Political incorporation is the process through which immigrants and their descendants come to think of themselves as Americans with political rights and with a voice in politics, should they choose to exercise it. It is a process that, while central to the republic's past, present, and future, has been complex and frequently marked by contradiction. On the one hand, the United States has incorporated tens of millions of immigrants across its history, a significant achievement. On the other hand, the United States has almost always barred some immigrant groups from either entering the country or from becoming citizens. Groups of native-born Americans, meanwhile, have often discriminated against members of racially or religiously “suspect” immigrant groups, making the process of political incorporation more fraught, and more complicated, than it otherwise would have been.

Political incorporation operates in three dimensions: legal, cultural, and institutional. The legal dimension entails immigrants becoming citizens of the United States and thereby gaining the right to vote, to sit on juries, to serve in the military, and to hold elective office. Citizenship in the United States has always been relatively easy to acquire for immigrants defined as white, but for immigrant groups defined as nonwhite, citizenship was often out of reach. Between 1870 and 1952, for example, this category included immigrants from East and South Asia (but not from Latin America), effectively barring them from the most elementary dimension of political incorporation.Footnote ¹

The cultural dimension refers to the acculturative process through which individuals come to feel as though they belong in and to the United States and can play a part in its democratic politics. Belonging can develop through formal naturalization and political channels—becoming a citizen, joining a political party, voting, and enlisting in the military. Typically, however, it develops in more multifaceted and diffuse ways: through learning English and gaining exposure to American culture; among the young, through going to school and absorbing both the manifest curriculum (US literature and history) and the latent one (introducing schoolchildren to “American” notions of physical beauty, dress, male-female courtship, music, sports, and diet); through participating in American holidays, both sacred (Christmas, Thanksgiving, July Fourth, and, at one point, Memorial Day) and profane (the World Series, the Super Bowl, American Idol, and spring break); and, sometimes, through discovering powerful affinities between American culture, religion, and politics and one's Old World roots. Because of the complex and multilayered nature of this process, it has sometimes unfolded almost invisibly. Its advance has often surprised both immigrants and their native-born hosts. In the present-day United States, for example, the children of Mexican immigrants are learning English more quickly and thoroughly than outsiders generally recognize. As this second-generation Mexican linguistic pattern suggests, the cultural dimension of incorporation can often operate independently of formal naturalization processes. It has almost always involved a mix of voluntarism (immigrants or their children choosing to embrace American customs and culture) and coercion (public or private authorities compelling immigrants to Americanize).Footnote ²

The institutional dimension of political incorporation refers to the institutions that immigrants and their offspring join or establish and through which they seek political influence. Political parties are examples of these sorts of institutions; so are political machines, the municipal organizations developed by professional politicians between the 1840s and 1960s to control local politics through alliances with private business interests on the one hand and ethnic constituencies on the other. Immigrants frequently turned to work-based institutions such as labor unions and small business associations to voice their political concerns, and they were also active in establishing new ethnic or religious institutions to promote their interests. Churches, synagogues, and mosques have sometimes functioned in this role as have fraternal, civil rights, and lobbying organizations. Sometimes these institutions have worked to integrate immigrants and their offspring into established patterns of American politics. At other times they operated in ways that have shaken up and even transformed those established patterns. We thus need to be alert to both “acquiescent” and “transformational” modes of incorporation. Native-born Americans can be quick to celebrate the acquiescent and condemn the transformational forms of incorporation. But the latter is often the more enduring and meaningful way in which immigrants become Americans.

Both acquiescent and transformational modes of incorporation arise out of situations in which immigrants possess formal citizenship rights but, for reasons of religion, nativity, or race, have not been fully accepted as Americans. Mae Ngai has used the phrase alien citizen to describe Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans caught in these situations, and I extend this term to other groups—Mexican Americans, eastern and southern European Americans, even Irish Americans—who have faced a disjuncture between their formal rights and citizenship status on the one hand and their experience of those rights and membership in the American polity on the other.Footnote ³

The quiescent response to civic alienage entails accepting discrimination and marginality as a fact of life and doing one's best to cope with it. It often reflects a calculation that one's group is weak and that speaking out or mobilizing will only make things worse. Instances of such quiescence include the tepid responses of eastern and southern European Americans to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 and of Japanese Americans to their Second World War internment. Some scholars have argued that Arab Americans, after the repeated challenges to their whiteness and thus to their eligibility for citizenship early in the twentieth century, deliberately kept a low profile—and stayed far away from politics.Footnote ⁴

Acquiescent incorporation sometimes has resulted from an ethnic elite's ability to enforce a submissive posture on a group it claimed to represent. The American Jewish Committee, the Japanese American Citizens’ League, and the League of United Latin American Citizens (a Mexican-American organization) all represented the more prosperous, longer-settled, and more assimilated immigrants/ethnics within their respective groups. These organizations were keen to show mainstream Americans that their groups comprised hard-working and patriotic individuals, all of them eager to assimilate. Within their own groups, they brought heavy pressure to bear on those whom they believed were not doing enough to prove their bona fides as Americans. They invariably came up against fellow immigrants or ethnics who either did not want to be Americanized at all or at least not Americanized on the terms that these organizations set forth. Projects of transformational incorporation often emerged first out of these intraimmigrant and intraethnic group struggles.Footnote ⁵

