Immigrants' Perceptions of Host Attitudes and Their Reconstruction of Cultural Groups

The acculturation of immigrants does not take place in a social vacuum; it occurs and unfolds itself within the context of intragroup and intergroup relations that provide at times the support and at times the challenge for the reconstruction of selves and identities. In his comprehensive and integrative review, John Berry points to the importance of contextual "societal" factors (subsumed under the "group-level" category in his acculturation framework) and their effects on individual adaptation. It is on an important component of this category of factors, namely the attitudes of the host (or majority) society towards immigrants and immigration, that I would like to elaborate in the first part of this commentary.