By: héctor luis díaz  (Page 9/11)

Contextual factors

The concept of incorporation has been defined as the process through which immigrants are channeled into specific positions within the economic stratification system of a host society (Portes&Rumbaut, 1996, p. 83). According to this concept, where individuals end up in this stratification system does not depend on their level of acculturation or assimilation per se , but on their levels of human capital, pertinent government policies, the positive or discriminatory nature of the labor market at the time, and the extent to which existing ethnic communities in the U.S. have been able to receive and support the more recent immigrants. For a long time, inadequate models emphasizing the individual characteristics of immigrants were utilized in an attempt to explain their ability to find a niche in the economic structure of the United States. The contextual model proposed by Portes and Rumbaut, however, aims at overcoming the deficiencies of those individual models.

Portes and Rumbaut (1996) suggested that the political environment and the nature of the receiving ethnic community can easily nullify the potential effects of high or low human capital. The experiences of the 1980 Cuban Mariel immigrants clearly illustrate this point. Most members of this second wave of Cuban migration, who were poor and inexperienced in capitalism, were hired in Florida by well connected and successful Cuban entrepreneurs. Six years after their arrival into the U.S., approximately 20% of the new immigrants who had received support from the already existing Cuban network, had become self-employed (Portes&Rumbaut, 1996, p. 91). Their experience shows that the U.S. policy of granting immediate political asylum to Cuban immigrants and providing them with special programs to help them resettle combined with the support received from the Cuban-American community, contributed more to the success of the new immigrants than their level of acculturation or human capital. Hispanic immigrants from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean have not been equally successful because their contexts of incorporation have not been the same. Many Hispanic immigrants have become incorporated into the U.S. economy and have progressed socially and economically in spite of their low levels of acculturation and obviously without having been assimilated.

A new theory

Consistent with Portes and Rumbaut’s theory, I propose a theory related to the socio-economic development of Hispanics that includes individual, group and contextual factors. Such a model calls for managing the interactions between human capital, social policy-making, the labor market, and the role of ethnic communities in the United States as well as individual and group factors affecting inclusion. Such factors include: their time of arrival into the country, whether the particular group came to U.S. voluntarily or involuntarily, the degree of cultural similarity between the incoming and the dominant group, the racial characteristics (phenotypes) of the immigrant group, the desire of the group to become assimilated, the desire of the dominant group to accept the members of the incoming group, as equals, the size of the incoming group, and the degree of unity within the immigrant group or groups. According to the new proposed theory, all of these factors will be predictors of incorporation and of their socio-economic development.