THE MECHANISM OF INTEGRATION

How does anyone come to develop a sense of belonging and emotional identification with a society?

In tracing my own experience of integration into American society, I came to develop a sense of belonging and emotional identification with America and came to feel American as I came to identify with the civic values — of equality, inclusion, tolerance — that America not only upheld but were actively translated into the experience of my daily life.

Given America’s strong ethos of egalitarianism and inclusion through the 1990s and 2000s, Americans perceived me as 'American' before I started perceiving myself as American. America made me feel that my destiny remained at mercy of nobody else but my own, and if I worked hard enough, there would be no barrier in becoming whatever I wanted to become. And you knew that you had society’s back should you or anyone else ever become a victim of discrimination. I came to cherish the strong ethos of egalitarianism and inclusion that permeated through daily life and came to share these values as a proud American.

Looking back, what was striking about the integration process in America was that there was no separate 'integration effort' made by society the to integrate the new comers. Society didn’t worry about how 'acculturated' immigrants became or not: how much effort the new comer made to learn the language, how much of the old culture to shed and the new culture to adopt and whom one chose to stick with. The acculturalization process of immigrants was entirely left up to the newcomers to determine for themselves. This created a spectrum of how ‘Americanized’ they became even within one family who arrived in America at the same time — between parents and children and even among siblings — who stood on different points along the spectrum of ‘Americanization.'

Rather, America simply focused on practicing and teaching the civic values of equality, inclusion and tolerance to the natives as well as the newcomers, and creating an environment where everyone felt included and equal. And thrusted into this environment and ethos of the society, the new comers came to believe in the progressive values that the nation upheld, and develop emotional identification with the nation that not only preached these values but actively practiced them, that directly translated into the experience of their everyday lives.

In this sense, practicing and teaching the civic values of the nation was the mechanism for integration. And in fact, leaving the cultural realm up to the individual to determine for oneself, in fact, was the practice of the civic values of equality and inclusion — since there was no group that had the power to impose on other groups how they should feel about themselves and how they should express how they felt about themselves.

In Europe, by contrast, the integration effort seems to focus on acculturalization of immigrants — helping immigrants ‘try harder’ to integrate themselves by learning the language and adopting the culture of the host nation — the realm that was precisely left up to the individuals to determine for themselves in America.

But no matter how acculturated immigrants became — willingly or forcefully done, it won't lead to emotional integration of immigrants, because it was the strong ethos of egalitarianism and inclusion that pervades through the experience of everyday life — to be treated as ‘one of us’ in the ‘circle of we’ — that allows the new comers to develop an emotional identification with the nation. A strong ethos of egalitarianism and inclusion, in turn, would facilitate a robust and organic acculturalization process of immigrants over the course of generations, without the society having to impose it.

If European societies want to truly solve the integration problem, encouraging immigrants to ‘try harder’ to integrate themselves won’t solve the root of integration problem. It was creating a society with a strong ethos of egalitarianism and inclusion that would solve the root of the integration problem, without having to make a separate integration effort. Of course, the willingness to strengthen the ethos of egalitarianism and inclusion depended on first acknowledging that there was a need to strengthen it.