How do immigrants preserve their culture when immigrating to America ?

That’s how the immigrating generation does it. The next generation learns English and integrates. They walk the line between both worlds. The generation after that doesn’t speak the “old” language.
I’m generalizing, but that’s my understanding.
Some traditions are kept, some are lost. Lost of the observances are done onspecial holidays and times of remembrance. After several generations, much is lost. For instance, my mothers father is 100% Hungarian, second gen. American. I speak no Hungarian. Her mother is French Indian, I speak no French or Abnaki. My dads side is Scots-Irish. Ok, I’m actually trying to learn Gaelic, but for reasons of my own, and I don’t know anyone in my family who has spoken Gaelic for many generations. I’d run the other way if I saw a Haggis.

Preserve the language of the old country. Immigrants should teach their children to speak the mother tongue, and preserve this with future generations. Language is the foundation of culture.

Have you, your parents and grandparents lived in the same place all your lives? If not you have probably brought different traditions from your neighbors even if you just moved across country. My parents came from the urban Midwest and poor small town South and I grew up with a mixture of cultures. On the one hand we were lace-curtain Irish to the core, on the other nothing was ever wasted and nobody I knew ate day old cornbread in milk or for thay matter ate scratch cornbread at all in suburban California where I grew up.

They really didn’t.

The “preserved culture” in American society is to the original culture,
as Hollywood is to reality.
or American Pizza to Pizza
or Egg McMuffin to Eggs Benedict
or Santa Claus to Saint Nicolas
or Macy’s Day to honest-to-god public celebrations.

NOTHING has survived the great American machine of commercialization.

It’s all an over-simplified, exaggerated, contrived and desperate attempt to create and maintain some kind of idealised identity, in the midst of the most meaningless and bland society in the history of the world. Good for them, I say, but it never lasts long when people try too hard.

Really, the worst thing to come out of it is this idea, that so many Americans have, that they live in this wonderful varied society with more genuine traditions and real culture than anywhere else, when in fact all that “culture” is regarded by everyone else in the world with derision, as a childish bastardization of the reality, created by corporations, ironically enough, solely to appeal to – and make money from – the American fetish for supposedly meaningful cultural identifications.

@The_Idler AStraight out of the Intro to Sociology textbook and oversimplified to engage the tyro. Put down the book and get out and meet real people/

A lot of immigrants formed enclaves, such that one had the Polish part of town, the Italian part of town, the Chinese part of town, and so on. Established immigrants would provide a “landing zone” for the newer ones (often friends and relatives), offering anything from shelter to employment, and company.

@galileogirl I’ve never read a sociology textbook and that was my own over-simplified interpretation of the image I have constructed from my own experiences of the USA, and of her international image.

I apologize for that post, however, I was drunk.

also, @Nullo is correct.