Connecting Complex Processes: A Decade of Research on Immigrant Families

This review examines research on immigrant families in the United States from the past decade from multiple disciplinary perspectives. This work has used variations on assimilation and acculturation perspectives. In the case of the assimilation perspectives, the focus has largely been on family formation, whereas research using acculturation perspectives has focused more on intrafamily relationships. But, over the course of the decade, an interesting integrative model has emerged to address interactions of attitudes and values with structural conditions in the receiving and sending communities. Some of this effort to integrate perspectives can be found in studies of transnational families. The review concludes with some suggestions for continuing this integration and expanding studies to include dynamics of migration and family processes simultaneously.     

The Burden of Deportation on Children in Mexican Immigrant Families

In 2011, a record number of foreign‐born individuals were detained and removed from the United States. This article looks at the impact enforcement policies have had on Mexican families more broadly and children specifically. Drawing on interviews with 91 parents and 110 children in 80 households, the author suggests that, similar to the injury pyramid used by public health professionals, a deportation pyramid best depicts the burden of deportation on children. At the top of the pyramid are instances that have had the most severe consequences on children's daily lives: families in which a deportation has led to permanent family dissolution. But enforcement policies have had the greatest impact on children at the bottom of the pyramid. Regardless of legal status or their family members' involvement with immigration authorities, children in Mexican immigrant households describe fear about their family stability and confusion over the impact legality has on their lives.     

Marital Processes and Parental Socialization in Families of Color: A Decade Review of Research

Research published during the past decade on African American, Latino, and Asian American families is reviewed. Emphasis is given to selected issues within the broad domains of marriage and parenting. The first section highlights demographic trends in family formation and family structure and factors that contributed to secular changes in family structure among African Americans. In the second section, new conceptualizations of marital relations within Latino families are discussed, along with research documenting the complexities in African American men's conceptions of manhood. Studies examining within‐group variation in marital conflict and racial and ethnic differences in division of household labor, marital relations, and children's adjustment to marital and family conflict also are reviewed. The third section gives attention to research on (a) paternal involvement among fathers of color; (b) the relation of parenting behavior to race and ethnicity, grandmother involvement, neighborhood and peer characteristics, and immigration; and (c) racial and ethnic socialization. The article concludes with an overview of recent advances in the study of families of color and important challenges and issues that represent research opportunities for the new decade.     

Expectations,Aspirations, and Achievement Among Latino Students of Immigrant Families

ABSTRACT

This study examines the relationship between various measures of parental and student expectations and aspirations and math achievement among Latino 12th graders of immigrant parents in the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS): 2002 database. Findings indicate parental expectations and aspirations were not significant predictors of student achievement after controlling for an index of covariates. Moreover, neither were student expectations, agreement between student and parent expectations, nor student perceptions of parental aspirations. The analyses of the secondary questions likewise indicated only one strong relationship between aspirations, expectations, and parents' time in the United States – parental aspirations and expectations.     

Immigration Controls,Life-Course Coordination,and Livelihood Strategies: A Study of Families Living across the Mainland-Hong Kong Border

In-depth studies of families living across the mainland Chinese-Hong Kong border indicate how immigration controls can adversely affect the ability of families to synchronize members’ life-courses to provide for their own livelihoods. By disrupting family timetables, the immigration quota system that governs migration from the mainland to Hong Kong hampers the attempts of families to secure their long-term viability and arrange for inter-generational caring. Circumventing immigration laws through illegal migration is costly, and family care-givers are often forced to stay in Hong Kong without being recognized as residents. Mainland-Hong Kong families have a unique opportunity to live on one side of the border while members commute to work or study on the other side, but this strategy affects long-term social participation and is available only to families with the requisite social and economic assets. The research was supported by a grant from Oxfam Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, Hong Kong Christian Action, the Industrial Relations Institute, and St. James’ Settlement made the interviews possible by helping us contact our informants. Caren Wong, Lo Kwok Wai, and Lai Yuen Mei provided competent research assistance. Chan Chu Fung was a tremendous help in our research on public policies. We must also thank our informants for agreeing to be interviewed and sharing with us personal information about their life.     

Labor Market Disparities Between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans: Reexamining the Role of Immigrant Selectivity

Black immigrants from the Caribbean have long attained greater labor market success than African Americans. The most recent studies show that Afro Caribbeans have earnings that are approximately 16% greater than African Americans and that Afro Caribbeans are as much as 21% more likely to be employed than African Americans. The most prominent explanation for greater Afro Caribbean success is that, because they have chosen to migrate, Afro Caribbeans are positively self‐selected on characteristics that are key for success in the U.S. labor market. Proponents of immigrant selectivity argue that migrants have greater levels of both hard and soft skills than nonmigrants. Using data from the National Survey of American Life—the first social survey to provide a nationally representative sample of both African Americans and Afro Caribbeans—this study finds that Afro Caribbeans have greater hard skills than African Americans but split the difference on two measures of soft skills: African Americans and Afro Caribbeans are matched on John Henryism, but African Americans have greater personal mastery than Afro Caribbeans. Contrary to expectations, controlling for differences in hard and soft skills does not provide for a meaningful reduction in labor market disparities between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans.     

