The Impact of Immigration on Children's Development

C. Garcia Coll

• Publisher: S. Karger
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9783805597999
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Psychiatrie & geistige Gesundheit

All over the world families migrate, and with them so do their children. Probing the question of what 'being an immigrant' means, this publication brings together theory and empirical findings to highlight the impact of immigration on child development in a global context. Discussed is the impact of these processes on children and adolescents in a variety of different countries and social contexts to determine both universal and culturally specific aspects of the experience of immigration as it becomes a pervasive reality of the modern world. This publication is appropriate for anyone who is interested in the process of migration/immigration and how it affects human development. Both students and scholars as well as real-world practitioners and policy makers in education, psychology, sociology, anthropology, ethnic and cultural studies, immigration studies, government and public policy will find this book a valuable source of information about the present and the way in which the next generation develops in response to the immigrant experience.

Garcia Coll C (ed): The Impact of Immigration on Children's Development.
Contrib Hum Dev. Basel, Karger, 2012, vol 24, pp 122-148

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Immigrant Family Separations: The Experience of Separated, Unaccompanied, and Reunited Youth and Families

Carola Suárez-Orozco · María G. Hernández

New York University, New York, N.Y., USA

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Abstract

Migration is transforming the shape of the family. Worldwide, more than 214 million are immigrants or refugees, and in the US about 12% of the population are foreign-born with more than a fifth of the nation's children growing up in immigrant homes. During the course of migration, many families must make the painful decision to leave behind loved ones in their home countries, including children, spouses, parents and extended family members. Sociologists and clinical psychologists have documented the unfavorable psychosocial consequences associated with family separations, though we have not fully understood how strategies employed by families shape youths' overall well-being from a developmental perspective. To fill this gap, we utilized qualitative data from two large studies to provide insight into the experiences of separated-reunited youth and their families, and separated unaccompanied minors. Our findings revealed that the separated-reunited and unaccompanied minors experienced strain in their family relationships during the separation, and attempted to alleviate their angst by maintaining contact through numerous channels. Although separated-reunited families are confronted with reestablishing relationships that were tarnished due to the separation, through remarkable strengths, resources, determination and resilience they readjusted. Unlike separated-reunited youth, unaccompanied minors encountered the pressures of taking on adult-like responsibilities, such as parenting themselves, working to financially support themselves, at times their family members in their countries of origin, and attending school full-time. We discuss the implications that migration-related separations have for the psychological and academic adjustment of youth, development, and policy.

Copyright © 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel

Worldwide, more than two hundred and fourteen million are immigrants and refugees. In the US today, about 12% of the population are foreign-born [US Census Bureau, 2000] and more than a fifth of the nation’s children are growing up in immigrant homes [Rong & Preissle, 1998]. During the course of migration, many families must make the painful decision to leave behind loved ones in their home countries, including children, spouses, parents and extended family members [United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, 2009]. Thus, migration and forces of globalization are transforming the shape of the family [UNDP, 2009].

Increasingly, the experience of transnational families can be characterized by ‘separation and reunification of different members of the family unit over time’ [Tyyska, 2007, p. 91]. When families separate, they often expect to reunite soon. However, in the process of migration, families often endure prolonged periods of separation before they are reunited again [Suárez-Orozco, Todorova & Louie, 2002]. The actual manifestations of family separation and reunification processes vary widely depending on the purpose of the migration and social and cultural-specific contexts of the families. ‘Stepwise’ or ‘serial’ fashion migration is a common strategy for immigrant families [Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1992; Orellana, Thorne, Chee & Lam, 2001]. Historically, the pattern was of the father going ahead, establishing himself while sending remittances home, and then bringing the wife and children as soon as it was financially possible. Today, the first world's demand for service workers draw mothers from a variety of developing countries to care for ‘other people's children’ [Gratton, 2007; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997]. In cases where mothers initiate the migrations, they leave their children in the care of extended family such as grandparents or aunts along with the father if he is still part of the family. In many other cases, both parents go ahead, leaving the children in the care of extended family [Bernhard, Landolt & Goldring, 2006; Qin & Albin, 2010; Scalabrini Migration Center, 2003], while in a more recent documented trend adolescent children lead in immigration as ‘unaccompanied minors’, without any parents [Hernández, 2009; Martínez, 2009; Wexler Love, 2010]. These adolescents typically emigrate from Latin American countries, such as Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua seeking employment or educational opportunities [Hernández, 2009; Martínez, 2009; Wexler Love, 2010]. Upper-middleclass families from East Asian countries such as Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan send middle and high-school-aged students to study abroad as ‘astronaut kids’, living with the mother while the father remains in the homeland [Ong, 1999; Waters, 2002] or as ‘parachute kids’, living with extended or fictive kin while both parents remain in the homeland [Ong, 1999; Zhou, 2009]. Another long-documented practice is that of children being sent back to the homeland to be taken care of by grandparents. Typically, unruly adolescents have been sent back to be resocialized by their grandparents [Foner, 2009; Smith, 2006], but increasingly, infants and toddlers are being sent back to be cared for by extended family while parents work [Bohr, Whitfield & Chan, 2009; Gaytán, Xue & Yoshikawa, 2006]. In recent years, families with undocumented parents have involuntarily been wrenched apart by workplace as well as in-home raids conducted by immigration authorities [Capps, Castañeda, Chaudry & Santos, 2007; Chaudry, Pedroza, Castañeda, Santos & Scott, 2010].

