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The incorporation of immigrants is one of the most important issues both in immigration research and for immigration societies. The question of how foreigners become members of a new society and are able to enjoy full access to social, economic and political rights has been as relevant for historical immigration processes like the 19th-century European immigration to the United States as it is for the recent Syrian refugee immigration to Europe or migrants from Latin America who are seeking to escape the violence and corruption in their home countries and are trying to cross the US southern border. To explain incorporation processes, two research paradigms have for a long time dominated scholarly and later also political debates. The first one, assimilation, was introduced as a scholarly concept at the end of the 19th century, but the article Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups with Particular Reference to Negro by US sociologist Robert Park published in 1914 is widely considered the first seminal contribution on the topic. The ideas expressed by Park were further developed over the next decades, and in the 1980 s, the concept of assimilation crossed the Atlantic and was taken up by European sociologists. In Germany, in particular, US assimilation theory became the basis for one of the most important approaches, the integration concept by sociologist Hartmut Esser (1980, 2004). Esser adapted the concept that had been further developed by American sociologists like Milton Gordon to explain the process of integration of migrants in the receiving society. Esser's theory of integration became the basis for a whole school of thought and, especially after 2000, gained more and more influence in the political sphere. While being very similar, the concept of ‘Integration’ became more commonly used in Europe while ‘assimilation’ was used more in the U.S. context. However, at the beginning of the 1990s, an alternative way of conceptualizing migrants' incorporation started to garner attention from the scientific community. The concept of transnationalism was first developed by US anthropologists (Basch et al., 1994). It was an explicit critique of the assimilation theory, and most importantly its focus on the nation-state. Although all three concepts – assimilation, integration, transnationalism – have been subject to a whole range of revisions over the years, they have remained highly influential. All three still play an important role in the scholarly realm, and assimilation and integration concepts are often reflected in immigration policies and public perceptions of immigrants, both in Europe and in the United States. There are good reasons that all three concepts did become so influential. While assimilation and integration provide us with a theoretical framework that lends itself to easy operationalization to trace the process by which immigrants adapt in a new country, transnationalism reminds us that the immigrants that we encounter in receiving societies are not a ‘blank slate’. Rather, they may have significant and various ties to their home country. Furthermore, these theories were developed in response to new immigration processes that researchers witnessed at different historical stages, and each one was based on a large amount of empirical observation. From observations about immigrants in American cities in the 1920s and various phases of openness and restriction in the 1930s and 1960s, to post-colonial and the so-called guest worker migration in Western Europe immigration to the United States in the 1960s, to anthropologists in the United States in the 1980s, assimilation, integration and transnationalism were to some extent scientific answers to realities that scholars witnessed. Today, the question of how immigrants become members of a new society arises in yet another political context. In the last decade, we have witnessed an almost global rise of right-wing populism, nationalism and anti-immigrant positions. Immigration is often represented as a danger for receiving societies. Anti-immigration sentiment and rhetoric played an important part in the first country ever leaving the European Union. There are rising levels of islamophobia across Europe, and in Germany, for the first time after the Second World War, in 2017 a far-right party entered the national parliament. In the United States, a tightening of immigration policies, anti-refugee rhetoric and policies and a rising number of hate crimes also reflect the issues that immigrants are facing. These developments make the question of migrants' incorporation particularly salient. In neutral terms, all three concepts that we have at our disposition refer to the ‘the process of settlement, interaction with the host society, and social change that follows immigration’ (Penninx & Garces-Mascarenas, 2016, 11). However, the debates about these concepts have never been neutral. On the contrary, for several decades there has been a ‘heated, contentious debate’ (Mantovani & Sciortino, 2010, 2) between the various camps. There have been controversies among researchers from each side about the significance of the other theory and its epistemological and empirical value, and ‘all of these approaches and concepts are highly contested within the academic literature’ (Penninx & Garces-Mascarenas, 2016, 12). Although