Tomás Jiménez's new book discussed in the Atlantic

Marco Rubio's Lonely Fight

The Florida senator's political and cultural boundary-crossing is hurting him now, but it may be just what America needs in the future.

The real reason Rubio is such a lightning rod, I suspect, is that it is in his nature to cross cultural and political boundaries. I’m reminded of the work of the Tomás Jiménez, a Stanford sociologist and a leading expert on immigration-driven cultural change. In The Other Side of Assimilation, Jiménez observes that assimilation is not just a straight-line process in which newcomers, whom he defines as immigrants and the children of at least one immigrant parent, come to resemble established Americans, his term for the U.S.-born children of two U.S.-born parents. Rather, it is a relational process, which “involves back-and-forth adjustments in daily life by both newcomers and established individuals as they come into contact with each other.”

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