Migration is a shared condition of humanity.[1] Migrations are written in our genome and encoded in our bodies: in our bipedalism, in our stereoscopic vision, in our central nervous system.[2] Modern humans are the children of immigration. Migrations are complex, multi-determined, and not easily reduced to deterministic algorithms. They elude simple mechanistic models of causality because they unfold in complex ecologies involving demographic factors, economic variables, social practices, political processes, historical relationships, and, the environment itself.[3]
Global migrations are transforming the shape of families the world over. While there are many motivations and pathways for migration, large-scale migration is not random. It follows predicable corridors. At the proximate level migration is a household matter. Distinct patterns of kinship, family, and social organization carve the pathways for worldwide migratory journeys. The fundamental unit of migration is the family – variously defined in different parts of the world and structured by culturally coded legislative, economic, reproductive, religious and symbolic forms. At the distal level, immigration is multiply-determined by labor markets, demographic imbalances, wage differentials, technological change, and environmental factors, however, on the ground, it is the family that makes migration work.
The broad features of large-scale migration over the last four generations can be analytically divided into three distinct chapters: (1) the rise of labor migration which (2) begat family re-unification, which (3) begat the rise of the immigrant second generation. During the war and post-war there were concentrated efforts to bring temporary guest workers into the high-income countries of Europe and the United States – industry and agriculture got the much-needed field hands and, for the immigrants, family remittances were a central motivation for these flows. In the U.S. a war-effort program was created by executive order called the “Mexican Farm Labor Program” in 1942. This so-called “bracero” guest-worker program ignited the largest migration flow in U.S. history as Mexicans responded to the call for braceros in US field and farms. In due time, as migrant workers settled, the rise to family reunification gave kinetic momentum to new migration flows around the world. Third and most recently, the rise of the second generation came to define the immigration landscape in many high-income countries as migrant workers, newly re-unified with family members, begat the immigrant origin second-generation.
Familyhood Across Borders: Immigrant Family Relations in Transnational Perspective
Immigration typically starts with the family and family bonds sustain it. “Love and work”, Freud’s words on the well-lived life, are useful to think about migration as an adaptation of and for the family: it is initiated for the family and the family is deeply transformed by immigration. One family starts the migration process and another, reconstituted family, completes the process.
Increasingly “familyhood” is experienced and conducted by hundreds of millions of families across national borders as international migration has grown significantly since the turn of the millennium. According to the most recent United Nations data, the number of international migrants worldwide reached 281 million in 2020, up from 220 million in 2010 and 173 million in 2000.[4] “The percentage of migrants in the global population increased from 2.8% in 2000 to 3.6% in the present”.[5] In 2020, two-thirds of all international migrants were living in ten high-income countries. “The majority of all international migrants live in the United States of America (50.6 million, or 18.1% of the world’s total), followed by Germany (15.8 m), Saudi Arabia with 13.5 million migrants, the Russian Federation (11.6 m), the United Kingdom (9.4 m), the United Arab Emirates (8.7 m), France (8.5 m), Canada (8.1 m), Australia (7.7 m), and Italy with 6.4 million migrants”.[6]
The largest international corridors of human migration are in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. In 2020, “India was the largest country of origin of international migrants (18 million emigrants), followed by Mexico (11 million). Other countries of origin with large emigrant populations include the Russian Federation (over 10 million), China (10 million), Bangladesh (7 million)”.
COVID-19 impacted global migrations with geologic force. According to UN estimates, pandemic restrictions and border-closing likely reduced the total number of immigrants “may have reduced the growth in the stock of international migrants by around two million. In other words, had there not been COVID-19, the number of international migrants in 2020 would have likely been around 283 million”.[7]
Over the last two generations, internal migration has been on the rise: “The estimated number of internal migrants (migrants inside of their country of origin) is 763 million”.[8] These internal migrations reshape the families in many similar ways as international migrations given the time and distance that families spend apart.
The Family (Re)Shaped by Migration
While scholarship on immigration has tended to focus on labor, demographic, and economic factors, an underappreciated enduring propellant, the migrant family, has been under-studied.
Shortly after losing her husband to cancer, a Filipina nurse makes the migratory journey to the outskirts of San Diego, working long shifts to support her four young children who have stayed behind in the care of her mother. A Haitian accountant from Port-au-Prince reluctantly leaves his family to find work as a taxi driver in Boston to save for his youngest daughter's costly medical treatment. The oldest Salvadorian brother in a family of 5 siblings takes the trek north to work to support his siblings’ educational aspirations. Countless such sacrifices constitute the ethical logic of family migration all over the world.[9] Ja Immigration is, most often, an ethical act of and for the family. For well over a billion people (international and inter migrants and the family members left behind), “familyhood” today is experienced across long distances and across borders.
Immigration – often framed as a sacrificial act made by some members for the greater good – unsettles and irrevocably changes the very fabric of the family. Even under the best of circumstances, the family is never the same after migration. Migrations often begin tentatively as target-earning sojourn, with a plan of eventually returning home; yet most migrations result in protracted family separations that deeply threaten the identity and cohesion of the family, transforming well-established roles, creating new loyalties and bonds, and destabilizing cultural scripts of authority, reciprocity, and responsibility.
