School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemImmigration and assimilation: an outline account of the IR0 immigrants in Australia( 1955)The following considerations are the successive stages of a historic-sociological study of assimilation in its widest sense with the aid of various branches of knowledge, which relate to or deal with the causes, effects, and processes of the transplantation of members of foreign cultures into a new socio-economic and cultural environment. Postwar refugees (and displaced persons) from Eastern Central Europe, resettled in Australia through the agency of the International Refugee Organization have been chosen as the objects of observation. The principal proposition which was followed in this thesis is that: assimilation (integration) is not limited to one side alone but based on reciprocal adjustments between the immigrants and the receiving society, and consists in a great measure of a number of long selective processes; in these, cultural traits are mutually modified, abandoned or assumed according to usefulness or attractiveness irrespective of volition, yet those processes may be hastened or slowed down by the existence of certain attitudes and circumstances; one major factor in this respect consists in the extent to which the pre-immigrational hopes of both the receiving society and the newcomers concerning immigration have materialized. For the determination of the processes of assimilation a brief evaluation of overseas immigrational and assimilational history was undertaken; for the identification of some of the causes of the transplantation of the IRO immigrants various aspects of the Australian and Eastern Central European backgrounds were analyzed; for the establishment of different effects of this population influx an examination of the major adjustment on the part of both the receiving society and the immigrants was performed. (From Introduction)