this is often not explicitly stated, what fuels these controversies to a significant degree is the inherently political character of theorizing processes of immigrant incorporation. Theories of assimilation and integration and the concept of transnationalism hold competing views on the mechanisms by which migrants become members of their host societies, and most importantly about the interaction of immigrants and the majority society. While all three concepts aim at being analytical, each one of them also has a normative dimension. Almost by definition, they contain a juxtaposition of majority society and immigrants. Therefore, they are loaded with assumptions about the relationship of immigrants with the native society, and they implicitly ask questions (or present answers) about power relations, agency, and equality between immigrants and receiving society. Against the backdrop of new immigration realities and controversies about the existing concepts, this volume sets out to revisit the main concepts that have dominated migration research over the last decades. To what extent do the classical concepts still help us to understand current immigration phenomena and the incorporation of immigrants? How valid are the various critiques that have been brought forward, especially with a view to the power relations between immigrants and the majority society? What are the merits and problems of assimilation, integration and transnationalism theories? After a short discussion of the history of these theories – assimilation, intergration, and transnationalism – this special issue takes up these questions by revisiting and critically assessing these main paradigms that dominate our understanding of the incorporation of immigrants. One of the most common critiques of the classical assimilation concept is that it conceptualizes immigrant's incorporation as a process of submission of the immigrant to the core culture of the host society (Pries, 2015). However, a closer look at the original texts shows that many of the early assimilation concepts were more complex than that in some ways timelier than we give them credit for today. Most accounts on the history of assimilation theory locate its beginning at the start of the 20th century. Based on a broader interest in urban ethnography and the integration of various social groups into US society, sociologists started to have a closer look at immigration processes. Against the backdrop of several European immigration waves and the growing presence of immigrants in American cities, scholars of the newly emerging discipline of sociology started to pay attention to the process of the incorporation of immigrants. Later accounts on these origins of the assimilation concept have paid less attention to the fact that the early immigration sociologists also wrote during a time of dramatic societal changes, especially the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy. The most prominent classical conceptualizations of assimilation were written in the context of sociological thought that was interested in the mechanism of cohesion of increasingly complex societies and that wanted to understand how social cohesion would work under new conditions. This was the historical context when Robert Park, ‘the sociologist most responsible for the canonical formulation of assimilation theory’ (Kivisto, 2005) wrote his seminal article (Park, 1914). Park's theorizing of assimilation was very much embedded in reflections on the new social environment that he witnessed. Park viewed assimilation as a dimension of the process of individualization that characterized the upcoming modernity. Like many other scholars of his time, Park was interested in the mechanism that held the new and more complex society together, and he identified culture as a central mechanism. He viewed shared values as the glue that held society together, and believed that ‘social solidarity is based on sentiment and habit’. Park thought that subjective dimensions of human behaviour must be included in sociological analysis (Ballis Lal, 1990) and he focused on culture as the symbolic system that linked individuals to each other and made them social. Applied to the question of assimilation of immigrants, this meant focusing especially on culture and the process of immigrants gradually taking on the values and norms of the receiving society: ‘The growth of modern states exhibits the progressive merging of smaller, mutually exclusive, into larger and more inclusive social groups. This result has been achieved in various ways, but it has usually been followed, or accompanied, by a more or less complete adoption, by the members of the smaller groups, of the language, technique, and mores of the larger and more inclusive ones. The immigrant readily takes over the language, manners, the social ritual, and outward forms of his adopted country’ (Park, 1914, 607). The fact that the Japanese bears in his features a distinctive racial hallmark, that he wears, so to speak, a racial uniform, classifies him. He cannot become a mere individual, indistinguishable in the cosmopolitan mass of the population, as is true, for example, of the Irish and, to a lesser extent, of some of the other immigrant races. The Japanese, like the Negro, is condemned to remain among us an abstraction, a symbol, and a symbol not merely of his own race, but of the Orient and of