In this paper, we locate the family at the center of global migrant journeys, revealing just how dislocating immigration becomes to its form and coherence. We review the prominence of transnational familyhood and its implications for the meaning of family life in an age of mass migration. We consider what it means to be a parent, a child, or even a “family unit” in transnational circumstances. We examine the reverberations of transnational parenting on children, parents, and extended family dynamics. Is the biological far-away parent who sends remittances more, or less, a parent than the grandparent or aunt and uncle or fictive kin who cares for the child’s daily needs across most of their childhood? Is the child’s attachment to the everyday caretaking parental figure of a different sort than the attachment to the biological long-distance parent? Upon reunification, how are the legislative, social, and symbolic functions of family life negotiated among members who had lived familyhood at a distance? Finally, we suggest that migration policies should be more attentive to the family – in its enormous diversity and plasticity the world over – as the fundamental unit of migration.
Family Separations
Global migrations are transforming the shape, essence, and definition of the family.[10] While across immigrant communities, cultural norms typically place the parent-child relationship at the center of the family, the lived realities of migration create new patterns of caretaking which come to transform and expand notions of just what and who is family. Migrations create extended family separations which result in biological parents providing long-distance financial care while caretakers (often provided by extended or fictive kin like comadres and compadres) provide the daily experience-near care of the children left behind. Extended separations lead to complex attachments to both the symbolic parents (daily caretakers) and biological parents who may become abstractions over time. Reunifications lead to complex and poignant adjustments for all parties in the caretaking arrangement. This long-distance familyhood – while still kin-based – complicate the paradigm of mother/father/children integrative family life.
Historically, male target-earners left first, establishing a beachhead in a new land while sending vital remittances home. Over time, when financially and legally possible, the process of bringing relatives – wife, children, and others – left behind, began. In recent decades, however, immigration has achieved more of a gender balance. Today, men represent 51.9% of the global migrant population; women represent 48.0%.[11] In the high-income countries, there has been a voracious appetite for service workers drawing women from a variety of developing countries to care for “other people’s children’s”. In rapidly aging countries, these immigrant workers are also summoned to care for “other people’s aging parents”.[12] Large sectors of the “pink-collar” occupations and other labor niches requiring emotional labor have also attracted immigrant women. When migrating mothers leave their children behind, extended family members, such as grandparents or aunts, often become the primary caretakers with the help of the father (if he remains local and is still part of the family). In many other cases, both parents go ahead, leaving the children in the care of extended family.[13]
As migrant households gain a firmer foot in the new country, newborns begin the growth of the immigrant second-generation. Thus, new complex-blended families incorporate a range of settled migrants, newly arrived children left behind, and citizen children, born in the new land.[14]
Unauthorized status further challenges the immigrant family. In the United States some 10.5 million undocumented immigrants face extraordinary challenges. According to the Pew Research Center, over half of immigrant Latinos in the US “worry a lot or some that they or someone they know could be deported – a higher share than among U.S.-born Latinos, 28% of whom say they have the same concerns”.[15] Families with undocumented heads-of-household have been involuntarily wrenched apart by workplace as well as in-home raids conducted by immigration authorities. This leaves citizen children behind, sometimes in the care of relatives, sometimes in the care of foster homes, and sometimes forced to relocate to a country they have never known.[16]
Seemingly in perpetual motion, the immigrant family is destined for separations and, with luck, reunifications. Here, then, is immigration’s bittersweet paradox: while it is motivated by the well-being of the family, in reality it wrenches the family apart.
The United Nations Human Development Report suggests that family separations are widespread and have lasting repercussions. In a nationally representative survey of documented immigrants within North America, nearly a third of the six-to eighteen-year-olds had been separated from at least one parent for two or more years. Notably, the rates of separation were highest for children of Latin American origin, who account for more than half of all migrants to the United States.[17]
In a U.S. bicoastal study conducted with 400 recently arrived immigrant youth from China, the Dominican Republic, various countries in Central America, Haiti, and Mexico attending public schools, we found· that the majority of the immigrant children had been separated from one or both parents for protracted periods of time – from six months to ten years.[18] Nearly three-quarters of the youth were separated from one or both of their parents during the migration process. We found significant differences between groups in regard to family separations: Chinese families were least likely to be separated over the course of migration (52%), while the vast majority of Central American (88%) and Haitian children (85%) were separated from either one or both of their parents during the course of migration.[19] Approximately 26% of children in the study were separated from both parents, for some period of time, a pattern most often occurring in Central American families (54%). Separations from mothers only occurred most frequently in Dominican families (40%), and separations from fathers only were most frequently found in Mexican families (33%).[20]
The length of separation from parents was unexpectedly long, with some children reporting separation from one or both parents for nearly their entire childhood. The length of separation varied widely across regions of origin. Of the youth who were separated only from their mothers, Central American children endured separations lasting four or more years, as did approximately one-third of both the Dominican and the Haitian families. Chinese and Mexican children underwent fewer and shorter separations from their mothers.[21] When separations from the fathers occurred during migration, they were often very lengthy or permanent ones.[22] For those families who were separated, 28% had separations from fathers that lasted more than four years. This was the case for 44% of the Haitian, 42% of the Central American, and 28% of the Dominican families.[23]
What are the psychological effects of the separations? When comparing youth who had not undergone family separations with youth who had, we found that those who arrived as a family unit were less likely to report symptoms of depression or anxiety.[24] Those who had undergone the longest separations from their mothers reported the highest levels of mood disorders. Generally, we found that the highest levels of distress were reported by youth who had undergone medium- and long-term separations. Not surprisingly, we found the lowest rates of psychological distress among youth who had not been separated from their mothers or who had undergone separations of less than two years from their fathers. Youth who had undergone separations of four or more years from their mothers reported the greatest distress. Many of these children had stayed behind with their fathers rather than with grandparents or with aunts and uncles. We learned that two-caretaker (both grandparents or aunt-uncle) homes had afforded more stable care as well as better, extended supports.
