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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: PIMS - Polity Immigration and Society series
- Sprache: Englisch
Immigrant Families aims to capture the richness, complexity, and diversity that characterize contemporary immigrant families in the United States. In doing so, it reaffirms that the vast majority of people do not migrate as isolated individuals, but are members of families.
There is no quintessential immigrant experience, as immigrants and their families arrive with different levels of economic, social, and cultural resources, and must navigate various social structures that shape how they fare. Immigrant Families highlights the hierarchies and inequities between and within immigrant families created by key axes of inequality such as legal status, social class, gender, and generation. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, and historical scholarship, the authors highlight the transnational context in which many contemporary immigrant families live, exploring how families navigate care, resources, expectations, and aspirations across borders. Ultimately, the book analyzes how dynamics at the individual, family, and community levels shape the life chances and wellbeing of immigrants and their families.
As the United States turns its attention to immigration as a critical social issue, Immigrant Families encourages students, scholars, and policy makers to center family in their discussions, thereby prioritizing the human and relational element of human mobility.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Background to Family Migration
Main Demographic Characteristics of Immigrant Families
Emphases of the Book
Organization of the Book
Notes
2 Families and Immigration Law
Family Reunification Law
Temporary Statuses with Implications for Families: TPS, DACA, and H-2A Worker Visas
Enforcement of Immigration Laws
Mixed-Status Families
Conclusion
Notes
3 Immigrant Families and Social Class
Introduction
Social Class as a Platform for Family Migration
Social Class, Parenting, and Divisions of Labor within Immigrant Families
Social Class and Mobility across the Life Course
Families Divided by Class and Borders
Conclusion
Notes
4 Gender and Immigrant Families
Locating Gender in Immigrant Families
Gendered Expectations and the Migration Process
Gender, Family and the State
Gendered Work: In the Labor Market and in the Home
Gendered Social Networks in Families and Communities
Gendered Expectations in Families across Borders
Gender, Care Networks, and Those Who Stay
Conclusion
Notes
5 Generations and Immigrant Families
Locating Agency and Constraint within Immigrant Generations
Intergenerational Relations
Life Cycle and Age at Migration
The Special Place of the Generation within Mixed-Status and Undocumented Families
Transnational Intergenerational Ties and Family Separations
Conclusion
Notes
6 Institutions, Policy, and Immigrant Families
Federal and State Immigrant Policies
General Policies
The Role of Community Organizations and NGOs
Conclusion
Notes
7 Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Immigration & Society series
Carl L. Bankston III, Immigrant Networks and Social Capital
Stephanie A. Bohon & Meghan Conley,Immigration and Population
Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, & Eveline Reisenauer,Transnational Migration
Christian Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration
Grace Kao, Elizabeth Vaquera, & Kimberly Goyette,Education and Immigration
Nazli Kibria, Cara Bowman, & Megan O’Leary,Race and Immigration
Peter Kivisto, Religion and Immigration
Cecilia Menjívar, Leisy J. Abrego, & Leah C. Schmalzbauer,Immigrant Families
Ronald L. Mize & Grace Peña Delgado,Latino Immigrants in the United States
Philip Q. Yang, Asian Immigration to the United States
Min Zhou & Carl L. Bankston III,The Rise of the New Second Generation
Immigrant Families
Cecilia Menjívar, Leisy J. Abrego, and Leah C. Schmalzbauer
polity
Copyright © Cecilia Menjívar, Leisy J. Abrego and Leah C. Schmalzbauer 2016
The right of Cecilia Menjívar, Leisy J. Abrego and Leah C. Schmalzbauer to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9674-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Menjivar, Cecilia.Immigrant families / Cecilia Menjivar, Leisy J. Abrego, Leah C. Schmalzbauer.pages cmISBN 978-0-7456-7015-7 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-7016-4 (paperback) 1. Immigrant families--United States--Social conditions. 2. United States--Emigration and immigration--Social aspects. 3. Immigrant families--Law and legislation--United States. 4. Emigration and immigration law--United States. 5. United States--Emigration and immigration--Government policy. I. Abrego, Leisy J. II. Title.JV6475.M46 2016305.9’069120973--dc23
2015022102
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the many people and entities that made the writing of this book possible. We were fortunate to receive persistent and enthusiastic support from our editor at Polity, Jonathan Skerrett. Manuela Tecusan was a thorough and patient copyeditor. We would also like to gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of Alexander Agadjanian, Daniel R. Alvord, Jacqueline Caraves, Andrea Gómez Cervantes, William McDonald, and Nayely Velez-Cruz.
