Tamar Jacoby > Quotes

“The most important obstacle to speed and ease of assimilation, however, is race. In the nineteenth century, swarthy Jews, “black” Irish, and Italian “guineas”—a not so subtle euphemism borrowed from the African country of Guinea—were all seen as what we today call “people of color.” These immigrants terrified lighter-skinned native-born Americans, who accepted the newcomers as “white” only when they—actually, their descendants—began to earn middle-class incomes. Of course, skin color does not affect an immigrant’s ability to absorb American culture. But color can play a large part in hindering economic and social assimilation: today’s black newcomers, from the Caribbean and elsewhere, are often treated as part of the African-American population, with all the associated disadvantages.”
― Tamar Jacoby, Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American

“Regardless of where they come from, immigrants learn that, in America, lighter is always better, darker is always worse and black is worst. Little time passes before immigrants become prejudiced against African-Americans. This, too, is a kind of assimilation, and one that Israel Zangwill’s idealistic vision never anticipated.”
― Tamar Jacoby, Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American

“Whether or not they are assimilating is harder to quantify. Becoming an American is a complex, personal process—the kind of transition that can take a lifetime, even two. A Mexican farmhand with a sixth-grade education takes a different path into the mainstream than an Indian engineer working on an MBA, and the sometimes mind-boggling diversity of today’s immigrants can make it difficult to generalize. What’s more, even when one focuses on one group, it can be hard to assess just how well or how fast they are integrating. Economic success or failure, for example, is reflected in countless and sometimes contradictory statistics, and in today’s polarized immigration debate, any statistical portrait is sure to be controversial. Nevertheless, a lot is known about today’s”
― Tamar Jacoby, Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American