Search

The educational, occupational and income success of the racial minority immigrant offspring is very similar for many immigrant origins groups in the United States, Canada and Australia. An analysis based on merged files of Current Population Surveys for the United States for the period 1995–2007, and the 2001 Censuses of Canada and Australia, and taking account of urban areas of immigrant settlement, reveals common patterns of high achievement for the Chinese and South Asian second generation, less for other Asian origins, and still less for those of Afro-Caribbean black origins. Relatively lower entry statuses for these immigrant groups in the US are eliminated for the second generation, indicating they experience stronger upward inter-generational mobility. As well, ‘segmented assimilation’ suggesting downward assimilation of Afro-Caribbean immigrants into an urban underclass in the US, also receives little support. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article analyses the way Australian and United States of America (USA) governments used the notion of the best interest of the child to remove Aboriginal and Native children respectively from their families and communities. Both governments relied on legal means to achieve the assimilation of children within the mainstream culture in order to annihilate Aboriginal and Native culture. On the one hand, the children were targeted because of their malleability and capacity for adaptation without influencing the mainstream culture. On the other hand, the chance of survival for their community was very thin without them. With regard to Australia, the process began as early as when the first settlements were established as Aboriginal women and children were kidnapped for economic and sexual exploitation. The protectorate system was thus established in the 1830s to assure their protection on reserved lands administered by a Chief Protector. In the case of the Native Americans, the assimilation policies were carried out with the boarding school system and the placements in white adoptive and foster homes. Both governments had shown the limit of their role as parens patriae when ethnic issues were at stake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a comparative mode of analysis, this article offers a new perspective on Indian assimilation policy in the United Slates. It focuses on one aspect of assimilation policy common to the United States and Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the practice of removing indigenous children from their families and communities and placing them in institutions. The article argues that there is a subtle difference in the way that Americans and Australians described ‘assimilation’ taking place-namely, the extent to which white Americans and white Australians openly planned to ‘whitewash’ indigenous identity through interracial relationships. Nevertheless, while children of mixed descent played a very different role in the grandiloquent words used by reformers and politicians to describe their nation's policies, similar ideas about their role in the absorption and eventual disappearance of the indigenous population into the white one can be discerned in both contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]