Cecilia Menjívar would like to thank the Cowden Distinguished Professorship at Arizona State University and the Foundation Distinguished Professorship at the University of Kansas for important resources and institutional support. Leisy Abrego would like to thank Carlos Colorado for his assistance and to recognize the institutional support received from the Hellman Fellows Fund and the Center for American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA. Leah Schmalzbauer would like to thank the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and the Department of American Studies at Amherst College for their support throughout this project.
***
We dedicate this book to all the families we have met during our respective studies in immigrant communities over the years. We have been inspired by their courage and have aimed to capture their humanity and the complexity of their lives in the pages that follow.
We also dedicate this book to our own families, as they play important roles in the work we do:
To Victor and Sasha, to my siblings Ana and Oscar, and to my nieces and nephews—Cecilia
To Carlos, Mateo, and Diego, and to my siblings Claudia, Tatiana, and Natalie—Leisy
To Steve, Micah, and Zola, to my sister Anna, and to my nieces and nephew—Leah
1Introduction
Immigrant families, like those without a recent immigrant past, are varied, multifaceted, and dynamic. They often encompass modalities beyond the nuclear model and include a wide range of blood and fictive kin. They are comprised of chosen members, stepparents and stepsiblings, same-sex parents, and members with various legal statuses and migrant histories. Indeed, individuals’ definitions of family and the boundaries around these characterizations are, in general, expanding and becoming more malleable (Powell, Bolzendahl, Geist, and Carr Steelman 2010).
Adding a layer of complexity to this heterogeneity, immigrant families often span national borders, as not all family members are able to migrate together and some never do. Some members may return to the country of origin; in other cases an adolescent or adult daughter or son may migrate first and then send for the parents or, if that is not possible, may remain separated across borders indefinitely. Families may be reconstituted units or newly formed ones; in the process of reunification; or already reunited and facing the challenges of new lives together. Indeed, migratory movements almost always entail the separation of families, as members live in at least two different contexts for varying lengths of time. During the period of separation a parent may establish a new union or the immigrant parents may have new children—actions that significantly alter the composition of the family. In many ways, therefore, these depictions defy conventions about what we think a family is and where it is located physically.1
Like all families, immigrant families are malleable and embody change; they are shaped by external forces that they must negotiate. Unlike their non-immigrant counterparts, however, immigrant families are made permissible or are barred through immigration laws in general and through family reunification laws in particular.2 These laws and continuously changing policies determine the composition of immigrant families through their definition of family (Hawthorne 2007), dictating who is allowed to come into the country, how long members stay apart, and which family relations take priority for immigration purposes (Lee 2013). Thus, for immigrant families, immigration laws and policies are fundamental in shaping their contour, location, and structure.
Immigrant families and kinship ties can certainly facilitate migration in some cases. Newcomers may find that settlement is easier when they are able to obtain an initial place to stay and a first job through a relative. Indeed, immigrant families can provide a range of resources for relatives in need (Boyd 1989; Foner 2009; Kibria 1993; Massey, Alarcon, Durand, and González 1987). However, immigrant families should not be assumed to always be a source of refuge, comfort, or support. In a world of inequalities, when many face restrictive laws and racially based discriminatory reception, families cannot always step in to help relatives ease into their new home (Menjívar 2000). Just like their non-migrant counterparts, immigrant families are complex. They have ups and downs, tensions, and fissures often rooted in inequalities along gender, generational, and other contextual inequalities. These inequalities shape what happens within immigrant families.
Immigration to the United States takes place in the context of families. The United States’ policies, unlike those of other nations of immigration such as Canada, Australia, or Germany, encourage the largest sector of migration through the family (Kofman 2004). Therefore, studying the experiences of immigrant families provides access to most processes related to immigration, from decision-making to relationships to other institutions in society, to racialization, and to long-term experiences of settlement (Rumbaut 1997). In the process of entering and settling, immigrant families, through their interactions with communities, institutions, bureaucracies, and civil society, contribute to shaping the United States’ social landscape. Consequently, examining immigrant families can help us understand key migratory processes as well as broader societal engines of change. Immigrant families provide what Robert Merton called a “strategic research site”: “an area where processes of more general import are manifested with unusual clarity” (Merton, cited in Portes 1995: 2). Thus, a focus on immigrant families can reveal knowledge about the “standard North American family” (SNAF) (Smith 1993) by providing insights into the “ideological code” that shapes how we think about families and about living arrangements more broadly.
Background to Family Migration
Public discourses about immigration and immigrant families have a tendency to compare and contrast people’s integration experiences by race, national origin, and across different historical periods. In particular, they celebrate what is perceived as the quick ascendancy of Asian-origin immigrants while simultaneously deploring that immigrants from Latin America do not immediately experience mobility or the economic gains achieved by their European counterparts in the past. To explore these matters and examine how contemporary immigrant families face the manner and the context in which they are received in the United States, we turn to the twin factors that frame our general examination of families in this book: the structure of immigration law and current economic conditions.
