Acculturation and Acceptance: Migrant Integration in Host Societies

Every migrant who steps into a new country carries two things: a suitcase, and a set of habits, values, and ways of seeing the world. What happens after landing decides whether that person quietly disappears into the new culture, ends up isolated from it, or finds some workable middle ground. Anthropologists have a word for this middle ground, and understanding it explains a lot about how migrant communities actually live, from Punjabi families in London to Syrian families across Europe.

What acculturation actually means 🔗

Acculturation describes what happens when groups with different cultures come into direct, sustained contact and start changing as a result. In migration studies, this usually means the migrant adjusting to the culture of the host society. But the word carries an important assumption that often gets ignored in practice: acculturation is meant to work both ways.

The UNHCR’s own integration framework describes this two-way process clearly. It expects refugees to adapt to the host society without discarding their own cultural identity, while also expecting host communities and institutions to adjust and make room for newcomers. In reality, though, the burden of adjustment almost always falls on the migrant. The host society is rarely asked to change anything about itself.

Berry’s four strategies 🔗

Psychologist John Berry’s acculturation framework remains one of the most cited models in this field. It maps out four possible outcomes based on two questions: does the migrant want to keep their original culture, and do they want regular contact with the host culture? The combinations produce integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalisation. Integration, where a person keeps their heritage culture while actively participating in the new one, is generally considered the healthiest and most sustainable path. Assimilation, by contrast, involves giving up the original culture almost entirely to blend into the dominant one.

Acculturation vs. assimilation: a critical distinction 🔗

Acculturation and assimilation get used interchangeably in everyday conversation, but anthropologists treat them as very different outcomes. Acculturation allows a migrant to adopt what is useful or necessary from the host culture, things like language, workplace norms, or civic behaviour, while still holding on to core parts of their own identity: religion, food habits, family structures, festivals. Assimilation goes further. It involves the near-total absorption of the migrant into the host culture, often at the cost of the original one.

This distinction matters because total assimilation carries a real cost: the loss of self-identity. A community that assimilates completely stops existing as a distinct group within a generation or two. Acculturation, on the other hand, allows survival in a new environment without that erasure. This is also where the idea of acceptance comes in. Acceptance refers to the adjustments made by all parties involved, migrants and host communities alike, to reduce conflict and make coexistence workable. It is not a one-sided compromise; it is meant to be a shared one.

How acculturation changes across generations 🔗

Acculturation is rarely uniform within a single migrant community. It shifts noticeably from one generation to the next. First-generation migrants, who grew up entirely within their culture of origin before moving, tend to acculturate more slowly and less completely. They arrive with an already-formed identity, and adapting to a new culture as an adult is a different process than growing up inside two cultures simultaneously.

A well-known study by Sekhon and Szmigin on second-generation Indian Punjabis in Britain illustrates this well. The researchers found that second-generation Punjabis were, in many ways, comfortable navigating Western life while still holding on to their Punjabi and Indian roots. But this balance was not entirely their own choice. Parental and extended family expectations exerted strong pressure on how much they participated in rituals, festivals, and community functions tied to their ethnic origin. Their identity was constantly negotiated rather than fixed, shaped as much by family networks as by their own preferences.

Why this matters practically 🔗

This generational gap often becomes a source of friction inside migrant households. A first-generation parent may see their child’s comfort with the host culture as a worrying dilution of heritage, while the child may see the parent’s caution as an obstacle to fitting in. Both are responding rationally to different acculturation timelines, not to some failure on either side.

What shapes the pace and direction of acculturation 🔗

No two migrants acculturate at the same speed, even within the same family. Several factors influence how quickly and how completely someone adapts to a host culture: age at the time of migration, gender, socio-economic status, religion, place of origin, language ability, and political ideology all play a role. A young child who starts school in the host country will typically acculturate faster than a grandparent who arrives later in life and has fewer opportunities for daily interaction with the new culture.

Underlying most of these factors are two competing pulls: cultural maintenance, the desire to preserve one’s original customs and values, and contact and participation, the willingness to engage with the host society’s institutions, language, and social life. When these two pulls are balanced, acculturation tends to proceed smoothly. When they pull in opposite directions, tension follows, both within the migrant community and between the migrant community and the host society. Distrust, suspicion, and in extreme cases violence, can slow or block acceptance altogether, regardless of how willing the migrant is to adapt.

Why some host societies accept newcomers and others don’t 🔗

Acculturation is not something migrants achieve alone. It depends heavily on whether the host society is willing to accommodate cultural difference in the first place. Some societies operate on a model of cultural pluralism, where multiple cultural identities are allowed to coexist without pressure to conform. Others remain sceptical of outsiders and resist accommodating difference at all.

The European response to the Syrian refugee crisis is a useful case study here. Countries like Italy and Greece, as first points of entry, absorbed large numbers of refugees, and Germany went further, adopting an unusually open stance under Chancellor Angela Merkel that allowed hundreds of thousands of Syrians to settle and eventually enter schools, training programs, and the workforce. Hungary took the opposite approach, building border fences and refusing entry to most arrivals.

Even within Germany, acceptance was not universal. The country’s civil society response was matched by the rise of the far-right PEGIDA movement, which mobilised tens of thousands of people specifically to oppose refugee acceptance. A comparison of German and Hungarian policymaking during the crisis found that the two countries’ approaches diverged sharply even though they were responding to the same event, showing how much national attitude, not just the scale of migration, shapes acceptance.

When cultural maintenance and participation collide 🔗

Conflict in acculturation almost always traces back to the same two factors mentioned earlier: how much a migrant wants to maintain their original culture, and how much contact and participation they have with the host society. When a host community reads strong cultural maintenance as a refusal to integrate, tension builds, even if the migrant is participating actively in other ways, like employment or civic life.

This tension plays out distinctly in the lives of second-generation migrants. Many do not fully classify themselves as part of the host country’s native population, yet they also don’t identify purely with their parents’ country of origin. Instead, they hold multiple, overlapping identities, shaped heavily by family and kinship networks. These networks influence far more than festivals and rituals; they shape personal relationships, marriage choices, and even professional decisions, long after the first generation’s direct influence would be expected to fade. The UNHCR notes that managing these cultural differences well requires ongoing mediation and bridge-building between communities, not a one-time adjustment that ends once a migrant “settles in.”

Acculturation as an ongoing negotiation 🔗

None of this suggests that acculturation is a problem to be solved once and for all. It is closer to an ongoing negotiation that continues across generations, shaped by family expectations, host society attitudes, political climates, and individual choices. Migrant communities that manage to hold on to their cultural identity while genuinely participating in their new society tend to fare better, both socially and psychologically, than those pushed toward full assimilation or left isolated through host society rejection.

For urban centres experiencing rapid in-migration, whether from rural regions within the same country or from across borders, this framework offers a useful lens. It moves the conversation away from asking “why won’t they adapt?” and toward a more accurate question: how much room is the host society actually making for that adaptation to happen on fair terms?

What do you think? Do you think Indian cities offer migrants enough room to maintain their cultural identity while integrating, or does the pressure to “fit in” usually fall entirely on the newcomer? And looking at your own family or community’s migration history, does the generational pattern described here, slower acculturation for the first generation, more negotiated identity for the second, match what you have observed?

References

1. https://www.unhcr.org/handbooks/ih/about-handbook/guiding-principles
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172911/
3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10253860903562171
4. https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/66491/the-refugee-summer-of-2015-key-moments-that-shaped-germany
5. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13501763.2024.2377617
6. https://www.unhcr.org/handbooks/ih/welcoming-inclusive-societies/promoting-welcoming-and-inclusive-societies