Source‐Country Gender Roles and the Division of Labor Within Immigrant Families

The authors examined the relationship between source‐country gender roles and the gender division of paid and unpaid labor within immigrant families in the host society. Results from Canadian Census of Population (N = 497,973) data show that the 2 indicators of source‐country gender roles examined—female/male labor activity ratio and female/male secondary education ratio—are both positively associated with immigrant wives' share in their family labor supply and negatively associated with their share in housework. The association between source‐country gender roles and women's share in couples' labor activities weakens over time. Moreover, the relationship between source‐country female/male labor activity and immigrant couples' gender division of labor is reduced when immigrant women have nonimmigrant husbands, indicating that husband's immigration status matters.     

Posttraumatic Psychological Distress and Resettlement: The Need for a Different Practice in Assisting Refugee Families

Social work practitioners are increasingly confronted with couples and families who have come from war-torn countries. Refugees may have experienced genocide, organized violence, ethnic wars, displacement, and losses of various kinds. Such experiences will often be carried through the post-migratory period and obscure legitimate individual and family processes that are often evaluated through a psychopathology lens. In this context, there is a pressing need to be attentive to refugee situations around the world and to issues related to forced migration and its impact on families. In an attempt to fill the gap in the literature on intervention with refugee families, this article presents two of the most compelling aspects of the refugee experience that can have a lasting impact on families and couples: premigration traumatic events and their potential impact on the refugee resettlement experience, and postmigration social and psychological experiences. The concept of “trauma” is presented within the context of resettlement of asylum seekers and refugees. Key stressors documented as having an impact on the long-term well-being of individuals, families, and communities who have been touched by war and conflict are outlined. Multiple-family group intervention is discussed as one of the promising approaches for helping families cope with pre- and postmigration trauma.     

#FamiliesBelongTogether: Facts and Fictions of Race and Family in U.S. Immigration Policy

Family reunification is widely seen as a relatively stable feature of the contemporary U.S. immigration regime protected by the nation’s liberal democratic institutions and humanitarian values. Drawing on critical scholarship that situates immigration policies in racial nation‐building projects, this article explores the development of U.S. family‐based admission policies from 1965 to the early 2000s. I bring attention to the role of racial family logics in the changing character and meaning of these policies. Racial family logics reflect the emergent and contested ways in which families are both idealized and institutionally organized in relation to the state, the economy, and other social institutions to support racial projects. A normative conception of “the family” as a white, heterosexual, male wage earner, nuclear household unit informed the 1965 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act and its emphasis on family‐based admissions. However, by the 1990s, the landscape of immigration, race, and family in the United States had shifted quite dramatically. The family‐based admissions system was now associated with immigrants from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe. The “browning” of the system was accompanied by its incorporation into racialized projects of state discipline, surveillance, and control over those deemed “undeserving” in relation to neoliberal values of self‐reliant and self‐regulating families.     

Parent‐Adolescent Language Use and Relationships Among Immigrant Families With East Asian,Filipino, and Latin American Backgrounds

This study examined differences in the quality of relationships between immigrant parents and their adolescent children as a function of the languages with which they speak to one another. Over 620 adolescents with East Asian, Filipino, and Latin American backgrounds completed measures on parent‐adolescent language use and relationships. Adolescents who spoke in different languages with their parents reported less cohesion and discussion with their mothers and fathers than did their peers who spoke the same language with their parents. Adolescents who mutually communicated in the native language with their parents reported the highest levels of cohesion and discussion. Longitudinal analyses indicated that whereas language use did not predict differential changes in parent‐adolescent relationships over a 2‐year period, the quality of relationships did predict changes in language use. The associations between language use and relationships generally existed regardless of the families' ethnic and demographic backgrounds, and these associations did not vary across families of different backgrounds.     

White Australian Adoptive Mothers' Understandings of Birth Cultures and Families

This paper reports an analysis of interviews conducted with 10 White Australian women who had undertaken intercountry adoption. The paper begins with an overview of how issues of culture play out within discourses of intercountry adoption in general and how this occurs specifically in Australian policy in regard to intercountry adoption. The analysis highlights how the interviewees were in many ways inculcated in broader Australian discourses of intercountry adoption, as much as in some instances there was an attempt to resist this. The paper concludes by discussing how it might be possible for White adoptive mothers in Australia to do other than remain complicit with marginalizing accounts of adoptive children's birth cultures and parents.     

Adoption,Foreign‐Born Status,and Children's Progress in School

Using recent data from the American Community Survey, the author investigated how the dynamics of immigration influence our understanding of the adoption–schooling relationship. The results suggest that implications of immigrant and adoption statuses could be understood within specific familial contexts. Thus, no statistical differences were found in the outcomes of foreign‐born adoptees in U.S. native families and their peers with immigrant parents. Instead, the most favorable patterns of schooling progress were found among U.S.‐born adoptees living in immigrant families. Among immigrants, the analysis indicated similar patterns of achievement among Hispanic and White adoptees that are inconsistent with the predictions of segmented assimilation theory. However, there was a Hispanic disadvantage relative to Whites among immigrant children living with biological and stepparents. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for kinship selection and assimilation processes and the contention that alternative theoretical frameworks should be used to understand the implications of adoption status.     