Immigration Law and the Legal Framework
Family migration is the most important mechanism for authorized immigration to the United States today.3 Immigrants have been coming as members of families since the founding of the nation. Many early immigrants in the nineteenth century, for instance, migrated in the context of the family, even if they arrived one by one and it took months or years to be reunited with family members (Thomas and Znaniecki 1996). This process is often referred to as “chain” migration (MacDonald and MacDonald 1964). Even the so-called “birds of passage”—those individuals who migrated alone in search of work—participated in migration with the idea of improving the lives of their family members: their intention had been to earn enough money to send their families and then to return to the origin country (Piore 1979).
These aspects of family migration—“chain” migration and the migration of “birds of passage”—have not changed over the years. What has changed, however, is the legal framework within which family members have been admitted to the United States. As Gratton, Gutmann, and Skop (2007) observe on the basis of their examination of ninety years of census data, the most important factor affecting family structure in different historical periods of US-bound migration is immigration policy. Their results, which are based on data for Mexican, Irish, Swedish, Italian, and Polish immigration flows, point to structural factors shaped by immigration policies rather than by the race or ethnicity of the immigrants themselves; these would be the sorts of factors that are central to shaping the evolution of immigrant family forms.
Since the 1960s, US immigration policies have prioritized families for the granting of legal status. By 2011 about two thirds of the 1 million immigrants who became legal permanent residents during that year were family-sponsored (US Department of Homeland Security 2011). As recently as November 2014, President Obama further reinforced the centrality of the category of family as deserving of lawful presence in the country when he issued an executive action to provide relief from deportation only to undocumented parents of US citizens or lawful permanent resident (LPR) children.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigration law centered more explicitly on the racial composition of flows, on the basis of attempts to limit the migration of certain national origin and racial groups. Regularly informed by racist and nativist immigration politics, the history of US immigration laws also includes “periodic waves of harsh exclusions and deportation campaigns,” which targeted different groups of people deemed to be undesirable (Johnson 2007: 48) regardless of labor and population needs. As one of the most egregious examples of this, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred all labor migration from China to the United States. Asians were excluded, discriminated against, and barred from bringing their spouses (Glenn 2002). Upheld in different formats until the 1940s, this law prevented Chinese immigrants already in the country from thriving as a community (Takaki 1989). Developments from the 1950s onward, however, gave preeminence to family migration or family reunification and have structured a different type of “chain migration,” which is less explicitly based on race. In contrast to the chain migrations of previous eras that were organized through direct family connections and social networks, post-1965 chain migration is formally organized by law. Indeed, “each new immigrant becomes a potential immigrant sponsor” (Jasso and Rosenzweig 1990: 213).
The McCarran–Walter Act of 1952 amended the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to revamp the immigration system, abolishing racial restrictions (but leaving the quotas intact) and creating a path for the visa preference system established with the 1965 INA, which is largely still in place today. While the 1952 Act limited the total number of annual visas to one sixth of the United States’ continental population, it exempted spouses and children of US citizens, further setting the stage for a major move to favor family relations in the admission of immigrants.4 Reflecting major shifts in society in the 1960s, the 1965 INA, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, continued with the overhaul of the immigration visa structure.
The Hart-Celler Act abolished national origin quotas in place since 1924,5 sought to rid the system of its racist bias, firmly established a system of family preference visas that prioritized “family reunification,” and radically altered the demographic composition of post-1965 flows. Migration shifted from predominantly European flows to immigration from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. For instance, while migration from Europe made up two thirds of the total flow in the 1930s, it constituted one third of all immigration in the 1960s and slightly over 10 percent in the 1980s. Immigration from Asia and Latin America shows the reverse trend. Whereas authorized immigration from Latin America totaled nearly 500,000 in the decade of the 1950s, it reached 4.2 million during the 1990s, making up 44 percent of the entire flow (Massey and Pren 2012).6
Subsequent amendments to the INA, such as the 1990 Immigration Act, instituted major changes while maintaining the main categories of the visa system—that is, family reunification, employment-based, and refugee migration—as well as narrow conceptions of family. These categories are largely defined by policy and political expediency; they are created by the receiving state and are used to determine the admissibility of immigrants at entry (Schrover and Moloney 2013).7 Thus, these classifications are not static; rather, they evolve according to the geopolitical climate (see also Menjívar 2000). And, as we will discuss in Chapter 2, the very definition of what constitutes a family has varied from time to time, in the process informing what family relations “count” for immigration purposes.8
Examining family migration from the vantage point of immigration law therefore allows us to discern how categories of admission are redrawn in the public arena of immigration debates. Simultaneously, in the lived experiences of immigrants, divisions across these categories of admission—as recipients of family petitions or employment visas—are porous. Immigrants arriving through employment-based visas, for example, have family members who can join them. Refugees, too, come in as part of families and also enter the labor force and sometimes become entrepreneurs. To be sure, immigrants entering through family reunification are also likely to join the labor force.9
The 1990 Act created new entry visas, including diversity visas for immigrants from countries less represented in migratory flows. It authorized temporary protected status to individuals migrating from specially designated countries, it added new visas to employment-based categories, and it removed AIDS from the list of illnesses that make an immigrant ineligible for entry. Further reflecting changing general societal attitudes, the 1990 Act also removed homosexuality as grounds for exclusion from immigration (Luibhéid 2002).
