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These visibly "different" newcomers seem to spark various concerns wherever they are concentrated. There have been complaints in New York that the signs in some Asian immigrants' stores did not contain sufficiently visible English translations. In a letter to Le Figaro recently, Brigitte Bardot denounced Muslim rituals involving animal sacrifice as simply unacceptable in French cities. Other Parisians are said to find the "smells" in immigrant areas quite offensive. In many parts of the postindustrial world, immigration is transforming "host" cities in ways that many people find culturally disorienting and personally unsettling.

Finally, there are anxieties that the new immigrants are not easily "assimilating" to the institutions of the various labor-importing democracies-that their differences instead persist. Both sides of the Atlantic have witnessed highly charged events capturing a clash in the symbolic space new immigrants and dominant societies must struggle to share. The recent battle in French schools-long proud of their secular tradition-over the right of Muslim girls to wear head scarves captured the cultural conflicts over forms of diversity and difference that many Europeans see as intolerable. And on the eve of the vote on Proposition 187, many California voters were outraged when Mexican-American students, some displaying Mexican flags, took to the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego to protest the campaign for the proposition. Some observers interpreted the incident as symptomatic of a studied and angry refusal to "assimilate."

Immigration in the global era of instant communication and ease of transportation generates what Harvard sociologist Peggy Levitt and others call "transnational communities." In America, the new immigrants, though typically eager to learn English and acquire the skills to function successfully in the global market, seem even more reluctant to give up their cultural loyalties than previous waves of immigrants. Today's immigrant parents are frankly much less apt to encourage their children to identify with the aspects of American culture that they come to see as antiauthority, antifamily, and antischool. This hesitant "approach-avoidance" strategy generates powerful anxieties and resentment among established Americans.

In his sensationalist book Alien Nation (1995), journalist Peter Brimelow says what many now feel: "The United States is being engulfed by the greatest wave of immigration it has ever faced. The latest immigrants are different from those who came before. These newcomers are less educated, less skilled, more prone to be in trouble with the law, less inclined to share American culture and values, and altogether less inclined to become Americans in name or spirit." A central element in the American debate over immigration is the issue of schooling, and, more broadly, the sociocultural adaptation of immigrants' children, the subject of my academic work.

How are immigrant children doing in school? I find three patterns of adaptation. The children of some immigrant groups tend to do much better-in terms of grades, achievements tests, and attitudes toward schools-than their native-born peers. The children of other immigrant groups approximate the norms of their U.S.-born peers, while those of a third set of immigrant groups tend to do worse.

Yet the research shows an unsettling pattern: among all major groups of recent immigrants-Asians, Latinos, and Caribbeans alike-exposure to U.S. society seems to be negatively associated with school performance. The longer immigrant children live in the United States, the more time they spend watching television and the less time they spend doing homework, the worse their school performance becomes, and the lower their aspirations fall.

No matter how at odds with the facts, Brimelow's image of clannish new arrivals stubbornly clinging to their counterproductive values, world-views, and languages is of course not new. But what we see today, I think, is the strategic deployment of the concept of "culture" as the marker of insurmountable difference. The new immigrants are a problem, this argument goes, because they share cultural norms and values that are incompatible with those of the dominant culture. Other cultures are viewed as being radically different, as manifestations of an uncanny Otherness. If an earlier generation of anthropologists spoke of malleable immigrants who could be "melted down" into the mysterious American alloy, today we are decidedly "beyond the melting pot."

This is not just an American phenomenon. I think this is yet another symptom of a profound cultural anxiety of the fin de si�cle. At a time when the nation as we understood it during this century is rapidly being subverted-internally by a crisis of trust and authority, and externally by the new phantom formations that some call transnationalism-cultural and ethnic identities are making a furious comeback as the dominant idiom of belonging. At a time when Belgian national identity itself is increasingly unimportant, Flemish and Walloon hyperanxieties about "language" and "cultural integrity" seem a little obsessive. The French, who continue to fight a hopeless battle for the "integrity" of their language, are now perhaps for the first time in their history paralyzed about the "assimilability" of their new immigrants. As the grande dame of French psychoanalysis, Julia Kristeva, has put it, "France today is in the process of welcoming newcomers who do not give up their particularities."

Clearly, new patterns of trade, capital flows, massive and instantaneous flows of information, and ease of transportation are giving birth to new cultural dynamics and identities in a global, postnational space. All parturitions are painful and dangerous. They are also exhilarating and promising. Immigration, a key feature of the emerging transnationalism, today captures the pain, danger, and promise of new life. As an immigrant and a citizen of the United States at home in a worldwide community of scholarship, I cannot help being alarmed that a xenophobic idiom is coming to dominate discussion of the profoundly important problems involving the movement of peoples and culture around the planet.

Marcelo M. Suérez-Orozco is professor of education in the areas of human development and psychology and of learning and teaching at the Graduate School of Education. His most recent book, Transformation: Immigration, Family Life and the Achievement Motivation Among Latino Adolescents, coauthored with Carola Suérez-Orozco, was published in December 1995 and won the best book award from the Society for Research on Adolescence. Carola Suérez-Orozco, a clinical psychologist, is a research associate at the school.

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