese, Chinese, Irish, or Germans) in the nineteenth century and of refugees, such as Jews at the turn of the twentieth century and Cubans, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Salvadorans in the latter part of the twentieth century.