The replacement of national origin quotas with family- and employment-based categories of admission that were enacted with the amendments of 1952 and 1965 altered the demographic composition and geographic origin of immigration to the United States. At the same time there were significant events in the developing world that propelled thousands to emigrate. Political upheavals, revolutions, and civil wars, as well as the implementation of structural adjustment programs that further weakened the economies of countries around the world, all precipitated emigration (see Coe 2013). Thus, in examining current migratory flows and especially the migration of families in stages, it is important to consider both the US legal framework at the particular historical time when immigrants arrive and the conditions in the countries of origin that spark migratory flows. Equally important are the social networks that migrants create in the course of migrating over the years, which facilitate connecting the motivation to migrate with a destination point (Massey and Pren 2012; Menjívar 2000).
US immigration law has had effects on the composition and flows of immigrant families even when the laws did not specifically concern family reunification. For instance, from the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 through World War II, “US immigration policies treated Asian male workers primarily as temporary, individual units of labor rather than as members of family groups” (Espiritu 2008: 11). This meant that there were few women immigrants from Asia; and in effect Asian immigrants were legally barred from forming families in the United States. Similarly, immigrants from Mexico who qualified for legalization through the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 were mostly men, because men were more likely to be able to document formal employment (Zavella 2011). The same gendered pattern occurred among Guatemalan immigrants in Houston (Hagan 1994). The formal employment requirement for legalization thus often tilts the proportion of legalized immigrants in favor of men, a gender imbalance in legalization processes observed in various immigration categories (Salcido and Menjívar 2012).
Noteworthy, legislative changes have given preference to family ties and to job skills deemed necessary for the US economy in determining who can immigrate legally, while also promoting an image of a particular family form: the heteronormative nuclear family, which is ideologically assumed to best fit into US society. The ideological bases on which the family reunification visas and the requirements for family-based migration have been created have in turn shaped the contours of legally recognized immigrant families, often excluding a variety of family formations among contemporary immigrants. Laws have rarely recognized queer (Acosta 2013), extended, and other non-traditional families as acceptable; the latter are therefore blocked from the possibility of migration as a family unit. Existing ideology poses challenges for potential migrants whose families do not fit this model, who cannot tap into nuclear family ties to immigrate, or who do not have relatives already in the United States to petition for them.
The inability to physically reside with loved ones can be difficult for families (Abrego 2014; Chin 1999). Immigrants in these situations, however, have responded to legal constraints in a variety of ways. They have resorted to alternative paths to continue to sustain family ties—an attitude that reflects their agency. As anthropologist Cati Coe (2013: 5) observes in her examination of how Ghanaian immigrants manage parent–child separations, migrants use their “repertoires” to make sense, experience, and respond to the challenges of immigration. Such “repertoires” are composed of “a multiplicity of cultural resources and frameworks, a body or collection of practices, knowledge, and beliefs that allow people to imagine what is possible, expect certain things, and value certain goals.” The “repertoires” that Coe conceptualizes on the basis of the Ghanaian case also exist among other immigrant groups, as they adapt and respond to the long-term, often indefinite, family separations that are quite common in today’s migration context.
Immigrants create multiple avenues that allow them to maintain active ties with loved ones across borders. In the absence of legal pathways to family unity, many have turned to unauthorized migration (Cruz 2010). Gridlock in immigration reform efforts and extensive backlogs in the immigration bureaucracy have led to a swelling of unauthorized migration, as families tire of waiting for the ever-distant possibility of authorized reunification (Carr and Tienda 2013; Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002; Zavella 2011). Thus, while family reunification has been a cornerstone of US immigration policy, family reunification for the more numerous groups today tends to be delayed for long periods of time due to backlogs in processing or limited visas (Abrego 2014; Enchautegui and Menjívar 2015; Zavella 2011).