that vague, ill-defined menace we sometimes refer to as the “yellow peril”. (Park, 1914, 611) Park's examples of non-assimilation relate to oppression, social injustice and unequal power relations, not to the failure of immigrants to assimilate. Assimilation is a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life. (…) assimilation denotes this sharing of tradition, this intimate participation in common experiences (…). (Park & Burgess, 1921, 735) At the same time, Park and Burgess viewed differences as an essential part of assimilation: ‘The process of assimilation is concerned with differences quite as much as with likenesses’ (735), and they acknowledged the danger of losing – or having to give up – characteristics related to the home country. They stated that ‘negatively, assimilation is a process of denationalization’ (Park & Burgess, 1921, 735). One of the biggest misunderstandings in subsequent discussions of the early assimilation concepts is that they were normative. Instead, conceptualizations were based on empirical material from immigration processes that were conflictive at times but ultimately incorporated immigrants into the new society in an unproblematic way. Most importantly, the early concepts did not view assimilation as a one-way street but as a mutual process involving immigrants and majority society alike. The United States has not assimilated the newcomer nor absorbed him. Pure immigrant “stock” and our native “stock” have each integrated. That is to say that each element has been changed by assimilation with each other, without complete loss of its own cultural identity The sum is greater than its parts (…). (Gordon 1994, 64) To clarify further, Gordon quoted Bernard: ‘This concept of integration rests upon a belief in the importance of cultural differentiation within a framework of social unity. It recognizes the rights of groups to be different so long as the differences do not lead to dominion or disunity’ (Gordon, 1964, 68). Gordon did not think that ‘there was a straight and uniform path to assimilation, but rather assumed (…) that it would occur along a variety of different avenues and at differing speeds. Moreover, if persistent levels of prejudice and discrimination characterize interethnic relations, all or some types of assimilation would be stymied’ (Kivisto, 2005, 14). Ethnic enclaves would prevent the incorporation of immigrants, but he also acknowledged discrimination as a hindering factor, thus assigning great importance to the attitudes of what he called the “core society”. Unusually marked discrimination (…) may indefinitely retard the acculturation process for this group. Gordon's assimilation concept contained various phases. Like his predecessors, he put a strong focus on culture: ‘cultural assimilation, or acculturation, is likely to be the first of the types of assimilation to occur when a minority group arrives on the scene’. Gordon (1964: 71) identified seven types of assimilation: (1) cultural or behavioural – also known as acculturation; (2) structural; (3) marital – or amalgamation; (4) identificational, which means creating a shared sense of peoplehood at the societal level; (5) attitude receptional; (6) behavioural receptional and (7) civic, where interethnic conflicts over values and power are overcome by the shared identity of citizenship (Kivisto, 2005, 14). According to Gordon, the other important dimension of the incorporation process is structural assimilation, defined as social relationships and entrance in majority societies’ institutions as the most important dimension of assimilation. ‘Once structural assimilation has occurred, either simultaneously with or subsequent to acculturation, all the other types of assimilation will naturally follow’. His concept placed a specific emphasis on interethnic group contact and assumed that for the second generation of immigrants, through stronger interaction with the majority society, differences will gradually disappear. Gordon did assume that structural assimilation will lead to a disappearance of immigrants' characteristics related to their home country. However, contrary to many modern readings, he does not advocate for this. He rather views it as ‘the price of assimilation’. Discrimination disappears because the immigrant community is not recognizable anymore as such. His concept does not put a normative pressure on the immigrant, but it rather acknowledges xenophobia of the majority society that allows the immigrant only to be a full member of society if they lose the characteristics of their home society. Until the 1970s, assimilation remained the hegemonic concept to analyse ethnicity in the United States. However, increasing criticism of the concept led to several attempts to refine the idea of assimilation. According to Alba and Nee (1997), ‘assimilation can be defined as the decline, and at its the of an and the cultural and social differences that & Alba and Nee a assimilation theory’ that attention to the role of and rights policies, and the idea of a as believed that assimilation and transnationalism can be a part of the immigrant Based on an empirical analysis of seven different groups, that can assimilation into the host society and the of and assimilation However, this did not the about how to explain the incorporation of immigrants into a new society. 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