Crossing the immigration and race border: A critical race theory approach to immigration studies

Largely in response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, scholarship in the sociology of race abandoned the conceptual framework of Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and others who, during the 1920s and 1930s, had developed urban sociology at the University of Chicago. Using the city of Chicago as a "natural laboratory" for conducting urban social research, members of the Chicago School (Park; Park, Burgess, McKenzie, and Wirth; Thomas and Znaniecki; Wirth) focused their work on immigrants who settled in locales that recruited their labor. Adopting Simmel's social type of "the stranger" as an heuristic in their detached role as researchers, they studied immigrant populations moving into Chicago's "natural areas." Building on theories of social organization and conflict, Park and Burgess described immigrants' social experiences as being those of competition, conflict, or accommodation. Indeed, they saw these experiences as steps toward the inevitable process of assimilation.