That said, if the U.S. House of Representatives cooperates with the U.S. Senate and passes reform legislation to offer those 11 million immigrants an opportunity toward citizenship, that will change for many of those people. Hence, acculturation will become -- and is now -- an important issue in how the majority population should relate to those immigrants.

For social workers (and other professionals in healthcare and welfare-related agencies) acculturation should mean a kind of "moving and mixing" within the larger U.S. culture rather than simply expecting immigrants to go from culture a to culture B, and basically become like Americans of European extraction, according to an article in the peer-reviewed journal Human Development (Bhatia, et al., 2001).

Why is the history of American immigration policies relevant to social workers today? That question can be answered by using Bhatia's research, which reflects that due to the "diasporas" in "First World" communities...
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