Certain definitions and requirements in legal immigration provisions are designed to reconfigure immigrant families. Citing Hawthorne (2007: 619), Zavella argues that the provision of the 1986 IRCA stating that the “family group shall include the spouse, unmarried minor children under 18 years of age who are not members of some other household, and parents who reside regularly in the household of the family group” established a narrow view of the family (Zavella 2012: 1). Zavella notes:
This provision codifies a heterosexual nuclear family and excludes other types of family structures that are prevalent in the United States and Latin America—such as single parents, the elderly, multigenerational, extended, those headed by minors, or same-sex families—as well as children born “out of wedlock” or who have informal foster relationships with parents (in loco parentis) such as grandchildren cared for by their grandmothers when the parents migrate (Zavella 2012: 1).
Undeniably, such codification and legal recognition of only certain types of families has consequences for the settlement process and general well-being of immigrant families, as many are excluded. This book will explore how, in some cases, this leads to the long-term separation of families across borders or to the complicated experiences of mixed-status families by exacerbating inequalities within families. (See Tables 1.2 and 1.4 for contemporary compositions of immigrant families and households.)
The Economy, Economic Restructuring, and Immigrant Families
Together with the immigration laws in place at the time of arrival, economic trends and concomitant labor market dynamics have significant bearing on immigrant families. The economy is essential in determining how family migration is organized and how family members fare. Many migrate to the United States in search of a better future for themselves and their families, often on the basis of perception of access to better employment opportunities. Changes in the availability and quality of jobs, shrinking budgets for social services, economic and wage decline, and decreases in purchasing power dramatically affect where and how immigrants are able to enter the labor force, whether and how they provide for their families, and the paths to mobility they will follow. Thus, economic trends, broader structural shifts, and labor market opportunities impact immigrant families in multiple and profound ways.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, for example, when Southern, Central, and Eastern (SCE) European immigrant families arrived and settled in the United States, they had access to jobs in growing manufacturing sectors that allowed even poorly educated workers to move up the socioeconomic ladder (Lieberson 1980; Steinberg 2001). And, when employment waned, public and private programs were established to provide relief (Fox 2012). However, not all immigrant groups had access to the same resources that helped financially stabilize and more fully integrate SCE European immigrants. Many of these disparities are seen across racial groups today (Fox 2012).
Following general trends for the US population, the economic decline of the past several decades also impacts immigrants. As the United States shifted from manufacturing to a service-based economy, the unionized, more secure jobs that were available in the post-World War II era disappeared after the economic drop (or reversal) of the mid-1970s. The economic transformation that dramatically expanded the service sector shaped the dynamics of the labor market for new immigrants (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001). New jobs are mostly concentrated in the low end of the service sector, particularly for immigrants who arrive with little formal education. Moreover, in the contemporary immigration regime (see Chapter 2), even immigrants with high levels of education are unable to secure jobs or wages commensurate with their professional capacities if they are undocumented or have otherwise unstable legal statuses. Thus, there is a high concentration of immigrants in low-paid service sector jobs that do not provide benefits or enough hours for full-time employment (Abrego and Gleeson 2014). This situation leads to economic insecurity, as many immigrant families try to make ends meet in the United States as well as in the countries of origin, where relatives receive remittances (Abrego 2014; Schmalzbauer 2005).
To be sure, not all contemporary immigrants to the United States enter the low-end jobs of the service sector; it is rather the case that “contemporary immigration features a bewildering variety of origins, return patterns, and modes of adaptation” (Portes and Rumbaut 2006: 13). Indeed, as Portes and Rumbaut note, today’s immigrants are also professional and highly skilled workers, engineers, scientists, physicians, entrepreneurs, and skilled mechanics and laborers who show a bimodal distribution in that large numbers have low levels of education and work-related skills but there are also large numbers who are highly skilled and educated.10 For example, 76 percent of Indian immigrants in the United States have a bachelor’s or a higher degree, and South Korean and Chinese immigrants are closely behind them, with 53.9 percent and 49.6 percent, respectively. At the other end of the spectrum, only 5.6 percent of Mexicans and approximately 7.4 percent of Salvadorans and Guatemalans have a bachelor’s or a higher degree (see Table 1.1). Many immigrants fall in between this bimodal picture. The trend across generations seems encouraging, as members of the second generation generally have higher levels of educational attainment than their parents (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, Waters, and Holdaway 2008). And immigrants who arrive as refugees often cover a wide range of educational backgrounds and work experience as well.
Although educational level at the time of arrival is a key determinant of how well families will fare, it does not alone determine immigrants’ position in the labor force. For instance, immigrants with high levels of education and work experience who are sponsored by a family member or by an employer are able to secure higher paying jobs, often in high-technology fields or in the healthcare sector. On the other hand, many immigrants have opened up their own businesses. Whether because their qualifications were not valued in traditional fields or because they faced institutional racism in traditional jobs, they used their human capital to create economic opportunities for themselves and for their relatives, their co-ethnics, and others beyond the immediate immigrant community (Valdez 2011). In fact this has been a common experience for some immigrant groups (Min and Bozorgmehr 2000), including South Koreans (Kim 2008), and Iranians (Dallalfar 1994).