The poignancy of separations became clear to us as we listened to teachers, parents, and above all, immigrant youth. Insightful school personnel often spontaneously brought up the issue of family separations and sub-sequent reunifications as a challenge facing their immigrant students. The director of an international center in a Boston area high school summed up the challenge:
I feel like I need to give [students] a great deal of personal and emotional support in the transition they are making. You know, the whole issue of family separations. There are a lot of emotional issues, which come into this. We have people here from China, from Brazil, from Haiti, from Central America, and what is interesting is that they are all talking about the same issues – “I don’t know how to live with my parent”.
Few topics were more difficult to broach with immigrant families than their time apart. Many of our otherwise talkative informants became monosyllabic when we posed questions about this topic, and many youths admitted that their family simply never discussed their time apart.[25]
The act of separation was often described as one of the hardest things about coming to the United States. Jamisa,[26] a fourteen-year-old Dominican girl, said, “The day I left my mother I felt like my heart was staying behind. Because she was the only person I trusted – she was my life. I felt as if a light had extinguished. I still have not been able to get used to living without her”.
In many cases, parents left their children when they were infants and toddlers. While the parents told us that they had hoped to reunite quickly with their children, the separations turned out to be much more protracted than anticipated. A host of other challenges associated with migration often exacerbated family separations. These included barriers due to language and cultural differences, long working hours typically at low wages, displacement from familiar settings, cultural disorientation, and a limited social support system for the family. Lack of documentation and concerns about security exponentially added to the distress of having the family torn apart.
Rosario, a Salvadoran mother of three, told us:
I never thought it would be so long. But I had no choice. My husband had been killed and my children had no one else. I had to make the journey to El Norte. I left them with my mother, hoping I could send for them in a few months, but life here is so expensive. I sent money back every month to take care of them and saved every dollar I could. I spent nothing on myself. My life was better in El Salvador. Here I had no friends. I was always lonely. I missed my children desperately and my family. I worked all the time. But a safe crossing was so expensive for three children.
Parents, especially mothers, maintained contact with their children through a series of strategies that included regular remittances, weekly phone calls, the exchange of letters, sending photos and gifts, email and Skype, and occasionally return visits, when finances and documentation status allowed. Over time, these contacts played an ever more important role in nurturing the memory of the absent parent in the child’s mind.
The capacity to send remittances to support children and family members is the core motivation behind the majority of the parental absences in our study. Few children, however, seem to have a clear sense of why their parents are away. A fifteen-year-old Guatemalan girl, Amparo, was an exception: “I remember that my grandparents would tell me that my parents had to go to work so they could send money for us to live on”.
Children recalled gifts that were sent, sometimes on special occasions, in the form of money so they could buy what they liked, but also in the form of lovingly selected items sent with visitors. Lupita, a twelve-year-old Mexican girl, recounted, “My parents would send dolls, necklaces, clothes, and perfume. Things they thought I would like”. For some, the gifts served to salve the absence of the parent. Leandro, a twelve-year-old Mexican boy, explained, “[My grandparents] would say to me, ‘Son, do you. miss your mother?’ I would say, Yes: and then go and play. With the video games she sent I would forget everything”.
Staying in touch by sending gifts was a tangible means of maintaining contact. Nevertheless, a few children reported that no amount of material goods could provide what they wanted: a parent’s presence and active involvement in their daily life. For example, fourteen-year-old Bao Yu said “Even though he kept sending me new beautiful clothes – so what? I felt that he is my father, he should stay with me, and see how I grow up”. While some children had memories of their parents, for others, memories began to fade. For instance, Araceli, a sixteen-year-old Guatemalan girl whose mother left when she was two (and did not see her until eight years later when her asylum papers where finally granted), told us, “I would look at the pictures of my mother, and I would think that I would like to meet her because I could not remember her. I would say, ‘What a pretty mom – I would like to meet her’”. For a number of immigrant youth, the parents in the picture were parents in name only – long-distance benevolent figures ambiguously present but with whom the children had little first-hand experience.