One example of such a project is the 1930s labor movement, whose ranks were full of immigrants and their descendants—Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Greek, Arab, French-Canadian, Mexican, and others—united by their poverty and marginality and by their conviction that, as Americans, they deserved better. The Great Depression had weakened the power of traditional ethnic elites within these communities, allowing the immigrant masses more autonomy in fashioning their American identities. In the labor organizations they joined, ethnics were encouraged to infuse the first principles of the American republic—freedom, democracy, and opportunity—with insurgent and working-class meaning.Footnote ⁶

Ethnic workers mobilized not just in unions but in politics. Millions of immigrant Americans and their children voted for the first time in the 1930s, and most of them cast their votes for the Democratic candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They not only helped to carry him to victory in four elections, but also helped to shift the balance of power in the United States from conservatism to liberalism, and from a politics that glorified the free market to one that celebrated the role of government in regulating a capitalist system that seemed unable to right itself. Rhetorically, this shift was couched in a patriotic and incorporative language of Americanism.Footnote ⁷

These voters also began to engineer a significant reorientation in American conceptions of belonging by insisting that Catholics and Jews had as great a claim on the United States as did the descendants of those original English settlers who had wanted to make the United States a Protestant land. The New Deal did not self-consciously promote religious pluralism or multiculturalism and did not describe its supporters as a “rainbow coalition” of different ethnic and racial groups. Indeed, in important ways that I and others have written about, the New Deal reinvigorated older cultural and racial prejudices. The groups pouring into the Democratic Party were a diverse lot, however, and their very presence began to disrupt accepted ways of defining and representing the American nation.Footnote ⁸

This disruption became abundantly clear during the Second World War, when the dominant and most honored image of the nation became that of the multiethnic platoon, with its Protestant, Irish, Polish, Italian, and Jewish soldiers fighting side by side to preserve American democracy and freedom. And even as that platoon image frequently reaffirmed the identity of America as a racially supremacist society, the lines dividing race from race, and full citizens from alien citizens, had become unstable. In these and other ways, the incorporation of immigrants had convulsed and changed American politics and culture.Footnote ⁹ One sign of this convulsion was the delegitimation of racial barriers to citizenship and of prevailing forms of alien citizenship, including Jim Crow.Footnote ¹⁰ Such convulsions reveal that the labor movement and the New Deal were sparking a transformational moment of incorporation. We can interpret in similar ways the multicultural upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s that substituted an ideal of cultural diversity for one of cultural homogeneity as a defining feature of America.Footnote ¹¹ These incorporative moments promised not only inclusion, but also transformation. They allowed, even encouraged, immigrants who became Americans to become advocates for changing America. In the process, they generated unexpectedly powerful cultural and political affiliations to America. They gave immigrants and their offspring reason to believe in the idea of America and to engage deeply in its democracy.

Those worried about the incorporation of today's immigrants, in addition to underestimating the complexities of past incorporation, commonly identify four issues that they regard as new: first, that the “new immigrants” are more different from “Americans” than past waves of immigrants have been (an argument strongly associated with the work of Samuel Huntington);Footnote ¹² second, that the United States has never confronted a problem of illegal immigration on a scale that we face today; third, that our global age has rendered the pursuit of citizenship an instrumental process, devoid of incorporative meaning; and fourth, that the institutions that once guided the incorporation of immigrants have declined, and that no replacements have arisen to take their place.

The first issue can be addressed with the greatest concision: American history is full of groups who at one time were identified as unassimilable because their cultural and/or moral inheritance was thought to put them at too great a distance from the American mainstream. The roster of such groups includes the Irish, eastern and southern Europeans, Arab immigrants in the early twentieth century, and east and south Asians. In each case the charge of unassimilability has been proven wrong. It will be proven wrong again in regard to today's immigrant groups.

The second issue, the presence on US soil of ten to twelve million undocumented immigrants, is a new phenomenon in American history and one full of hazards. Maintaining this population over the long term in a legal and political shadow land damages both the immigrants and the practice of American democracy. A democratic system cannot thrive when a substantial portion of the population is categorically excluded from the polity. It can be argued, of course, that today's undocumented can make no political or moral claim on the American republic, due to the fact that they entered the country without permission; and it can be argued that every nation possesses the right to secure borders. But even if these arguments are accepted, what then is the solution to the presence of so many millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States? Maintaining them in a caste-like status or converting their hard-caste status to soft-caste status through “guest worker” programs is not in the interests of a society that values its democracy.Footnote ¹³ What about deportation? The mere contemplation of expelling ten to twelve million people and the extraordinary hardships and divisions that this act would engender compel us to see that the lives of the individuals and families in question are in fact already deeply woven into the fabric of American society. The interests, not just of the immigrants but of our society and polity as a whole, would be better served by a policy of incorporation rather than expulsion, one that should start by opening to immigrants the legal dimension of incorporation—what legislators have called, in recent years, a path toward citizenship. Such a path for existing undocumented immigrants might be combined with bilateral negotiations with Mexico that would put both countries in a better position to regularize the future movement of migrants across the US-Mexican border.Footnote ¹⁴

