For immigrant students, the power of the nation to regulate language behaviors through the school system
is shown in Olsen's (1997) study, among others, of how immigrant teenagers are socialized to conform to
the language and racial ideologies of the US. Olsen documented in close ethnographic detail the dominant
perception among new immigrants of Americans as exclusively English speaking, the social distance
between minority students of the same ethnicity who speak English and those who don't, and the
movement from nationality to "race" -- how immigrants become absorbed into particular racial categories
in the U.S. society. By situating her study in the historical context of American schooling, Olsen
concludes that,
There are three pieces to the process of Americanization that newcomers to the United States
undergo in our high schools: academic marginalization and separation; the requirements to
become English-speaking (despite many odds) and to drop one's native language in order to
participate in the academic and social life of the high school; and insistent pressures to find and
take one's place in the racial hierarchy of the United States