Over time, many families found it difficult to maintain meaningful steady long-distance communication – especially those enduring long-term separations. Communication was hardest for parents who had left children behind when they were very young; as the children grew up, the parent became an abstraction. As the mother of a 12-year-old Salvadoran boy, Manuel, explained: “They lived with my mother in El Salvador. I left when they were babies. I spoke to the eldest once a month by phone. As the little one grew, I spoke to him, too. But since he didn’t know me, our communication was quite short. I really had to pull the words out of him”.
In listening to parents, it was evident that the absent child remained a daily sustaining presence in their lives. For children, however, the story was different. Especially in cases of long-term absences, for many youths it was a case of out of sight, out of mind. Often, the day-to-day caretakers took on the parenting function along with the psychological role of being the symbolic “mother” and “father”.
Family Perspectives: During the Reunification Phase
We might expect that after so many sacrifices, family reunification would be joyful. Indeed, many children, especially those whose separations were short-term or from only one parent, described the moment of reunification with the word happy. A thirteen-year-old Guatemalan girl said that on the day she got together with her mother, "[I was] so happy. It was my dream”.
Yet for many children who had endured protected separations, the reunification was quite complicated. In almost all cases, the children recalled that their parents welcomed them in a highly emotional and tearful manner. For parents the reunification signified the joyful conclusion of a painful period of sacrifice and struggle to bring the family together. For the children, however, the reunification was the beginning of a new and emotionally laden phase. For them, it meant entering a new life in a new land to be raised by a new set of adults. They reported intense feelings of disorientation. As 13-year-old Celeste from Haiti confided, “I didn’t know who I was going to live with or how my life was going to be. I knew of my father, but I did not know him”. Even under optimal circumstances, migrating to a different country and adopting a new way of life is disorienting. Yet for many youths in our study, the process was complicated by uncertainty about whether they would feel comfortable in their own homes, how they would get along with the people they would be living with, and what their everyday routines would be. These children were experiencing two migrations – one to a new country and another to a new family.
Araceli, a cautious thirteen-year-old from Guatemala whose father left before her birth and whose mother left when she was a year old, not reuniting with her until nine years later, told us:
I felt very strange, and since I didn’t know my mother. I saw a lot of women [at the airport] but didn’t know who my mom was. And when she came to hug me, I said to her, “Are you my mom?” I didn’t hug her very hard because I didn’t know her or anything. I didn’t have that much trust or didn’t feel that comfortable with her.
Youth display a range of emotions from a short-term sense of disorientation to sadness to anger. For some, the extended absence led to a sustained rejection of the parent they believe abandoned them. In such cases, the damage of the long absence led to rifts that seemed challenging to traverse. Some were unforgiving, and by the time parents re-entered their life, it was too late. These youth had grown accustomed to living without the missing parent; they were ready to assert greater independence and were unwilling to submit to the parents’ authority after an extended separation. A 14-year-old Chinese girl, An, confided that after a nine-year absence, “Suddenly I had another creature in my life called ‘father’ … I was too old by then and I could no longer accept him into my life”.
Some parents perceived the socio-emotional ruptures and patiently worked to rebuild a bridge across the emotional chasm. The mother of a fourteen-year-old Honduran, Felipe, told us: “It was really hard at the beginning because we had been separated for five years [H]e barely trusted me, but now, little by little we are building something”. But other parents were less patient; hurt, and indeed enraged that their children did not appreciate the sacrifices made on their behalf. A Haitian father, who had worked years to bring over his daughter, said between clenched teeth, “She barely looks at me. All she does is complain that she wants to be back with her aunt, and she just treats me like a bank ATM”.
Parents and adolescents shared with us that reunifications were especially complicated when youth had to adapt to entirely new family members, particularly new stepparents (or partners) or new siblings (or stepsiblings). For example, twelve-year-old Inez from Mexico admitted that she had not wanted to migrate because “I did not know anybody and I was going to live with a man [a new stepfather] I did not like”. Many admitted outright jealously. The mother of thirteen-year-old Nicaraguan Enrique disclosed: “We are getting used to each other. We are both beginning a different life together … [T]he kids are jealous of each other and my husband is jealous of them. ... Jealousy exists between those who were born here and those who were not”. It was not unusual for the youth to envy attention lavished on new siblings (or stepsiblings). As 14-year-old Bao Yu articulately stated, “Now whenever I see how my father spends time playing with my younger sister, I always get mad that he never gave me fatherly love. Now I think he is trying to make up to my younger sister”. This pattern of envy often led to tension and conflict between family members.
The moment of reunification was thus interlaced with contradictory emotions, as children had to leave the caretakers who became their de facto parents during the absence of the immigrant parent. A 16-year-old Guatemalan, Marisol, explained, “I loved living with them [the grand- parents] because they were really sweet people. They were wonderful parents. For me they are not like grandparents, they are like my parents because they understand me [and] they love me I did not want to leave them”.
Understandably, many adolescents describe bittersweet feelings upon reunification because of this loss of the caretakers with whom they had daily contact. Marisol told us: “I was sad because I had left my grandparents behind but happy to be together with my mother”. Similarly, eleven-year-old Honduran Juan told us: “I was crying because I was leaving my grandfather. I had conflicting feelings. On the one hand I wanted to see my mother, but on the other I did not want to leave my grandfather”. Such double separations and losses are major disruptions in these youngsters’ lives. In these families, the grandparents also endured two sets of major separations. The elderly had said good-byes to their own children when the family migration began, and then had to bid farewell to their grand-children whom they had raised as their own children.
