Cultural Assimilation of International Students and the Role Attitudes of Mainstream Population Play

Abstract

It has been about ten years that universities in Georgia accept international students From Europe, United States, Asia and Africa. Georgia has been considered as one of the tolerant countries to diversity, being home for people of different culture and religions. In parallel, international students often report that they face major challenges just because of their origin. The value of the research comes from the context of the country. From one hand, we are able to investigate factors of cultural assimilation of long term minorities living in the country for many generations. From the other hand, we have unique possibility to track cultural assimilation process when there is a new, previously unrepresented group of immigrants. Therefore the research has both theoretical and practical value. The goal of the research is to identify what factors may influence – make easier or complicated – newcomers’ social integration. In this unique and specific environment, we try to answer the question: what are the factors that sometimes make assimilation easy or hard, how do attitudes of immigrants and locals influence this process, etc. The study is an attempt to consider cultural assimilation as a dynamic process with more than two dimensions and bring readiness of mainstream population to accept an outgroup as a factor of cultural assimilation.