Reunification of the entire family can often take many years, especially when complicated by financial hurdles as well as immigration laws [Bernhard et al., 2006; Menjívar & Abrego, 2009]. When it is time for the children to arrive, they may be brought to the new land all together or one at a time [Bernhard et al., 2006]. Though parents maintain contact during the separation period through letters, phone calls, personal visits, and contributions to the material well-being of their children, these separation-reunification processes involve difficult psychological experiences for the children during the separation as well as after the reunification [Suárez-Orozco et al., 2002]. For the children, these serial migrations result in two sets of disruptions in attachments - first from the parent, and then from the caretaker to whom the child has become attached during the parent-child separation [Ambert & Krull, 2006; Bernhard et al., 2006; Wong, 2006].

This practice of ‘familyhood’ even across the national borders' [Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002, p. 3] has been well documented by sociologists [Dreby, 2007, 2009; Foner, 2009; Glick-Schiller & Fouron, 1992; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2003] and economists [Abrego, 2009; Suro, 2003], but has largely failed to be noted in the developmental literature. In particular, the children's perspectives on the separation experience and its developmental implications have been overlooked until recently [Suárez-Orozco, Bang & Kim, 2011]. This chapter first aims to summarize the current knowledge of transnational separations and reunifications through a review of existing literature, including studies related to separated-reunited families, unaccompanied minors, and parachute kids¹. Then, through qualitative analyses of data from the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation (LISA) study [Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco & Todorova, 2008] and the Immigrant Central American and Mexican Adolescent (ICAMA) study [Hernández, 2009], the authors share insights into immigrant families' subjective experiences of the separation-reunification process.

Prevalence of Separations of Transnational Familyhood

Despite the commonality of family separations during the migration process, prevalence and cross-cultural patterns of immigrant family separations is largely unknown, and the estimates from available studies vary widely. Among the participants of the LISA study - a study of 385 adolescent newcomers from China, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America, approximately one third of the participants reported experiencing a separation from at least one parent [Suárez-Orozco et al., 2011]. Significant differences between ethnic groups were observed with regard to family separation: Chinese families were the 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 or both of their parents during the course of migration. Approximately 26% of children in the sample were separated from both parents, a pattern most often occurring in Central American families (54%). In cases where the child was separated from only one parent, about 26% of children were separated from the mother, while about 20% of children were separated from the father. Separations from mothers occurred most frequently among Dominican (40%) families, and separations from fathers were most frequently found among Mexican (33%) families. Of the participants who were separated only from their mothers, 44% of Central American children endured separations lasting 4 or more years as did approximately a quarter of both the Dominican and Haitian families. Chinese and Mexican children underwent fewer and shorter separations from their mothers. When separation from the father occurred during migration, it was often a very lengthy or permanent one. For those families who were separated, 28% had separations from fathers that lasted over 4 years. This was the case for 45% of the Haitian, 41% of Central American, and 27% of the Dominican families.

In a more recent study conducted in Montreal, a similar pattern of separation was found [Rousseau et al., 2009]. Among 254 first- and second-generation immigrant origin high school students from the Philippines and the Caribbean, approximately 62% of the Filipino origin participants and 38% of the Caribbean origin participants had experienced separations. It is important to note that this study did not disaggregate by generation. Since separations are unlikely to occur in the second generation, this is a low estimate of what the separation rates would be for a first-generation sample.