Many parents expressed guilt for being away from their children while recognizing that their sacrifice was necessary for the good of the family. The longer the parent and child were apart, the harder it was for the child to make sense of the situation, and the more parental authority and credibility were undermined. Graciela, the insightful mother of a thirteen- ear-old Central American girl, reflected that since the reunification:
Our relationship has not been that good. We were apart for eleven years and communicated by letters. Now, we have to deal with that separation. It’s been difficult for her and for me. It’s different for my son because I’ve been with him since he was born. If I scold him, he understands where I’m coming from. He does not get angry or hurt when I discipline him, but if I discipline [my daughter] she takes a completely different attitude. I think this is a normal way to feel given the circumstances.
Disruptions in Normative Parenting in Transnational Families
All societies define parenting along shared scripts of safety, security, and emotional care in the ethical formation of children.[27] The idea of “home” connotes familiarity and the sense of being at ease, feeling safe, and being cared for. Providing for the physical security of the child is but the most fundamental of parental responsibilities. The work of protecting children involves a range of domains: providing the basic financial resources needed for feeding and clothing, sending them to school, and meeting their health needs. Parents must also provide the protections afforded to citizens living as members of a larger community.
For immigrants these basic securities may prove elusive. While immigrants are renowned for their work ethic and for struggling to provide for their families, this may not be enough. Poverty among working-class immigrant families remains a protracted problem for newcomers from many countries.[28] Financial security remains a distant mirage for millions of immigrant families.
Millions of immigrant families face a more formidable threat to their basic security as they are living with unauthorized status. The ethos of safety and security essential to foster healthy family dynamics is unattainable to families who live in a culture of fear – driven by the constant threat of being hunted and at risk of apprehension. In the United States, approximately 1.1 million children are unauthorized, and an additional 4.4 million are citizen children growing up with at least one parent who is an unauthorized immigrant.[29]
Beyond the fundamental physical, social, and economic security parents should provide, there are parental socio-emotional and ethical cultural scripts that are essential for optimal child development and well-being.[30] For a variety of reasons, immigrant parents are often robbed of the psychological, social, and cultural resources to engage meaningfully with their children in the new society.
Immigrant parenthood is often defined by an ambiguous presence, when parents have gone ahead and left their children behind. Upon reunifications the children will experience a new ambiguity. They need to get to know, in new intimate proximity, the rhythms, moods, and expectations of their parents in an entirely new cultural context.
Parents, now physically present, may continue to be only ambiguously there.[31] Making ends meet while learning a new language and the ways of a new culture drains parents of their time and energy. Many work multiple jobs for long hours. Others find the stresses of learning a new language while performing on the job overwhelming. Most are mourning the losses of loved ones left behind. Many immigrant parents, with the best of intentions, find themselves unable to provide the physical presence, time, and energy required to meaningfully parent their children. Further, the cumulative stresses and losses of migrations, while tempered by economic gains, leave many parents emotionally exhausted, anxious, depressed, and distracted. They may be physically present but psychologically elsewhere and unavailable to meet their children’s emotional day-to-day needs.
Immigration is particularly stressful to parents when they are unable to draw on their usual resources and coping skills, especially when much is at stake for the balance and well-being of the family. Immigration removes many parents from many of the supports that are linked to community ties, jobs, and the main institutions of the new society. Stripped of many of their significant supports (extended family members, best friends, and neighbors), immigrant parents may never fully develop the social maps needed to find their way in a foreign land. A lack of a sense of basic competence, control, and belonging leaves many immigrant parents feeling marginalized. A new paradox becomes evident. Even as immigrant parents become more empowered economically by the opportunities in their new homeland, they experience a keen sense of inadequacy in their ability to effectively exercise their parenting authority. At a time when immigrant children and youth need extra guidance in navigating the difficult currents of the new country, many immigrant parents find themselves at a loss in guiding their children.