Table 1.1 Demographic Profile of the Largest Immigrant Groups from Asia and Latin America
Source: American Community Survey 2012.
Although most immigrant groups develop ethnic businesses that cater to the specific tastes and lifestyles of their co-ethnics, there are immigrants with higher rates of entrepreneurial activity. These groups have high concentrations of immigrants who bring business experience, have access to resources to finance their ventures, and can draw on their co-ethnics for needed labor (Portes and Rumbaut 2006). Such groups have created what scholars call ethnic enclaves. Notable examples are Cubans in Miami and Koreans in New York and Los Angeles (Portes and Rumbaut 2006). Other immigrant business owners work outside enclaves and run establishments to cater to a non-ethnic clientele, including inner-city residents. Although some immigrant-owned businesses constitute large enterprises, most tend to be small restaurants and shops. These small enterprises are likely to use family labor, often unpaid (Espiritu 1999).
The Great Recession of 2008–2010 exacerbated trends already under way since the mid-1970s, affecting all workers, including immigrants. Those who worked in housing and construction suffered most acutely. Latino/a immigrants in particular lost union jobs at higher rates than native-born workers with equivalent qualifications (Catron 2013). Coupled with increased immigration enforcement, immigrant workers’ vulnerability intensified during the Great Recession (Menjívar and Enchautegui 2015; Schmalzbauer 2011). But immigrants also experienced greater employment gains than native-born workers during the recovery, even if the quality of jobs declined (Enchautegui 2012). These macroeconomic dislocations create poverty, unemployment, and underemployment for immigrant families, blocking their ability to survive and thrive (Schmalzbauer 2014).
These effects, furthermore, are not contained solely within US borders. For many immigrants, wages stretch internationally, in the form of remittances designed to sustain non-migrant family members in the origin country, sometimes in transit countries, and, given dispersion patterns in the United States, in other US destinations as well. Immigrants’ remittances dropped notably in 2008, when the economic downturn hit. Since then, however, they have increased, slowly but steadily, and have now surpassed 2007 levels (Orozco 2012).
Main Demographic Characteristics of Immigrant Families
In this section we situate the demographic patterns of immigrant families in a broader structural context and consider the influence of cultural dynamics on demographic patterns in the home and host countries. We depict the demographic profile of the largest US immigrant groups from Asia and Latin America, the main sending regions in the world today, paying special attention to family-related indicators (for a detailed overview, see Glick 2010).
The five largest groups of immigrants from Asia originate in China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and South Korea; the largest groups from Latin America come from Mexico, El Salvador, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala, and they present a range of sex ratios within and between regions (see Table 1.1). It should be noted that some of these groups are also the fastest growing ones from each region. For instance, it is estimated that the size of the Central American immigrant population has multiplied several times from 1960, when it was 48,900, to 2011, when it reached over 3 million (Stoney and Batalova 2013). And Asians as a pan-ethnic group are the fastest growing racial group in the United States (Okamoto 2014).
The age distribution of Latin American immigrants varies significantly by national origin, reflecting the age distribution of the origin country but also variations in the migratory flow over time. Cubans have the highest median age of all Latin American immigrant groups, namely 51.4 years; they are followed by Dominicans, who have a median age of 43.5. Immigrants from El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala are on the whole younger, having median ages of 39.6, 39 and 34.9 respectively. Among Asians, the median age of Filipino/a immigrants is the highest at 48.1, being followed by that of Vietnamese at 45.7, of Chinese at 45, of South Koreans at 42.7, and of Indians at 37.9 (see Table 1.1).
In general, intermarriage is on the rise (Wang 2012): marriages involving an immigrant comprised 16.9 percent of marriages between 2008 and 2012 (Lichter, Qian, and Tumin 2015). Researchers note that intermarriage where one partner is a US-born non-Hispanic white is positively associated with integration (Glick 2010; Landale and Oropesa 2007). Further strengthening the assimilation argument, immigrants who marry outside of their ethnic group are more likely to stay in the United States and not return to the origin country (Moran-Taylor and Menjívar 2005). And yet the picture is more complicated, as research reveals that “ethnic replenishment” (Jiménez 2010)—that is, a sustained migration from a country of origin—can entrench marriage segregation; this suggests that segmented (and not classical) assimilation is also at play in certain contexts (Lichter, Brown, Qian, and Carmalt 2007; Vasquez 2015). Intermarriage also shapes immigrant identities (Perlmann and Waters 2007). While Asians have historically had higher rates of intermarriage with non-Hispanic whites than have other immigrant groups, Asians born abroad intermarry at lower rates than third- and fourth-generation Asians in the United States (Qian, Blair, and Ruf 2001), and Asian women are more likely to marry whites than are Asian men to marry whites (Qian and Lichter 2001). Thus we can assume that, as immigration patterns become more varied across origin groups, so too will immigrant marriage patterns.
