What a Polish Social Scientist Thought of Immigration in the U.S. (c. 1934)

What a Polish Social Scientist Thought of Immigration in the U.S. (c. 1934)

From Florian Znaniecki’s (1882-1958) The Methodology of Sociology (1934):

Even real active participation in foreign social life does not always insure against them [immigrants], for the individual participant may only grasp superficially certain significant foreign values, while their deeper meaning eludes him.*

*I have often been struck, for instance, by the stunted and superficial conception American-born citizens of foreign-born parents have of the most important standards of American social and even political life, particularly when their parents belonged to the working-class and lived in an immigrant community. Active participation there is, but reduced to secondary-group contacts, since immigrants are not admitted into intimate relationships with natives; and since secondary-group norms have grown, and still remain in some measure founded on primary-group relations, it is impossible to understand the former without knowing the matter.

(The Methodology of Sociology, (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1934) p. 181.)