Remaking the American Mainstream; Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration

xiv, [2], 359, [7] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Richard D. Alba (born December 22, 1942) is an American sociologist, who is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is known for developing assimilation theory to fit the contemporary, multi-racial era of immigration, with studies in America, France and Germany. Alba earned his B.A. in 1963 and Ph.D. in 1974 from Columbia University. Alba's text on assimilation theory (written with Victor Nee), Remaking the American Mainstream (2003) won the Thomas & Znaniecki Award of the American Sociological Association and the Eastern Sociological Society's Mirra Komarovsky Award. It was one of the most highly cited works in sociology. Alba has also written about the historical realities of assimilation, using Italian Americans to exemplify them. His book, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America, summarizes his thinking on the assimilation of the so-called white ethnics. Richard Alba and Victor Nee show in the first systematic treatment of assimilation since the mid-1960s, that assimilation continues to shape the immigrant experience, even though the geography of immigration has shifted from Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Institutional changes, from civil rights legislation to immigration law, have provided a more favorable environment for nonwhite immigrants and their children than in the past. Assimilation is still driven by the decisions of immigrants and the second generation to improve their social and material circumstances in America. They also show that immigrants, historically and today, have profoundly changed our mainstream society and culture in the process of becoming Americans. Surveying a variety of domains-language, socioeconomic attachments, residential patterns, and intermarriage-they demonstrate the continuing importance of assimilation in American life.…