Table 1.2 Marital Status of the Largest Immigrant Groups from Asia and Latin America
Source: American Community Survey 2012.
Analyses of US census data (see Table 1.2) show that Mexicans have the highest marriage rates among Latinos/as, at 58.1 percent, and Dominicans the lowest, at 42.9 percent. Cubans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans fall in the middle, with marriage rates of 49.6 percent, 49.4 percent, and 47.6 percent respectively. Marriage rates among Asian immigrants are markedly higher. Of the Indian immigrants aged 15 or older, 77.8 percent are married; Chinese immigrants follow, with 64.3 percent, then South Korean immigrants with 64 percent, Vietnamese with 63.7 percent, and Filipinos/as with 62.5 percent.
There are debates about how much fertility is impacted by the factor of time spent in the United States (Glick 2010). While some research shows that fertility rates in marriages between native-born whites and Latinos/as converge as the time spent by Latinos/ as in the United States increases (Parrado and Morgan 2008), other research, with Mexicans, suggests that fertility may decline at first, only to rise again in later generations (Bean, Lee, Batalova, and Leach 2004). It is clear that, while marriage rates are higher among Asians than among Latinos/as, the story is reversed in terms of fertility. According to 2012 data from the American Community Survey, Latinos/as also have higher rates of children outside of marriage: 49.1 percent of Dominicans, 46.9 percent of Cubans, and 33 percent of Mexicans fit into this category. On the other hand, the highest percentage of out-of-marriage births among Asians is among Filipinos/as, who register 17.7 percent, while only 1.3 percent of Indians have children outside of marriage, and, according to the American Community Survey (ACS), 14.9 percent of Vietnamese births have been outside of a marriage. This percentage is followed by 7.5 percent among South Koreans and 6.4 percent among Chinese (see Table 1.3).
Marital dissolution is sometimes interpreted to be a marker of immigrant integration, especially for immigrants from countries where divorce is uncommon. Bean, Berg, and van Hook (1996) found that the longer Mexicans reside in the United States the more likely they are to divorce. Divorce rates among Latinos/ as and Asians deviate little. According to the ACS, Cubans have the highest divorce rate among both groups, at 15.3 percent (and 4.2 percent of couples are separated). They are followed, among Latinos/as, by Dominicans, who have a divorce rate of 13.6 percent (but a higher separation rate than Cubans, at 7.6 percent). Among Salvadorans, 12.1 percent are divorced or separated—a figure followed by 10.2 percent for Mexicans and 9.9 percent for Guatemalans. The highest combined rate of divorce and separation among Asians is found among Filipinos/as, at 9.3 percent, who are followed closely by Vietnamese, at 9.1 percent. South Koreans come next, with a combined rate of 7.2 percent of couples that are divorced or separated, and then come the Chinese, with 6.4 percent. Indians have by far the lowest rates: 2.1 percent of couples are divorced and 0.6 percent separated (see Table 1.2).
Table 1.3 Fertility Rates among the Largest Immigrant Groups from Asia and Latin America*
Source: American Community Survey 2012.
Country
Fertility out of marriage (%)
Fertility of women aged 15–50
Asia
China
6.4
5.0
India
1.3
7.9
Philippines
17.7
5.78
Vietnam
14.9
6.26
South Korea
7.5
5.4
Latin America
Mexico
33.0
7.76
El Salvador
38.2
7.0
Cuba
46.9
4.5
Dominican Republic
49.1
5.6
Guatemala
37.8
9.6
* Ratio of live births in an area to the population of that area, per 1,000 population per year.
Important to this demographic story are the many family partnerships that are divided by borders and thus spend time apart. Hence we resist the assumption that a geographically bound nuclear family is the norm. Indeed there are many immigrants who negotiate partnerships, married or not, across borders. In other cases, which involve lengthy separations and uncertain reunifications, unions sometimes dissolve and new families are formed both in the home countries and in the United States. Geography, cultural practices, and legal status may complicate marriage, separation, and divorce, as immigrants must also negotiate partnerships in different national contexts (see Dreby 2015; Foner 2009).
