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This chapter explores how Colombian and Dominican children of immigrants living in New York City negotiate multiple identities, selves, cultures, and histories within transnational social fields. Children of immigrants grow up in the midst of multiple cultures and juggle an array of cultural norms, values, and expectations of their parents’ culture and those of mainstream “American” culture, while they maintain transnational ties to the home country of their parents. This chapter is based on a mixed-methods secondary analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data collected on Dominican and Colombian young adult children of immigrants (ages 18 to 32) living in New York City by the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York study (ISGMNY) in 1998–2000 (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, & Waters, 2004). The author argues that children of immigrants navigate multiple identities as a result of their experiences of growing up within transnational social fields shaped by their parents’ home country and the United States. Second, children of immigrants embrace and feel at ease with the complexity and ambiguity inherent in their border-crossing lives. Third, children of immigrants construct and manage their personal and social identities by comparing and contrasting their multiple cultural repertoires without juxtaposing them as oppositional dichotomies. Using a transnational perspective allows us to approach the study of migration and its impact on people’s lives with a lens of continuity and recognizes migration as a family project and as a process of transition and change where migrants maintain connection between their pasts, presents, and futures through subsequent generations.

War and terror, demographic imbalances, unchecked climate change, and rampant criminality are the drivers of catastrophic migrations. In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we witnessed the largest number of forcefully displaced human beings in record. Concurrently the world is now facing the largest “crisis of confinement” in history, leaving millions of human beings in search of shelter far away from the high and middle-income countries, lingering in interminable limbo. In the aftermath of World War II, Europe, the United States, and their allies developed policies for forcefully displaced refugees based on the assumption that whatever caused them to flee their homes would be resolved and refugees would return home. These architectures, we argue, are misaligned with the new conditions. Devastated environments in states with weak institutional capacities hold little promise for safe return. A new twenty-first-century cartography of mass migration suggests forms of migration that do not fit existing policy frameworks. First, most forcefully displaced migrants today stay as internally displaced either in their own countries or in camps in neighboring states often in subhuman conditions with few protections. Second, protracted conflicts are sending millions fleeing with no expectation of returning. Third the architectures in place are generally blind to the developmental needs of children. Crying children are the face of the catastrophic migrations of the twenty-first century. Worldwide, one in every two hundred children is a refugee, almost twice the number of a decade ago. In 2017, there were over twenty-eight million children forcefully displaced. For the first time in history, over half of all refugees under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees mandate are minors. Even when temporary protection is possible or desirable, children in flight need more than a safe haven. They need a place to grow up. They need the safety of home. In this Introduction we review the best evidence and current thinking on physical health, mental health, and trauma; legal protections; and education for forcefully displaced children and youth.

This chapter reviews what is known about how the children of immigrants to the United States are integrating. Overall the second generation is integrating with natives, showing a great deal of progress compared to their parents levels in socioeconomic attainment. In other areas such as crime, health and family type, the children of immigrants are also converging with native born Americans, but in these three areas this makes them worse off because first generation immigrants have lower crime rates, better health and more intact families than native born Americans. While the children of immigrants suffer from racial discrimination and rising income inequality which also affects the native born, there is one area in which they face a specific barrier to their integration and well-being—legal status. Undocumented children and the citizen children of the undocumented show more psychological distress, lower educational attainment and other negative consequences stemming from their parents legal status. Universal policy solutions that address racial discrimination and income inequality are recommended. In addition, an appeal to human rights and to American shared moral values are suggested as a way forward to improve conditions for undocumented immigrants and their families and to reach a lasting solution to America’s immigration impasse.

This chapter looks at child poverty trends in Sweden across two recessions, the first (severe) 1991–6, and the second (hardly noticeable) 2008–10, using a number of measures. Absolute (bread-line) household income poverty and economic deprivation surged, with some lag, during the first recession, but shrunk steadily as the macro-economy improved up until around 2006, after which there is no trend but temporary fluctuations. Relative income poverty fell somewhat during the earlier recession but has grown since the mid-1990s, mainly because of a more precarious situation for one-parent families and non-employed parents (often immigrants). In a rare but theoretically important step, child poverty is also measured by young people’s own reports, showing few trends between 2000 and 2011. While material conditions improved somewhat, relative poverty did not change, in stark contrast to household relative poverty—perhaps because poor parents distribute more economic resources to their children during hard times.

This chapter examines educational attainment is our sample of second-generation youths, comparing it to native-parentage students and, subsequently, to results among children of immigrants in the United States, based on CILS data. Staying in school, type of school attended, and average grades are the objective indicators examined. To these, we add educational ambition and attitudes toward the schools attended. Multivariate analysis highlights the role of family status and parental expectations in increasing both educational ambition and academic attainment among second-generation youths. The chapter closes with two structural models graphically summarizing the educational attainment process among children of immigrants in Spain.

We review the research design of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) as a prelude to presenting the methodology of the Longitudinal Study of the Second Generation (ILSEG in its Spanish acronym) in Spain. The sampling strategy, questionnaire design, and instrument administration of ILSEG closely parallel those of CILS and facilitate comparisons between the countries. The rationale for employing a longitudinal design and its advantages relative to cross-sectional surveys are explained. We present evidence of the success of the follow-up ILSEG sample in terms of absence of bias relative to the original one. The second generation’s replacement survey, completed in 2012, also turned out to be quite similar to the follow-up sample in a number of objective characteristics. This allows us to merge both samples to increase the reliability and representativeness of adaptation results over time.