Neither side of this decision has a direct regret survey, so both numbers below are clearly-labelled proxies. On the heritage-assertion side, the proxy is the cost that visibly heritage-distinct people bear: a 2023 Pew Research Center survey of 7,006 Asian American adults found that 58% say they have ever experienced racial discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. That cost sits alongside, not instead of, a benefit: a meta-analysis of 83 studies and 23,197 participants (Nguyen & Benet-Martinez, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2013) found that maintaining heritage identity in its bicultural form is positively associated with both psychological and sociocultural adjustment, more so than leaning on either culture alone.
On the assimilation side, the proxy is measured heritage-identity attrition rather than self-reported regret. A 2017 Pew analysis tracked Hispanic self-identification across immigrant generations: it falls from 97% among immigrants to 92% in the second generation, 77% in the third, and 50% by the fourth-or-higher generation — a roughly even split that has stopped identifying with the heritage at all. A systematic review of 21 acculturation studies (61,885 migrants; Public Health in Practice, 2020) corroborates the direction of the cost: integration, which keeps heritage identity alongside the host culture, has a more significant positive effect on mental health than assimilation, which adopts the host culture while rejecting one’s own.
So measured as discrimination cost (58%) versus heritage-loss attrition (50%), the two proxies land close together, with the visible, immediate cost of heritage assertion edging slightly higher. That ordering should be read with heavy caveats: the figures come from different ethnic populations, different surveys, and genuinely different constructs, so this is not a bilateral within-population regret comparison. The optimal strategy is also highly context-dependent — heritage assertion in a multicultural policy environment like Canada or Australia carries different costs than the same assertion in a monocultural assimilationist context.