Immigrants live in a variety of family forms. For example, 57.4 percent of Mexican families are headed by a married couple, whereas this proportion is 50.3 percent for Salvadorans, 48.8 percent for Cubans, 47.6 percent for Guatemalans, and 34.6 percent for Dominicans. Relatedly, among Latinos/as, Dominicans have the highest percentage of female-headed households with no husband present, at 34.7 percent, and Cubans the lowest, at 15.2 percent. Among Latinos/as, Mexicans have the largest household size, at 4.27 percent, and Cubans the lowest, at 2.99 percent (see Table 1.4).
Table 1.4 Household Composition among the Largest Immigrant Groups from Asia and Latin America
Source: American Community Survey 2012.
According to the ACS, Asians have higher percentages of married, couple-headed families than do Latinos/as. Indians have the highest rate of married, couple-headed households, at 77.1 percent. They are followed by the Vietnamese, at 63.6 percent, by Filipinos/as, at 59.7 percent, and by South Koreans and Chinese, both at 59.1 percent. Asians also have lower rates of female-headed households with no husbands present. Indians have the lowest rate of female-headed households, at 3.1 percent, and Filipinos/as the highest, at 16.1 percent. The remaining Asian groups are the Vietnamese at 13.7 percent of female-headed households, the Chinese at 9.4 percent, and South Koreans at 8.2 percent. Household size among Asians ranges from a high of 3.62 for the Vietnamese to a low of 2.74 for the South Koreans (see Table 1.4).
Extended households are common among recent immigrants; the latter are also likely to live in multigenerational households (Qian 2014). Once immigrants start to experience upward socio-economic mobility, they tend to move out and establish their own households. The economic context for this decision is critical, as research suggests that, if economic conditions worsen, immigrants are likely to return to extended households (van Hook and Glick 2007).
Important to the demographic story of non-family households is the recognition that cohabitation without marriage is common across the life course in many Latin American countries, a practice that may impact household formation in the United States (Castro Martín 2002). In contrast, cohabitation is much less prevalent in Asian countries, and so it should not be surprising that Asians have the lowest rates of cohabitation among all immigrant groups (Brown, van Hook, and Glick 2008).
Homeownership has long been lauded as symbolic of incorporation and mobility in the United States; it is often held up as indicative of one’s having achieved the “American dream,” with important implications for families. According to Census figures, immigrants have diverging patterns of homeownership. Notably, Asian immigrants have higher rates of homeownership than do Latinos/as. Among Asians, Vietnamese have the highest rate of owner-occupied housing, at 66.8 percent; they are followed by Filipinos/as at 61.3 percent, by Chinese at 61 percent, by Indians at 53.6 percent, and by South Koreans at 47.4 percent. Cubans have the highest homeownership rates among Latinos/as, at 55.3 percent; they are followed by Mexicans at 44.9 percent, by Salvadorans at 41.2 percent, by Guatemalans at 28.4 percent, and, lastly, by Dominicans at 24.2 percent (see Table 1.3).
Much immigration into the United States is motivated by immigrants’ search for higher wages and socioeconomic mobility, which in turn is met with a persistent demand for immigrant labor in key US economic sectors (Sassen 1990). Thus, it is not surprising that labor force participation rates are high among all immigrant groups in the United States. Guatemalans have the highest participation rate, at 77.8 percent, being followed by Salvadorans at 77.1 percent, by Indians at 71.3 percent, by Filipinos/as at 69.9 percent, by Mexicans at 69.1 percent, by Vietnamese at 68.9 percent, by Dominicans at 66.7 percent, by Chinese at 61.3 percent, by South Koreans at 59.7 percent, and by Cubans at 58.9 percent (see Table 1.1).
Scholars disagree about how labor force participation translates into socioeconomic mobility. Portes and Zhou (1993) theorize that assimilation is segmented, channeling second-generation youth from disadvantaged backgrounds to low-paying jobs and downward mobility, so they do not go above the socioeconomic status of their poor parents. Yet research by Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, Waters, and Holdaway (2008) paints a more optimistic picture. Although these authors agree with Portes and Zhou that not all immigrant groups are doing equally well, noting the stark challenges faced by black Dominican men and Puerto Ricans, they argue that, in comparison to Americans as a whole, second-generation immigrants are doing well. While most of the second generation has not been launched into the elite, university-educated class, Kasinitz et al. point out that this is true of all Americans, including the white native-born. Besides, there are now more racial–ethnic minorities in the middle and upper echelons of the labor force than ever before. Waters, Tran, Kasinitz, and John Mollenkopf (2010) attribute this rise to post-civil rights policies, which have opened access to employment and education previously off limits to minorities. Alba (2009) boosts this optimism by theorizing that, as white educated baby boomers exit the work force, racial–ethnic minorities, including the second immigrant generation, are certain to enter these jobs.
