The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (35 page)

been regarded as a key mediator to stress (Cobb, 1988). Social relationships

provide tangible aid, such as running an errand or making a loan, as well as

guidance and advice (including information, and job and housing leads) so much

needed by disoriented newcomers. Social relations also serve to maintain and

enhance self-esteem and provide much needed acceptance and approval. A well

functioning social support network, quite predictably, is closely linked to better adjustment to the new environment. Of course, in part, the availability of an

effective social support structure will be influenced by the individual's pre-

existing social competence. Individuals with highly developed social skills are

likely to be better able to establish and draw upon interpersonal relationships

(Heller and Swindle, 1983).

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Carola SuaÂrez-Orozco

A number of other factors within the host environment play a role in the

adaptation of the immigrants. Whether or not the immigrant is ``documented'' or

`ùndocumented'' will obviously impact the opportunity structure in which she is

able to participate (Chavez, 1992; Smart and Smart, 1995), as well as the general quality of life. Feeling ``hunted'' by the Immigration and Naturalization Services is highly stressful (Padilla et al., 1988) and leads to anxiety and (well founded) paranoia. For adults the availability of jobs will be key. Here, social networks will play a key role as employers often rely on migrant networks to provide them with a constant referral source of potential new employees (Waldinger, 1997;

Cornelius, 1998). Ability to find work, questions of pay, seasonal availability, safety, and unpleasantness of the job will also play a role in adjustment.

For children, the quality of their schools will play a key role in the ease of

transition. Unfortunately, many immigrant children find themselves in segre-

gated, poverty-stricken, and conflict-ridden schools (Orfield, 1998). Fear of

violence is a central concern in the lives of many new immigrants. Obviously,

neighborhood safety will do much to influence the quality of life for children and adults alike. Many immigrants move to inner-city areas in search of housing they can afford. Unfortunately, `àffordable'' urban housing is often located in areas which may be characterized as ``war zones.'' Parents, too, fear for their children's safety. They often require them to stay within the confines of their (often

cramped) living spaces, out of harm's way in the streets. Many of our informants lamented the resulting loss of freedom following immigration.

The general social climate of reception to the new immigrants plays a critical

role in their adaptation. At the present time in the USA there is considerable

prejudice against immigrants, and particularly against immigrants of color

(Garcia-Coll and Magnuson, 1997, p. 119). In recent years, widespread concern

about the influx of new immigrants has led to several dramatic initiatives

designed to prevent immigrants (largely undocumented but also documented)

in the United States from receiving benefits or public services (M. SuaÂrez-

Orozco, 1998). Tightened restrictions initially involved border controls, but

later were extended to services, including education, health, and welfare

(Eschbach et al., 1997; Brown et al., 1998). These policies and practices are

generating patterns of intense exclusion and segregation involving the workforce (Portes and Zhou, 1993; Waldinger, 1996), schools, and residential patterns

(M. SuaÂrez-Orozco, 1998). Furthermore, for many minority youth, while they

have made gains in terms of level of completed education, those gains are not

being rewarded proportionally in terms of wages in the market place (Myers,

1998).

Exclusion and Social Mirroring

While the structural exclusion suffered by immigrants and their children is

detrimental to their work and social roles, racism and prejudice also play a

toxic role. How does a child incorporate the notion that she is `àn alien,'' `àn illegal,'' unwanted and not warranting the most basic rights of education

Immigrant Families and Their Children

135

and health care? Even for legal residents, the hostility prevalent in the current climate in the USA adversely affects all children with accents and darker

complexions.

The fear of the cultural dilution of the USA's Anglo-Saxon institutions and

values is a enduring preoccupation, feeding the anti-immigrant ethos (Espan-

shade and Balinger, 1998). Citizens today feel more positive about immigrants

from Europe than they do about immigrants from Latin America and the

Caribbean. Immigrants who do not speak English and whò`look'' different

from the dominant Anglo-European majority make many non-immigrants

uncomfortable. The fact that 80 percent of thè`new immigrants'' (post-1965)

are of color (coming from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean) is clearly a

further complicating factor in the USA's race-polarized society. When it comes

to immigration, race and color do matter. Immigration is an enduring concern

that lurks just below the surface of public consciousness in the United States.

Opportunistic politicians have long found immigrants to be convenient scape-

goats onto which to direct righteous anger about all sorts of chagrins (Jones-

Correa, 1998). At best they are viewed as competitors and at worst they are seen as sinister.

As a result, a range of negative attributes are projected onto them. De Vos and

SuaÂrez-Orozco (1990) developed an interdisciplinary, psychocultural framework

to explore the experience of self in cultures where patterned inequalities shape social interaction. They argue that, in addition to the obvious structural inequalities they face, some minorities are also targeted for ``psychological disparagement.'' They become the object of symbolic violence which stereotypes them as

innately inferior (lazier, prone to crime, and so forth). These attributes make

thesè`disparaged minorities,'' in the eyes of the dominant society, less deserving of sharing in the society's dream and justifies their lot in life.

When immigrant and minority children look into the societal ``mirror'' they

see predominantly negative and hostile images. This distorted mirror commun-

icates prejudiced expectations of sloth, irresponsibility, low intelligence, and violence. Such reflections as these can be further intensified by the media. Even when the parents provide positivè`mirroring,'' it is often insufficient to compensate for the distorted images that children encounter in their daily lives. Even strong parental support may not be enough to compensate for the intensity of the distortions of the House of Mirrors immigrant children encounter in their everyday lives.

