The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States

“The point about the melting pot,” wrote Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the preface to their influential Beyond the Melting Pot , “is that it did not happen.” This “failure to melt” thesis was iconoclastic when the book was published in 1963. But it had become widely accepted already by the end of the decade — well before the post-1965 revival of mass immigration began to transform the American urban landscape. By the 1980s, when the effects of the “new ‘new immigration’” had become unmistakable, earlier conceptions of assimilation seemed to many to have lost all relevance. When Glazer published We Are All Multiculturalists Now in 1997, he was writing as éminence grise , not as iconoclastic intellectual. 1 Pluralistic understandings of persisting diversity, once a challenge to the conventional wisdom, had become the conventional wisdom, not only in the US and other classic countries of immigration such as Canada and Australia, but also in much of northern and western Europe. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.