Some who might otherwise favor a path toward citizenship draw back from such a policy because they fear that too many illegal immigrants would choose such a path only for instrumentalist reasons: to become eligible for jobs and social welfare benefits in the United States; to protect themselves against deportation; to enjoy the personal security that traveling on a US passport can provide. The deeper anxiety is that immigrants would use newly gained citizenship rights not to incorporate themselves fully into America but to strengthen their affiliation with their home countries. In the process, it is feared, Southern California would figuratively, if not literally, become part of Mexico, and Miami would be transformed into a Latin American capital. Thus, legal incorporation would not lead to the second set of processes associated with incorporation—those that occur in the cultural and affective realm and tie immigrants culturally and emotionally to the United States.Footnote ¹⁵

We should not underestimate, even in this global age, the appeal and integrative power of the United States at a cultural level, nor the incorporative energies that immigrants' engagement with American democracy can unleash. The former is evident in the fact that the children and grandchildren of immigrants today possess levels of fluency in English similar to those of earlier generations of immigrants; by no means have we put to rest America's longstanding reputation as a graveyard for foreign languages.Footnote ¹⁶

The latter—the incorporative energy that civic engagement can unleash—is abundantly clear in the experience of immigrants one hundred years ago, who often thought that they themselves were acquiring citizenship for instrumentalist reasons: to protect themselves and their communities from nativist efforts to stop the teaching of foreign languages in schools; to end their vulnerability to deportation; to reverse restrictive legislation barring additional individuals from their home countries from ever entering America; and to end their exclusion from desirable jobs and careers. In the process of acquiring citizenship and fighting for their rights as citizens, however, many of these “instrumentalist citizens” deepened their engagement with America.

To take one example from that earlier period, the 1928 struggle to elect Al Smith, the grandson of immigrants, president of the United States electrified immigrant communities throughout the country.Footnote ¹⁷ They wanted to be part of an America that had chosen an Irish Catholic, and a member of an ethnic American family, as their leader. They believed that the United States would become a different place—and their home—were that to occur. Or, to take an example from our own period, the city in which I live (Nashville) recently witnessed a hard-fought struggle over an English-only ordinance mandating the exclusive use of English in all official city (metropolitan) business. A broad coalition of pro-immigration forces defeated this ordinance by a significant margin. From a distance, this defeat might be regarded as a victory for the right of immigrants to be foreign and different. But close up, it is clear that the struggle brought together many different groups in the Nashville area, some immigrant, some native born; it is also clear that the struggle itself and the participation in a broad coalition of groups that it entailed have enabled many more of Nashville's recent immigrants to believe that the city could become their enduring home. The net effect, over the long term, may well be to promote, rather than stymie, the spread of English fluency among the city's foreign-born populations—and to accelerate, rather than retard, immigrant incorporation in the city.Footnote ¹⁸

I am not suggesting that Nashville, any more than any other part of America, is at the cusp of an effortless absorption of immigrants into a preexisting America. Incorporation is rarely effortless, and it is rarely a one-way process. It requires not just changes from immigrants but changes from America, too. This two-way process is not, however, a process to be feared. To the contrary, incorporation often works best when it is dynamic, even dialectical.

What about the fear, then, that the institutions that once guided political incorporation—political parties, labor unions, and a state willing and able to police its borders and enforce its authority—have declined?Footnote ¹⁹ Barack Obama's 2008 election demonstrates that predictions about the demise of politics as an integrative process are premature. Also, where labor unions remain strong, as they do in Los Angeles and New York City, they are once again playing an important incorporative role for the heavily immigrant populations that form their memberships. Other institutions, such as the Catholic Church, have shown great potential for facilitating incorporation; so, too, have a variety of local and regional advocacy organizations that have developed a strong base among multiple immigrant groups. And beginning with Bill Clinton's presidency, and continuing through both the Bush and Obama administrations, the state has shown new energy in enforcing its authority, legal and moral, on immigrant populations. This authority can be used both to promote the incorporation of immigrants and to punish, marginalize, and expel them.

There are, however, reasons to worry about the adequacy of incorporative institutions, especially in regard to economic matters. Economic inequality is severe, and many groups, native born and immigrant alike, find themselves in a bleak employment situation, either because they lack adequate work or are stuck in jobs that are harsh, punishing, and impoverishing. The situation calls for institutions to protest this state of affairs and to seek political remedies for it. If such institutions fail to arise or to involve significant numbers of immigrants and ethnic workers in their affairs, we are likely to witness severe forms of alienation and the failure of efforts at incorporation. This is a future we should fear and work to avert. Economic inequality and lack of opportunity are not, in their origins, immigrant issues; but their resolution, or lack thereof, will have profound consequences for the prospects and character of immigrant political incorporation.Footnote ²⁰