Definition
The process by which immigrants adopt the cultural practices, norms, and identity markers of the host society over time. Distinct from economic assimilation (earnings/occupational convergence) — the two are nearly uncorrelated across sending-country groups.
Key Ideas
- Foreignness Index (F-index): A measure of name "foreignness" defined as the relative probability a given name belongs to a foreign-born vs. native-born person, normalized to a 0–100 scale. Introduced by Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson using the Fryer-Levitt (2004) normalization. A name with F-index = 100 is held exclusively by immigrants; F-index = 0 is held exclusively by natives.
- Naming as assimilation measure: Children's given names are a pure parental choice (unlike intermarriage, which also depends on who wants to marry you). They signal cultural identity and are observable in both historical census records and modern birth certificates.
- 50% gap closure in 20 years: Across both the Age of Mass Migration (1920 Census) and the modern era (California 1989–2015), immigrant mothers give children names ~18–19 F-index points more foreign than native mothers on arrival, and close roughly half that gap after 20 years in the United States (US).
- Fastest assimilation among accused groups: Groups most accused of resisting assimilation start with the most foreign names but shift fastest. Historically: Southern and Eastern Europeans (Finnish, Swiss, Portuguese, Russian, Italian mothers). Today: Mexican immigrants (−0.51 F-index points/year) and Vietnamese (−0.34/year).
- Education doesn't gate cultural assimilation: Even high school dropouts assimilate at similar or faster rates than college-educated immigrants (for Mexican and Vietnamese mothers in California data).
- Anglicization as mechanism: In modern California, Anglicizing Spanish names (Maria → Mary, Ana → Anna) accounts for roughly half the measured assimilation. In historical data, phonetic equivalence explains less — immigrants shifted to genuinely different names (e.g., Antonio → John or Frank), not phonetic variants.
How It Works
Assimilation is estimated using a mother fixed-effects design: the key variation is between siblings born to the same immigrant mother at different maternal ages (proxying for different years spent in the US). This controls for all time-invariant mother characteristics, including age at arrival. The dependent variable is the F-index of the child's name; the key regressor is mother's age (proxy for time in the US). Including birth-year fixed effects absorbs secular naming trends.
The causal interpretation is supported by two placebo tests: (1) native-born mothers show no decline in name foreignness with age — they drift slightly toward more foreign-sounding names; (2) children born abroad before the mother migrated show smaller assimilation effects than US-born children.
Why It Matters
- Falsifies the nostalgic narrative used to restrict immigration policy — that past immigrants assimilated but modern immigrants do not.
- Shows that cultural and economic assimilation are decoupled: a country's immigrants can Americanize rapidly in naming while lagging economically, or vice versa. Policy arguments based on cultural refusal are empirically unsupported.
- Supports the Akerlof-Kranton (2000) / Bisin-Verdier (2000) identity economics framework: incomplete first-generation assimilation reflects the utility of ethnic identity, not inability or unwillingness to integrate. The tradeoff (ethnic names enhance group solidarity; American names reduce labor market discrimination) is real and resolved differently by different immigrant communities.
- First rigorous longitudinal evidence on first-generation cultural assimilation; most prior work focused on second-generation convergence.
Open Questions
- Does name-based assimilation generalize beyond California? The reweighted national estimate is ~8.4 vs. 9.8 points per 20 years — modest difference but suggests Mexican immigrant overrepresentation matters.
- How does cultural assimilation relate to political assimilation, civic participation, or residential integration? Naming captures one dimension; the multi-dimensional structure of assimilation is largely unmapped empirically.
- What explains the near-zero correlation between cultural and economic assimilation across sending countries? Are these driven by different immigrant selection processes, different discrimination environments, or different social networks?
- Does the assimilation gradient hold for third+ generation immigrants who retain ethnic enclaves? The paper observes first-generation mothers only.
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