My parents are christians from Iraq and Syria and i'm going to be blunt: I feel like the reason a lot of refugees refuse to assimilate is because they are not actually refugees but are economic migrants. When my mom came from Iraq in the 70s, she was vetted, detained, and split from her family for 8 years before she was allowed to come to the US. The reason is because they wanted to make sure she was actually a refugee. When you are persecuted and living in fear from your home country, you are grateful to just be safe and want to assimilate and start all over once you get to your new country. My mom's entire family actually refuses to speak arabic even because of how horribly they were terrorized and discriminated against. I have a lot of cousins coming now from Syria/Iraq and they are split into two groups: the refugees who came from minority villiages taken over from ISIS and had no where to go and the "refugees" who were born in major cities where they blended in with the majority, not really persecuted, were far from ISIS, and tagged along as economic migrants. The former like my parents have no problem assimilating into American/European culture, but the latter completely refuse to assimilate. I've tried so introduce american culture to them but they won't speak english to me, aren't open to doing american things with me, and will only hang with me if I try to fit in with their culture. Its extremely annoying and at this point i've just totally given up on them.