Multigenerational Punishment: Shared Experiences of Undocumented Immigration Status Within Mixed‐Status Families

Estimates suggest that approximately 16.6 million people in the United States are members of mixed‐status families composed of undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens or documented immigrants. Drawing on interviews with 32 undocumented 1.5‐generation parents, the author explores how immigration laws affect undocumented parents and their citizen children. She finds that U.S. citizen children and their undocumented parents often share in the risks and limitations associated with undocumented immigration status. She conceptualizes this phenomenon as multigenerational punishment, a distinct form of legal violence wherein the sanctions intended for a specific population spill over to negatively affect individuals who are not targeted by laws. Though not restricted to familial relationships, multigenerational punishment tends to occur within families because of the strong social ties, sustained day‐to‐day interactions, and dependent relationships found among family members. This sheds light on how laws can further the reproduction of inequality within families and over generations.     

Working with Immigrant Children and Their Families: An Application of Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory

The influx of multicultural and multiethnic immigrants to the United States following the liberalization of immigration law in 1965 has resulted in a high representation of children who reside with immigrant families. As these children are approaching early adulthood, their encounter with various ecological systems is likely to be shaped by their cultural differences and the diversity of family settings. Drawing on the insights of Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, this article highlights the critical function that family social ecology plays in how children of immigrants will fare over their adolescent life course. By providing a comprehensive picture of how immigrant family process takes place, this article suggests how understanding the ecology of immigrant families can help strengthen social work service delivery.     

Acculturation Gap,Intergenerational Conflict,Parenting Style,and Youth Distress in Immigrant Chinese American Families

This study examined mother–child acculturation gaps in relationship to youth distress and the possible mediating role of parent–child conflict and parenting style in a sample of 81 Chinese American families. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses provided partial support for a relationship between acculturation gaps and youth distress. No mediators of this relationship were found; however, post-hoc analyses indicated that intergenerational conflict and parenting style were associated with youth distress above and beyond acculturation gaps. These results suggest that interventions developed to reduce parent–child conflict and increase parental bonding (increase parental warmth and decrease parental overprotection) may be valuable for Chinese American adolescents, regardless of acculturation gap status.     

Ageing,migration infrastructure and multi-generational care dynamics in transnational families

The analysis of transnational family relations from an intergenerational to a multi-generational perspective highlights the significant role migration infrastructure plays in transnational family care arrangements at different family life stages. Changing migration policies and local-bound welfare systems in the host and home countries tend to fixate the role of care-receiver and provider against fluid transnational family care dynamics as the life course of the family unfolds. This paper focuses on Chinese transnational one-child families in which the initial separation between parents and their only-child was motivated by the child's overseas education, and followed by the adult child's employment and family formation in the UK. My findings illustrate how reified definitions of the family and familial roles structure mobile individuals’ access to family rights in a transnational context. They warn of the danger of entrenched injustice embedded in the definitional classification of family migrants.     

Gender and Families: Feminist Perspectives and Family Research

This review provides a selective overview of scholarship on gender and families over the past decade. First, we discuss four characteristics of feminist perspectives to theoretical and methodological issues in social science. Then we describe briefly how feminist sensibility has been reflected in family scholarship over the past decade. We conclude with brief observations on the disjuncture between academic work on gender and the feminist backlash apparent in the contemporary culture.     

In the Mix,Yet on the Margins: The Place of Families in Urban Neighborhood and Child Development Research

In the 1990s, the most popular theoretical and empirical research issue concerning the local ecologies of families focused on the impact of family structures (e.g., household composition) and processes (e.g., child management strategies) on the relationship between urban neighborhoods and child and adolescent development. In this article, we synthesize and critically examine the decade's prevailing literature on the topic, organizing this review into three areas: (a) the research designs of quantitative and ethnographic studies of urban neighborhoods, families, and child outcomes; (b) the conceptual approaches used in these studies; and (c) the role of structural and behavioral features of family and parenting as factors that influence the relationship between urban neighborhoods and child development in ethnically and racially diverse populations. Results suggest that although family has been center stage in the neighborhood effects research question of the decade, it has remained on the margins in terms of theoretical and methodological specificity. Recommendations for future research are also offered.     

Family Relationships,Social Connections,and Depressive Symptoms Among Chinese Older Adults in International Migrant Families

This study explored whether and how family relationships and social connections influence depressive symptoms of older migrants and older adults in transnational families using the data gathered from a cross-sectional survey in Los Angeles, California, United States, and Beijing, China. Regression results showed that the older migrants reported significantly higher levels of depression than the elders in transnational families. The findings highlight the importance of maintaining close family relations and having large friendship networks for older adults in international migrant families.