My recent research suggests that immigrant children are keenly aware of the

prevailing ethos of hostility of the dominant culture (C. SuaÂrez-Orozco, 2000).

Psychologically, what do children do with this reception? Are the attitudes of the host culture internalized, denied, or resisted? The most positive possible outcome is to be goaded intòÌ'll show you. I'll make it in spite of what you think of me.'' This response, while theoretically possible, is relatively infrequent. More likely, the child responds with self-doubt and shame, setting low aspirations in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: ``They are probably right. I'll never be able to do it.'' Yet another potential response is one of ``You think I'm bad. Let me show

you how bad I can be.''

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Carola SuaÂrez-Orozco

New Patterns of Assimilation

A number of theoretical constructs have been developed over the years to

explore the immigration experience in American society. Historically, models

developed to examine immigration were largely based on the European experi-

ence. These studies described patterns of assimilation and upward mobility

(Gordon, 1964). The argument was quite simple: the longer immigrants were

in the United States the better they did in terms of schooling, health, and income.

Most recently, a number of distinguished sociologists, such as Waters (1990,

1996a), Gans (1992), Portes and Zhou (1993), and Rumbaut (1996), argue that

a new ``segmentation'' in American society and economy has been shaping new

patterns of immigrant adaptation into American culture. This research suggests

what might be broadly termed à`trimodal'' pattern of adaptation. Some immi-

grants today are achieving extraordinary patterns of upward mobility ± quickly

moving into the well remunerated knowledge-intensive sectors of the economy

in ways never seen before in the history of US immigration. At the other end of

the hourglass economy, large numbers of low-skilled immigrants find themselves

in increasingly segregated sectors of the economy and society ± locked into low-

skilled service sector jobs without much promise of mobility (Portes and Zhou,

1993). In between these two patterns are yet other immigrant groups which seem

to approximate the norms of the majority population ± ``disappearing'' into

American institutions and culture without much notice.

This trimodal socio-economic pattern seems to be related to how the children

of today's immigrants tend to do in school. In the past few years, there have been several studies on the performance of immigrant children in schools. The

research suggests a complex picture. In broad strokes, we can say that the

immigrant children of today also fit a trimodal pattern of school adaptation (a

critical predictor of success in this society). Some immigrant children do extraordinarily well in school, surpassing native-born children in terms of a number

of indicators, including grades, performance on standardized tests, and attitudes toward education (De Vos, 1973; Kao and Tienda, 1995). Other immigrants

tend to overlap with native-born children (Rumbaut, 1995; Waters, 1996a). Yet

other immigrants tend to achieve well below their native-born peers (Kao and

Tienda, 1995; Rumbaut, 1995; SuaÂrez-Orozco and SuaÂrez-Orozco, 1995).

In addition to this pattern of variability in overall performance between

groups, another disconcerting pattern had consistently emerged from the data.

For many immigrant groups, length of residency in the United States is asso-

ciated with declining health, school achievement, and aspirations (Kao and

Tienda, 1995; Rumbaut, 1995; SuaÂrez-Orozco and SuaÂrez-Orozco, 1995; Stein-

berg, 1996; Vernez et al., 1996; Hernandez and Charney, 1998).

A recent large-scale study considered a variety of measures of physical health

and risk behaviors among children and adolescents from immigrant families ±

including general health, learning disabilities, obesity, emotional difficulties, and various risk-taking behaviors (Hernandez and Charney, 1998). Interestingly, the

researchers found that immigrant youth were healthier than their counterparts

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137

from non-immigrant families. The researchers pointed out that these findings arè`counterintuitive'' in light of the racial or ethnic minority status, overall lower socio-economic status, and higher poverty rates that characterize many of the

immigrant children and families that they studied. They also found that the

longer youth were in the United States, the poorer their overall physical and

psychological health became. Furthermore, the morèÀmericanized'' they

became, the more likely they were to engage in risky behaviors, such as sub-

stance abuse, violence, and delinquency (Hernandez and Charney, 1998).

Those results are also supported in studies of education. RubeÂn Rumbaut,

working with Alejandro Portes (Rumbaut, 1997), surveyed more than 15,000

high school students in San Diego, California, and Dade County, Florida. They

found a negative association between length of residence in the United States and both academic achievement and educational aspirations. A similar pattern was

found in another large-scale study of adolescents across the country (Steinberg, 1996). In a different voice, Reverend Virgil Elizondo, rector of the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas, articulates this same issue: `Ì can tell by

looking in their eyes how long they've been here. They come sparkling with

hope, and the first generation finds hope rewarded. Their children's eyes no

longer sparkle'' (quoted in Suro, 1998, p. 13).

Negotiating Identities

At no time in the lifespan is the urge to define oneself vis-aÁ-vis society as great as during adolescence. According to Erickson (1964), the single greatest developmental task of adolescence is to forge a coherent sense of identity. He argued that for optimal development, there needs to be a certain amount of complementarity

between the individual's sense of self and the varied social milieux he or she must transverse. This model made a great deal of analytical sense to explain

the experiences of individuals living in more homogeneous worlds across their

lifespan.

However, in an increasingly fractured, heterogeneous, transnational world,

there is much less complimentarity between social spaces. Hence, today we are

concerned less with theorizing identity as a coherent, monolithic, and enduring

construct than with understanding how identities are implicated in the ability to transverse increasingly discontinuous social, symbolic, and political spheres. The children of immigrants must construct identities that will, if successful, enable them to thrive in incommensurable social settings such as home, schools, the

world of peers, and the world of work.