Further, a loss of parental status is amplified by the multiple social demotions parents experience as immigrants in the new society. The sources of these demotions are many, and the consequences are profound. Some start with taking a job beneath their qualifications and skills. The field of immigration is littered with examples of wasted talent: the doctor from China now working as a nurse; the nurse from El Salvador working as a cleaning lady; the engineer from Ghana working as a taxi driver. Even with a better salary, these social demotions are a hard pill to swallow. A Mexican immigrant remembers: “Nothing broke my father except the U.S. He couldn’t find his footing here. He could not rise again and he knew it. He tried many jobs – bus boy, cannery worker, bakery truck driver. I often think that he settled on bowling alleys because he was the most erudite man there, even if he was a greaser”.[32]
While other immigrants may not suffer a drop in job status, they nonetheless find themselves toiling in the most stigmatized, dangerous, and demeaning work. Narratives of immigrant workers often reveal a deeply felt sense that they, and only they, can and will endure the harshest, most unforgiving working conditions the new land has to offer.[33]
Demoralization, uncertainty, and stress at work are but part of the strain that worms its way into the heart of immigrant family life. Immigration reverses the natural order of parental authority. Typically, native parents know the basic rules of socialization and how to guide their children through the moral, social, and cultural etiquette required for membership and belonging.[34] They can wisely impart the basic rules for respectful interaction with others, how to complete school, and how to get a job. In a new society, the rules of engagement change, and immigrant parents are no longer masters (or even sometimes players) of the game. For immigrants, “relinquishing the parental function”' is a painful and reluctant process. Some do so out of a sense of helplessness and entrust their children prematurely to responsibility beyond their years. Some youth cherish this role and feel like they are responsible and active contributors to the family.[35] Others, however, feel burdened or are left with a “worm that undermines basic certitude”. Eva Hoffman writes that her Polish migrant parents did “not try to exercise much influence over me. ‘In Poland, I would have known how to bring you up, I would have known what to do’, says my mother, but here she has lost her sureness, her authority”.[36]
Parents find themselves turning to their children for help and guidance in the practical, cultural, and linguistic nuances of the new society. Asking children to take on this mature role comes at a cost. A Vietnamese refugee who arrived in the United States as a child recalls,
The dreadful truth was simply this: we were going through life in reverse and I was the one who would help my mother through the hard scrutiny of hard suburban life. I would have to forgo the luxury of adolescent experiments and temper tantrums, so that I could scoop my mother out of harm’s way and give her sanctuary. Now, when we stepped into the exterior world, I was the one who told my mother what was acceptable and unacceptable behavior... and even though I hesitated to take on the responsibility, I had no choice.[37]
The inability of many immigrant parents to master the language of the new land contributes both to role reversals and to the undermining of parental authority. The complexity of understanding and making oneself understood will define the lives of new immigrants at work, in dealing with the institutions of the new society (including schools, health care, and the police and judicial system), and with the very essence of social membership. Language is an overwhelming preoccupation for immigrant parents in the new society because they see it as essential to advancing in a new land. An inevitable period of linguistic inadequacy compounds the difficulty of learning the social rules that smooth interactions in the new society. Some are blessed with the linguistic gifts, previous education, and social contexts that facilitate rapid acquisition of the new language, but many others find themselves linguistically challenged and never fully master its intricacies.
Immigrant children, by contrast, more readily come into more intimate contact with the language and culture of the new society. Schools immerse them in the new values and worldviews and, above all, introduce them to the systematic study of the new language. Other children who may not be immigrants will become the daily interlocutors with whom immigrant children will develop a new linguistic repartee. The children watch television, movies, listen to music, and are steeped in the media of their new land. Their parents, on the other hand, are more removed from these new cultural realities, particularly if they work long hours, in enclaves with other immigrants who tend to be of the same linguistic, ethnic, and national background. The children’s deep immersion in the new culture will facilitate the acquisition of the new language and give them a course to chart in making their way in the new society.
As the children increasingly gain mastery of the new language and culture, many develop feelings ranging from vague to intense embarrassment as they recognize their parents’ inability to help them manage what appear like simple tasks. Richard Rodriguez, the son of humble Mexican immigrants who grew to flourish as gifted author and National Public Radio commentator, found early success in school. When his teachers would comment, “Your parents must be proud of you ... shyly I would smile, never betraying my sense of irony: I was not proud of my parents”.[38] Instead, like other children of immigrants, he felt embarrassed by his parents’ accents, silent ways, and inability to help him understand homework even during the early years of elementary school.
Some immigrant parents rage against their loss of authority; overreaction is not uncommon. Hypervigilance, regimented routines, and policing peer influences, as well as those of the media, become preoccupations in many immigrant households. Parents feel threatened by the encroachment of new cultural values and behaviors in their children. They often respond by tightening the reins. Putting in place disciplinary sanctions from the “old country” will open a new cultural can of worms. While withholding a meal, pulling an ear, or forcing a child to kneel on rice are common practices found in many countries of origin, they may be dissonant with mainstream ideals of proper discipline in the new land. A “good spanking” in the old country can be a reportable offense in another. Children quickly become wise to the spirit and the letter of the law in the new land and threaten their parents with the I will call “911” Sword of Damocles.
If immigrant parents do not learn alternative sanctioning mechanisms, however, they will lose control of their offspring. This may have severe implications for the well-being of the children because it is essential for parents to maintain basic authoritative functions within the family.[39] Parents’ authority is not only symbolic but also critical for imposing limits around curfew, values around respectful behavior toward others, expectations for doing homework, and much more. When the voice of parental authority is undermined, and if the children lose respect for their parents, then the very foundation of safety and family coherence is compromised.
Many parents, thus, come to face the paradox of parenting in a promised land. The country that offers them the dream of a better tomorrow and provides them the opportunity to give their children greater economic security becomes a battlefield over the identity of the children and the coherence and cohesion of the family unit. The profound familial dislocations and the delegitimizing of parental authority can have destabilizing implications for the development of immigrant children, undermining the children’s educational and professional pathways in their new society.
