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This chapter examines the residential contexts of immigrant families, which also affect the starting point for the second generation. Fears that immigrants and their children will end up living in “parallel societies” like the black ghettoes of American cities are vastly overblown. Nevertheless, neighborhoods of immigrant concentration, at least for low-status groups, may create marked disadvantages. The chapter assesses the actual extent, and consequences, of residential segregation, and looks at the role of public policies in shaping these patterns. Neighborhoods are often the places where immigrant minorities and native majorities have initial contacts and thus where the impacts of immigration on the mainstream society are particularly salient. The chapter then considers the emergence of “super-diverse” neighborhoods.

This chapter uses data from the 1976 Survey of Income and Education to compare the receipt of transfers by families headed by male and female immigrants and those headed by native-born Americans. The average level of transfers is found to be considerably higher among families headed by immigrants, but this is almost entirely the result of the higher average age of family members among the immigrant group — a reflection of the large inflows of immigrants into the U.S. during the pre-1924 period. When age and other factors are held constant, immigrant families are found to be considerably less likely to rely on welfare than native families, and their receipts from social insurance programs are found to be only slightly higher.

This chapter examines the obstacles to the academic performance of immigrant students. It treats the family as the center of immigration; reveals just how dislocating immigration becomes to its form and coherence; shows how school policies and practices undermine the immigrant family in unanticipated ways; and clarifies how the family elements of the immigration experience intersect negatively with the structure of the educational system.

From March 10 to May 1, 2006, between 3.5 and 5 million people across the United States participated in immigrant rights rallies. Many of the faces in the crowd were those of children and adolescents. This chapter discusses youth engagement and family political socialization during the spring 2006 immigrant rights protests. It builds on an emerging empirical and theoretical literature that shows how children influence parents’ political attitudes and activities, particularly in immigrant families. Drawing on early findings from the Immigrant Families’ Political Socialization Project, which conducted in-depth multigenerational interviews of Mexican-origin families in Richmond and Oakland, California, this chapter shows that the protests of spring 2006 mobilized large segments of the Mexican-origin population, both adults and youth. Thus, the protests were a family affair. Youth played an active and independent role in these mass mobilizations. This chapter focuses on intergenerational mobilization: the processes by which people acquired information, were spurred to participate, and joined in the protests because of family interactions.

This chapter examines the third question of the book: how linkages work across the cultural worlds of adolescents’ families, peers, schools, and communities. When do cultural mismatches emerge across these worlds? When can youth navigate across their worlds while staying on the good path of life? Who serves as cultural brokers by helping youth link their worlds along their pathways or cultural gatekeepers by blocking these linkages? The chapter draws on findings from a research network including a broad array of cultural communities. Among the issues considered are: opening the academic pipeline across cultural communities, regions, and social class; aspirations and expectations for school, careers, and the “good path of life”, and bridging worlds of families, peers, schools, and communities. Taken together, these new findings challenge familiar assumptions about how linkages work across students’ cultural worlds.

This chapter discusses the life of Robert Matthews, who was born in 1788 to a Scots immigrant family in the farming village of Cambridge, Washington County, New York. It notes that the few associations they sustained with others came mainly with their fellow immigrants in the surrounding New York and Vermont country towns who clung to their uncompromising Scots Calvinism, nursing ancient ecclesiastical grudges unknown to the rest of the world. The chapter reports that in 1835, an enterprising Manhattan journalist disclosed that Robert Matthews had his own conversations with supernatural spirits and impressed his friends with feats of clairvoyance. It notes, however, that the source is highly suspect and that no such report appears in the Coila church records. It is just possible that the visions did appear and that the worried Coila churchmen suppressed the fact.

This chapter deconstructs the issue of immigration and immigrant parents' involvement in education. Based on a sociological study of second-generation Dominican and Colombian young adults and their parents, it reframes parental involvement by examining the world of parents as immigrants. It shows that the experience of immigrant families is shaped by the social isolation of parents and an emerging immigrant cultural identity of marginalization. This identity persists long after arrival and cuts across social mobility paths, although it is experienced in different ways according to social class. The chapter describes a poignant “sense of being alone in America among the immigrant parents” that bears upon their children's sense of being on their own in American schools. It argues that policymakers need to consider how best to incorporate newly arrived immigrants and immigrant children, particularly strategies for immigrants to develop strong affiliations in the multiple domains of their lives in the United States.

The prolonged controversy over mass immigration is embodied in the lives of the eleven million illegal immigrants in the United States. This chapter reflects on five years of immigration coverage for the New York Times to examine the impact of escalating immigration enforcement on a generation of children in unauthorized or mixed-status immigrant families. More than a million are coming of age without proper papers; at least four million others are at risk of deportation or family separation because a parent is in the country illegally. The chapter asks whether these children and young adults are forming a new kind of American caste system, one that challenges the nation's concepts of civil rights. It also explores how journalists and academics researching questions of assimilation deal honestly with the issue of legal status without putting vulnerable subjects at risk. Using examples from previous work, the chapter addresses this growing challenge and how it affects both news coverage and social science research.

Using the records of U.S. government officials enlisted to protect the welfare of children in the United States and the oral life histories of women raising children without the emotional or financial support of their bracero boyfriends or husbands, this chapter interrogates the trauma these women faced when investigating the whereabouts and intentions of these men for the sake of their children’s welfare. The caution and conviction with which they pursued the U.S. government’s assistance in a most personal family situation exposed these women to invasive proceedings and transactions. These processes and interactions further confirmed that, indeed, these women had been most daring in searching for answers that would help them parent their children responsibly and on their own.

