The past few years have witnessed an intensification of anti-immigration sentiment in America.

Lost in the midst of the acrimony is what actually happens to immigrants once they arrive and settle here, a story that is told in Assimilation, American Style. Peter D. Salins, himself a child of immigrants and a leading scholar of urban affairs, makes a powerful case that, at a time when the immigrant population of the United States is growing larger and more diverse, the nation must rededicate itself to its historic mission of assimilating immigrants of all ethnic backgrounds.

Reviewing the history of assimilation, he reveals how successive immigrant populations have become Americanized, despite being considered "alien" in their time - notably, the Germans, Irish, Italians, and Jews - and how assimilation continues to work among Hispanics and Asians today. America's vitality as a nation, Salins argues, depends on its being as successful in assimilating its newest immigrants as it was in integrating earlier immigrant groups.

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Salins advances our understanding of assimilation in two important ways. He convincingly shows how America's unique social compact of assimilation has permitted immigrants and their descendants to hold on to their ethnic traditions even as they acquired an American identity.

He also documents the dire ramifications of our retreat from the ideal of assimilation in recent decades, countering the multiculturalists who ask ethnic Americans to reject assimilation in favor of ethnic separatism, and the nativists who reject further immigration together.