Conclusion
Under the best of circumstances, immigration represents a significant challenge for the newly reconstituted family. As we have detailed, the very shape of the family as well as the dynamics between its members are forever changed by the process of migration.
Dysfunctional immigration policies compound these challenges, imposing unnecessary costs to the family. The status quo is in urgent need of repair. In the United States, for example, we must take seriously what we mean when we say that family reunification is at the heart of our immigration policy. We must strive to drain the bureaucratic swamp where millions of families suffer through protracted separations that can stretch more than half a childhood. Our research and other recent work suggest that lengthy family separations extract a serious toll. Indeed, some OECD member countries are encouraging policies to drastically minimize the length of separation or to simply do away with reunifications if they cannot be conducted in an orderly and timely manner.[40] The costs to families and society have been deemed to be that high.
Beyond the problem of protracted separations, we must once and for all develop a lawful, workable, and humane national plan to put an end to the deforming phenomenon of unauthorized parents raising citizen children.[41] The logic for this is simple and has multiple interests in mind. A wealthy advanced democracy simply cannot afford to have millions of citizen children growing up in limbo with unauthorized parents. Why? At the most basic level, unauthorized immigration undermines the fundamental core functions of the nation-state. Countries come with borders and are in the business of enumerating and accounting for their citizens; millions human beings who are unidentifiable represent a tear in the fabric of the nation-state. The reality of unauthorized parents and their citizen children cheapens the value of citizenship for the children, erodes their fundamental protections, and works to create a permanent subcaste of children and youth who are de jure citizens but who de facto operate in the shadows of society.
Finally, a laissez-faire approach to immigration is anachronistic and out of touch. With the sink-or-swim approach, while some immigrants and their children will thrive, too many are left at risk of drowning. In the case of the United States, the country with the largest number of immigrants and the largest number of undocumented immigrants, it is time to do its homework and to learn from what other countries have been quietly and successfully putting in place to ease the transition of their new immigrants and their families. At the very least, we need a system of nationally coordinated local supports with beachheads in schools, in community centers, and in places of worship devised to intelligently support immigrant parents and to aid them during a difficult period of transition. Immigration is the human face of globalization – the sounds, colors, and aromas of a miniaturized, interconnected, and fragile world. The children of immigrants, the smallest actors in the global stage, are the fastest growing sector of the child population in a growing list of high-income countries. They are set to reshape the future character of an ever-growing list of destinations the world over. Their future is our future.
[1] “According to the genetic and paleontological record, we only started to leave Africa between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago. What set this in motion is uncertain, but we think it has something to do with major climatic shifts that were happening around that time – a sudden cooling in the Earth’s climate driven by the onset of one of the worst parts of the last Ice Age”. When humans first migrated “out of Africa they left genetic footprints still visible today” (Map of Human Migration, see https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/human-journey/ accessed January 2, 2017).
[2] “Diverse species have emerged over the course of human evolution, and a suite of adaptations have accumulated over time, including upright walking, the capacity to make tools, enlargement of the brain, prolonged maturation, the emergence of complex mental and social behavior, and dependence on technology to alter the surroundings”. (Climate Effects on Human Evolution http://humanorigins.si.edu/research/climate-and-human-evolution/climate-effects-human-evolution Accessed, January 3, 2017). Indeed, migration is a precursor of modern humans, “the open-country suite of features inferred for Homo erectus had evolved together and provided the adaptations for dispersal beyond Africa. These features foreshadowed those of more recent Homo sapiens and included large, linear bodies, elongated legs, large brain sizes, reduced sexual dimorphism, increased carnivory, and unique life history traits (e.g., extended ontogeny and longevity) as well as toolmaking and increased social cooperation” (Antón, Potts, and Aiello, 2014 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/345/6192/1236828).
[3] Forman and Ramanathan (2019). Editor, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, In Humanitarianism & Mass Migration: Confronting a World Crisis. UC Press. https://bit.ly/3v7N3ZG
[4] World Migration Report, 2022 https://bit.ly/3v9KCpz
[5] International Organization for Migration, Migration in the World https://bit.ly/3NWJ8Y5
[6] See https://bit.ly/3NXMIkN
[7] Notably, migrant families have been particularly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in a number of ways – many have lost their employment in the destination country and have been unable to return to their home. Some of them ended up in an irregular status in destination countries. Others have been forced to stay in inadequate accommodation with limited COVID-19 safety measures in place. The families of migrants have also suffered through the loss of much needed remittances. Survey and interview respondents highlighted the plight, in particular, of migrant domestic workers who have been confined to private homes and exploited by abusive employers. https://bit.ly/3spMPvp
[8] International Organization for Migration, 2018 https://bit.ly/2OB5CQh
[9] https://bit.ly/3vaRY
[10] Nancy Foner, “Introduction: Intergenerational Relations in Immigrant Families:·in Across Generations: Immigrant Families in America, ed. Nancy Foner (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 1-20; Ramaswami Mahalingam, Sundari Balan, and Kristine M. Molina, “Transnational Intersectionality: A Critical Framework for Theorizing Motherhood” in Handbook of Feminist Family Studies, ed. Sally A. Lloyd, April L. Few, and Katherine R. Allen (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 69-80; United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2009 – Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
[11] International Organization for Migration, Migration in the World https://bit.ly/3NWJ8Y5
[12] Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila, “I’m Here, But I’m There” 548; Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Gender and US. Immigration”; Brian Gratton, “Ecuadorians in the United States and Spain: History, Gender and Niche Formation” Journal of Ethnic Migration Studies 33 (2007):581.
