Interview with Prof. Tomás Jiménez on “The Other Side of Assimilation”

In Fall 2018, Jody Agius Vallejo, CSII Associate Director and Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity, interviewed Tomas Jimenez, Associate Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, about his recent book, The Other Side of Assimilation. The following is a transcript of this conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jody Aguis Vallejo: In your recent book, The Other Side of Assimilation, you argue that examining immigrants and their descendants only tells one side of how the process of integration unfolds. So, what is the other side of assimilation?

Tomás Jiménez: As researchers, we haven’t really considered how long-settled native-born people—defined by people who are born in the U.S. and whose parents are born in the U.S. —change and are changed by immigration. The other side of assimilation is the process by which established populations adjust to immigrant newcomers.

Jody: So, your book looks not at outcomes of integration—like rates of intermarriage, educational attainment, or residential integration—but rather, the everyday processes and interactions that lead to those outcomes?

Tomás: Exactly. That other side of assimilation has always been there. We just never studied it. When researchers study intermarriage as a component of immigrant assimilation, when we study neighborhood segregation as a component of immigrant assimilation, we’re really studying the other side of assimilation without naming it. When immigrants and their children move into your neighborhoods, when they intermarry, when their networks change—these signs of immigrant assimilation have implications for the individuals whose neighborhoods are integrated; who are marrying into immigrant families; and who are interacting with newcomers. That’s what this book investigates.

And the established population is not just white middle-class folks—who are often viewed as the benchmark for assessing integration. The established population includes people who are white, Black, Asian American, Latino. It includes Native Americans. And so I don’t conceive of an established population as a monolith. It is incredibly diverse in and of itself.

Jody: And Silicon Valley, the region in which you conduct this research, is a window into this diversity?

Tomás:  I chose Silicon Valley in part because of the mix of immigrant generations and because there’s tremendous class diversity among the newcomer populations. There is a large high-skill immigrant population from South and East Asia. There is a middle-class immigrant population made up mostly of South and East Asian immigrants but also some Mexican immigrants who have a foothold in the middle class. And there is also a low-income immigrant population comprised of people who hail from Latin America and also Southeast Asia. This is not to mention a sizeable unauthorized population.

What’s interesting about the Silicon Valley (and here I’m talking about Santa Clara County) is that, proportionally, the immigrant population is on par with LA County; it’s about 38% of the total population in both places. If you combine the immigrant and the second-generation population in Santa Clara County, it’s about 54%. So, Santa Clara County is a major immigrant destination.

And because the immigrant population of the newcomer population is so big here and diverse, and there is a diverse long-settled population, I thought that it was an excellent place to do this study.

Jody: Tell me about the idea that assimilation is a relational process and what are the most important contexts in which this process of relational assimilation unfolds? How does it play out at the local level? To me, that’s one of the most important aspects of your work.

Tomás: To understand relational assimilation, you have to back up and know that most explanations of assimilation lay out a process of group absorption. In these accounts, immigrants and the subsequent US-born generations gradually become more like a mainstream, or its different race and class segments. The idea of relational assimilation stands in contrast. In the account I lay out in my book, immigrants and their children are adjusting to life in the United States; they are trying to find their way in terms of where they work and how they work, the places they live, the relationships they develop. And as they make those adjustments, it’s forcing the established population to make their own adjustments. And so, I think about this process as a volley back and forth of adjustment and readjustment in everyday life. In long hindsight you realize that new ideas emerge—ideas about what it means to be American, what it means to be a member of a particular racial and ethnic group, and new ideas about what it means to belong in the United States.

You see it happening in places where people interact in daily life—like the workplace—and as the demography of neighborhoods and schools change.

As newcomers and established individuals become neighbors, as they become co-workers, classmates, and sometimes romantic partners, immigrants aren’t so strange. Their stories aren’t perceived to be extremely different. The things they do that were once thought to be different, things like a quinceañera, those things actually become normal parts of life for both newcomers and the long-established population.

So, for example, one of the cities that I studied is East Palo Alto. It was majority African American, and it is now majority Latino. We talked to Black teenagers there, and every single Black teenager there has been to a quinceañera, and many have actually been members of the quinceañera court. And because this is just something you do as a teenager in East Palo Alto because there are tons of Latino kids, you go to their quinceañera because you grow up with these kids. You learn a few words of Spanish here and there. I mean in some ways these might seem like superficial things, but they also normalize what some people think of as ethnic difference, what some people think of as part of what makes immigrants strangers.

If you grew up in Cupertino, another place that I studied, you know how to do Bhangra, you know what Bollywood is, you know about K-pop because that’s what the kids who you go to school with are consuming.

Jody: But contact doesn’t necessarily result in complete acceptance of the new immigrants. Right? You write a lot about when boundaries kind of tighten or become more salient.

Tomás: Contact leads to acceptance in a lot of ways. But at the same time there’s a lot of ambivalence. This ambivalence emerges powerfully even in a place like Silicon Valley, which is very politically liberal, tends to be very progressive, tends to be on the whole more accepting in other places, and yet we still hear people—across the race and class spectrum—emphasizing how important it is to speak English in American society and emphasizing what English represents symbolically as the behavioral core of American identity.

So there is some pushback. So, if we go back to the idea of relational assimilation being a kind of back and forth volley of adjustment and readjustments, there are return volleys that come from the established population that tend to be quite powerful. And one of them has to do with speaking English, and also to some degree, legal status as a notion of legal belonging in the United States.

The people we interviewed again from across the spectrum drew bright lines around legal status and that being undocumented was not a good thing. That was a hard line they drew between insiders and outsiders. However, it was a line that they find people who were undocumented should be able to cross if they exhibit the behavioral aspects of “good citizenship:” if they are contributing economically, if they haven’t committed any crimes, if they’re learning English or trying to learn English or have learned it.

Jody: What does your research tell us about America’s future in this era in which politicians are stoking anxiety about immigration-driven demographic change?

Tomás: I think the tendency is to look at immigration by looking at loud speeches that politicians deliver. But I do think that notions of what it means to be American are also shaped by the way we bump into each other, the way we interact in everyday life, and the participatory aspect of national belonging.

This research gives me quite a bit of hope. I think President Trump is expressing a minority view of immigration and change in American society—these extreme disparaging views don’t resonate with the majority of Americans. If you look at the polling data, a large majority of Americans support legalization programs for people who are undocumented, more people are worried that that enforcement is going too far rather than not far enough. The percentage of people who think that immigrants are a net gain to American society has gone up during the Trump era.

Jody:  And it brings me to this question, my last question for you, which is, you know, what kind of insights do you think your work offers to policymakers?

Tomás: Politicians need to realize that if you are willing to take a bold stand on policies that integrate immigrants, the majority of Americans will be on your side.

The research that I’m doing with colleagues in Arizona and in New Mexico right now bears that out. There is a really loud minority that would be vehemently opposed to anything that supports immigrants. Our research suggests that in terms of establishing more welcoming policies, people would actually be really on board. And that’s a reason to be hopeful and bold.

About the interviewee

Tomás Jiménez is Associate Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.  His research and writing focus on immigration, assimilation, social mobility, and ethnic and racial identity. His latest book, The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants are Changing American Life (University of California Press, 2017), uses interviews from a race and class spectrum of Silicon Valley residents to show how a relational form of assimilation changes both newcomers (immigrants and their children) and established individuals (people born in the US to US-born parents).