This chapter examines how Latino immigrant families view the integration stage of bicultural development. Using alternation theory as a guide, it considers how the process of becoming bicultural is shaped by different environmental systems such as family, friends, and peers. It also explores the immigrant families' relationship to their culture-of-origin and to the U.S. host culture as well as the cultural capital, opportunities, and challenges they face in living between two cultures. Finally, it discusses how Latino families strongly encouraged biculturalism by reinforcing familism and practicing restrictive parenting strategies. The chapter highlights the benefits and challenges inherent in developing bicultural skills, especially the ways that bilingualism and peer networks facilitate bicultural development.

Global migrations are transforming the very shape, essence, and definition of family. This chapter examines the prominence of transnational familyhood and its implications for the meaning of family life in an age of mass migration. It considers what it means to be a parent, a child, or even a “family unit” in transnational circumstances of global migration. A study of immigrant communities (Central American, Chinese, Dominican, Haitian, and Mexican) show that cultural norms tend to hold traditional integrative models of “the family.” While the family typically places parent-child relationships at the center, it expands to encompass sustained and intimate caretaking provided by extended kin and fictive kin. Migrations create extended separations, resulting in biological parents providing financial care and grandparents, or other kin, providing daily care. Extended separations lead to complex attachments to both the symbolic parents (daily caretakers who are typically extended kin) and biological parents who may become abstractions over time. Reunifications lead to complex and poignant adjustments for parties in the caretaking arrangement.

This chapter explores enculturation or culture-of-origin involvement, with particular emphasis on how Latino immigrant families maintain their ethnic identities. Drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data from a study that was conducted as part of the Latino Acculturation and Health Project, it examines major changes in immigrant family systems that occur during the diffused, bifurcated stage of acculturation contact following immigration to the United States. Based on qualitative interviews with parents and adolescents from 100 Latino families, the chapter considers how Latino family systems change after immigration, how these changes affect family members' levels of enculturation (or ethnic identity) and family relationships, and what factors best explain postimmigration family system adjustment. It shows how the combined power of familism and maintaining culture-of-origin tradition and rituals relates to ethnic identity in the immigrant adolescents and shows that culture-of-origin involvement and biculturalism are positively correlated with family cohesion and adaptability. Finally, it discusses the implications of the findings for clinical practice with immigrant families.

This book explores the experiences of adult children of Korean immigrants in the United States who have supported their parents working long hours while trying to navigate language issues, racism and discrimination. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 137 adult Korean Americans conducted between 2006 and 2012, the book focuses on how immigrant children interpret the past and current concerns and cultural values of their parents as they make their own life choices. It analyzes the types of work that these children do for their immigrant parents over their lifetimes and how this work, especially cultural brokering and care work, shifts and changes during different life stages, including childhood, college, marriage, and child-rearing. In the context of Korean and many Asian immigrant families in the United States, the book also examines ideas of filial piety as they relate to the documented everyday experiences of racialized immigrants—experiences that include prejudice, racism, and institutional barriers.

This chapter examines the impact of assimilation mechanisms on Latino immigrant families, with particular emphasis on how acute assimilation pressures prompt Latino adolescents and their parents to explore and adapt to the host culture. It begins with a discussion of assimilation theory and two interpersonal and institutional mechanisms that drive assimilation in daily life: monolingualism and discrimination. It then considers monolingualism and discrimination in Latino immigrants' specific transactions with others in schools, workplaces, and churches. It shows that monolingualism was a strong form of interpersonal and institutional discrimination against Spanish speakers, and that discrimination regulated belonging by enforcing conformity with U.S. norms, appearance, and behaviors.

Nearly one-quarter of youth under that age of 18 in the United States live in immigrant families, and this group is among the fastest growing segments of the US child population. This chapter summarizes the research on the demographic and educational experiences of children in these families, which suggests that they face many obstacles to achievement (such as poverty), but that they perform at high levels when compared with demographically similar children of US-born parents. In addition to presenting the findings from a national perspective, the chapter profiles the educational outcomes of foreign-born students in the state of Florida, which is home to the fourth largest population of immigrant youth in the country. The chapter also describes current federal education policies that affect immigrant children, and discuss implications for policymakers.

This chapter presents a data-based portrait of American immigrants. Nearly 44 million immigrants live in the United States, and their health, and that of their children, is directly affected by their legal status and by U.S. policy. Indeed, public policy at both the federal and state levels—including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), changes in “public charge” rules, and eligibility for driver's licenses and prenatal care—are all significant influences on health status and access to care. As such, ensuring that immigrant families are supported requires health care providers, policymakers, and community leaders to acknowledge the myriad factors influencing the health of their immigrant constituents. It is a path that will improve well-being for immigrants, while offering benefits more broadly as people work toward health equity.

Using the oral life histories of former repatriates and braceros, this chapter contextualizes the enduring resonance of the trauma of repatriation from the United States to Mexico on Mexican families’ response to the Bracero Program—throughout the program's duration and across the Mexican countryside. By magnifying the successive toll of repatriation and the program on Mexican families as a permanent state of emergency, it elucidates bracero families’ willingness to learn from their shared sense of the past, present, and future together. This chapter's emphasis on the devastating and energizing potential of already being familiar with the hardships that ensue when the U.S. and Mexican governments fail to protect them as families inspired them to act in support of each other.

This chapter focuses on how California is integrating newcomers and in turn how they reshape the state. Drawing on seven years of reporting, the chapter looks at the history, causes, and context for immigration as well as its consequences. It argues that journalists are supposed to raise questions about the social impacts of immigration and the nation's struggle to integrate immigrant families and, at the same time, to examine the way immigrants and their children assert themselves and transform their new environs. One way to do that is through telling the human stories that help readers understand other people in their communities as individuals. The chapter draws on examples of previous reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle at a time of industrywide changes within journalism.