[13] Judith K Bernhard, Patricia Landolt, and Luin Goldring, “Transnational, Multi-local Motherhood: Experiences of Separation and Reunification among Latin American Families in Canada”·CERJS, Policy Matters 24 (Jan. 2006), http://ceris.metropolis.net/wp-content/uploads/pdf/research_publication/policy_matters/pm24.pdf; Foner, “Introduction”:·1-20; Scalabrini Migration Center and Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, Hearts Apart: Migration in the Eyes of Filipino Children (Manila: Episcopal Commission for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People-CBCP, 2003).
[14] In the United States the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship automatically at birth to all born in the country, irrespective of the citizenship or legal status of parents. Citizenship is not automatically granted at birth in other countries of immigration where children born in the new land typically must wait until they reach legal adulthood before being able to petition for citizenship. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
[15] https://pewrsr.ch/3uqY9K0
[16] Randy Capps et al., Paying the Price: “The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children” (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2007), http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411566_immigration_raids.pdf (accessed Dec. 14, 2011); Ajay Chaudry et al., Facing Our Future: Children in the Aftermath of Immigration Enforcement (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2010), http://www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/412020_FacingOurFuture_final.pdf (accessed Dec. 14, 2011).
[17] Tim H. Gindling and Sara Poggio, “Family Separation and the Educational Success of lmmigrant Children” Policy Brief No. 7 (Mar. 2009).
[18] For details about the sample and the methodology used in the study, see Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova, Learning a New Land (Harvard University Press, 2010). Carola Suarez-Orozco, Hee Jin Bang, and Ha Yeon Kim, “I Felt Like My Heart Was Staying Behind: Psychological Implications of lmmigrant Family Separations and Reunifications”:·Journal of Adolescent Research 26 (Mar. 2011): 222.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid. Carola Suarez-Orozco, Irina Todorova, and Josephine Louie, “‘Making Upfor Lost Time’: The Experience of Separation and Reunification among Immigrant Families”:·Family Process 41 (Dec. 2002):625.
[24] Suarez-Orozco et al., “I Felt Like My Heart Was Staying Behind”; 222. Unless otherwise indicated, all quoted statements from participants appear in this same article.
[25] For details about the sources of, and coding of, the qualitative data here, see Suarez-Orozco et al., Learning a New Land.
[26] All names used throughout this chapter are pseudonyms to protect the identity of participants.
[27] Robert A. LeVine, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Parenting” in Worlds of Childhood, ed. Robert H. Wozniak, Mary T. Rourke, and Berit I. Haahr (New York: Harper-Collins, 1993).
[28] Donald]. Hernandez, Nancy A. Denton, and Suzanne E. Macartney, “Family Circumstances of Children in Immigrant Families: Looking to the Future of America”· in Lansford et al., Immigrant Families in Contemporary Society, Urban Institute; Young Children of Immigrants in Two-Parent Families Have Triple the Poverty Rate of Children with US.-Born Parents, Feb. 8, 2005, http://www.urban.org/publications/900779.html (accessed Dec. 15, 2011).
[29] American Immigration Council. U.S. Citizen Children Impacted by Immigration Enforcement (2021). https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/us-citizen-children-impacted-immigration-enforcement
[30] Eleanor E. Maccoby, “The Role of Parents in the Socialization of Children: A Historical Overview”·Developmental Psychology 28 (Nov. 1992):1006; Suárez-Orozco, C., Abo-Zena, M.M., & Marks, A.K. (Eds.). (2015). Transitions: The development of children of immigrants. NYU Press.
[31] Pauline Boss, Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
[32] Luis Alberto Urrea, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 41.
[33] Peter Orner and Sandra Hernandez, eds., En las Sombras de los Estados Unidos: Narraciones de los Inmigrantes Indocumentados (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2009), 30-31.
[34] Maccoby, “Role of Parents”.
[35] Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009).
[36] Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (New York: Penguin, 1990).
[37] Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge (New York: Penguin, 1998), 32.
[38] Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Bantam, 1982).
[39] Maccoby, “Role of Parents”.
[40] Georges Lemaitre, “International Student Assessments, PISA, and the Outcomes of the Children of Immigrants, with Some Implications for Policy” (presentation by representative of the International Migration Division of the OECD, State, School, and Diversity Conference, University of Lisbon. June 7, 2010).
[41] Carola Suarez-Orozco et al., “Growing Up in the Shadows: The Developmental Implications of Unauthorized Status” Harvard Educational Review 81 (Fall 2011): 438; Suárez-Orozco, C., Abo-Zena, M.M., & Marks, A.K. (Eds.). (2015). Transitions: The development of children of immigrants. NYU Press.