While Berry’s model of psychological acculturation focuses primarily on the agency of individuals choosing strategies that they believe will lead to the most successful adaptation in their new national context, he simultaneously emphasizes that migrants do not operate within vacuums and consider these orientations in relation to the dominant society’s perspectives of immigration and cultural diversity (Berry, 1997, 2005, 2006a). Berry (2006a) emphasizes that while strategies may be mediated or constrained by national policies, the basic orientations that individuals follow reflect pathways that are universally applicable to all acculturating groups (see Bhatia, 2002a; Bhatia & Ram, 2001 for a critical review). Nonetheless, Sam and Berry (2010) maintain that integration is the most adaptive strategy across national contexts, even though it has been shown that this is only a permissible and efficacious strategy in nations that encourage cultural diversity (see García-Ramírez et al., 2011; Rudmin, 2006; Schotte et al., 2018). Ward and Geeraert (2016) reflect that considerations of the ecological contexts of acculturating groups would help illuminate these contrasting findings and help ameliorate acculturative stress. Chirkov (2009a) furthers this, arguing that Berry’s perspective “has minimal pragmatic usefulness as it is practically impossible to apply the discovered regularities to
specific communities” (p. 101). To that end, García-Ramírez et al. (2011) embrace a liberation psychological approach that emphasizes the political power of scholarship and without careful considerations of the particularities of diverse migrant groups and their ecological contexts, it is dubious whether agency amongst migrant youth could be fostered.
Berry’s four-fold model has repeatedly predicted that integration leads to the most beneficial psychological and sociocultural adaptation, but Schotte et al. (2018) emphasize that “it is unclear whether the integration hypothesis applies in assimilative contexts across
different outcomes, and across different immigration groups” (p. 16). Bourhis, Moïse, Perreault, & Senécal (1997) maintain that Berry’s model was derived from North American, multicultural contexts, and Paloma, García-Ramírez, Camacho and Olmedo (2016) highlight that Berry “argues that bicultural identity can only be freely chosen by migrant groups when the
mainstream society is open and inclusive towards cultural diversity” (p. 76). How applicable is his model to this thesis which investigates a German context that is considered ‘assimilationist’, even by Berry (more on this later; Phalet & Kosic, 2006; Sam & Berry, 2010; Schotte et al., 2018; Zick, Wagner, van Dick, & Petzel, 2001)? More importantly, “there are not proposals that lead migrant groups to reach well-being in oppressive or intolerant contexts” (Paloma et al., 2016), thereby necessitating a careful consideration of national contexts and policies. Recognizing this gap, Bourhis et al. (1997) propose an interactive acculturation model that conceptualizes adaptation and stress within the context of national policies and perceived discrimination. Berry’s model operates within the confines of an assumed multicultural society and offers little advice for migrants in different contexts, thus requiring a reformulation to account for these divergent experiences. Furthermore, Berry’s model must be refined to incorporate the particular experiences of non-white, non-European migrants.
Though Berry (1980, 2006a) has emphasized that acculturation studies are always situated within hierarchies of power between groups, Bhatia and Ram (2001) reflect that “when we adhere to universal models of acculturation, we undervalue the asymmetrical relations of
power and the inequalities and injustices faced by certain immigrant groups as a result of their nationality, race or gender” (p. 8). Universal models that seek to predict acculturation strategies and their outcomes are insufficient to understand the complexity of shifting cultural identities in relation to questions of power in the nation-of-origin and the new national context. Bhatia (2002a) outlines this perspective, arguing that
When referring to an immigrant’s acculturation process, we need to be attentive to issues of race, gender, and power status of an immigrant before and after migration to the host country. The acculturation process within the U.S. takes on a different developmental trajectory, if, say, the migrant was part of a powerful center or majority in his/her local milieu prior to migration, and after migration, he/she finds himself or herself to be a part of a minority living on the margins (p. 7).
Berry’s model that focuses on the power dynamics in the host country is unable to capture the nuances involved in this transition by considering past circumstances in the context of evolving relationships of the migrant community to changing national contexts. Additionally, migrant groups have different experiences within the same host country (see Schotte et al., 2018), especially those groups who encounter Othering discourses due to persistent colonial histories and racialization (Bhatia & Ram, 2001). Importantly, these considerations are closely tied to national policies for citizenship (Ellis & Bhatia, 2019) and anti-immigration laws, thereby also affecting identity formation. When scholars ignore these dynamic contexts and study
acculturation through predictable strategies removed from local particularities, these universal models “minimize the inequities and injustices faced by many non-European immigrants. Even worse we risk underrating, overlooking and suppressing the discordant and discrepant history of immigration in the United States (and elsewhere)” (Bhatia & Ram, 2001, p. 9).
Embracing a decolonizing perspective, this study recognizes that these policies constrain and moderate the possibilities for acculturating individuals, thus framing it as a political project to help ameliorate the restrictive and oppressive conditions by exploring how individuals can achieve well-being during the acculturation process (Bhatia, 2019; García-Ramírez et al., 2011; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Revising Berry’s model by considering how changing power dynamics in different national contexts, incorporating congruence frameworks for describing acculturative stress and adaptation, and explicitly reflecting on the particular experiences of non-white, non- European migrants help apply this model to the contemporary German migration context. These revisions, along with a reconceptualization of culture, help illuminate the prospective outcomes of the acculturation process, but do little to explain how individuals acculturate. Theorizing acculturation along axes of ‘strategies’, ‘orientations’, ‘attitudes’, or ‘behaviors’ allow for evolving perspectives, but cannot capture what the process actually entails, and measures it after long-term adaptation has been ‘achieved’ (whether this is even possible will be explored later). Therefore, Berry’s model must be holistically reconsidered in favor of a new framework that theorizes acculturation as a continually negotiated identity formation process.