In a US nationally representative survey (n = 1,772) that restricted its sample to documented immigrants (in contrast to the two studies noted above which included unauthorized immigrants), nearly a third of the participants between ages 6 and 18 had been separated from at least one parent for 2 or more years. Notably, the rates of separation were highest for children of Latin American origin than of Asia and other parts of the world [Gindling & Poggio, 2009]. Thus, in keeping with reports in other post-industrial settings (UNDP, 2009), separations from biological parents appear to be quite frequent among first-generation immigrants in North America.

Regrettably, little is known about the immigration prevalence rates of unaccompanied minors. Data that do exist come from a few qualitative studies [Hernández, 2009; Martínez, 2009; Wexler Love, 2010] and statistics maintained on apprehended youth by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Division of Unaccompanied Children Services, under the Administration of Children and Families. Regarding studies with samples of unaccompanied minors, Hernández [2009] found that out of 30 participants, 27% were unaccompanied minors, while in the study by Martínez [2009] 3 out of 7 participants were unaccompanied minors, and 6 out of 10 of Wexler Love [2010] participants were considered unaccompanied. In 2009, 6,074 unaccompanied children were apprehended [US Department of Health and Human Services, 2009]. The Division of Unaccompanied Children Services consider unaccompanied children to be those who: have no lawful immigration status in the US, have not attained 18 years of age, and with respect to whom: (a) there is no parent or legal guardian in the US or (b) no parent or legal guardian in the US is available to provide care and physical custody. Nevertheless, these data fail to provide an adequate representation of the number of adolescent children who lead in immigration, without their parents, because it only represents those that have come to the attention of immigration services.

Youth's Experience of Family Separations and Reunifications

In this section, we present findings from sociological, clinical, and developmental literature regarding the impact of separations and reunifications on family relations and psychological experience, and its implication in academic development in the host countries for families experiencing ‘stepwise’ immigration and ‘unaccompanied minors’.

Changes in Family Relations

While the discipline of developmental psychology has been slow to realize the number of children and youth caught up in transnational family constellations, sociologists and clinical psychologists have been documenting this phenomenon over the last decade or so.

From the sociological data, several patterns emerge. The clearest evidence points to the disruption to family relations. In broad strokes, this research - based largely on transnational studies conducted on Central American and Mexican families during the separation phase in the country of origin and during the reunification stage in the receiving country - reveal some fairly consistent insights [Foner, 2009]. During the separations phase, children appear to adjust more easily to the father being away, perhaps because this is consistent with gender expectations and patterns of childrearing [Dreby, 2007]. However, when the mother or both parents are away, the children often attach to the substitute caretaker. Mothers (more so than fathers) often maintain regular contact with their children [Abrego, 2009; Dreby, 2009] attempting to maintain ‘emotional intimacy from a distance’ [Dreby, 2009, p. 34]. Younger children often begin to emotionally withdraw from their mothers, and adolescents typically become either quite independent or act out aggressively [Dreby, 2009; Smith, 2006]. Similarly, the maintenance of close relationships is also challenging for unaccompanied minors and parachute kids. For instance, Hernández [2009] findings suggest that for unaccompanied minors, the relationships they have with parents become estranged and distant because of the lack of daily sharing that used to occur in the homeland with family members prior to immigration. Zhou [1998] findings in her study of parachute kids also underscore the estrangement that these adolescents endure when separated from their parents. Parachute kids and their parents maintain contact through phone calls and yearly visits, but these do not suffice over time to maintain the fullness of the relationship prior to separation. Over time, parents develop guilt and consequently become more easygoing with their children, while the children have gotten used to living by themselves and have become more independent. To comfort themselves about their separation, they overcompensate by understanding that education takes priority, and associate the physical separation as a sign of caring. Thus, for both ‘stepwise’ migrated, unaccompanied children, and parachute kids maintaining long-distance emotional intimacy with parents over an extended physical absence is challenging.

During the reunification stage for ‘stepwise’ migrated families, children and youth often report ambivalence about leaving behind their beloved extended family caregivers and friends and are anxious about meeting members of the biological family, including parents, who have become strangers over the prolonged separation [Foner, 2009; Menjívar & Abrego, 2009]. Parents often report struggles with asserting their authority and frustration that their financial and emotional sacrifices are not fully appreciated by their children [Abrego, 2009; Dreby, 2006; Foner, 2009; Menjívar & Abrego, 2009; Zhou, 2009].

There is also a body of literature derived from clinical reports, which points to a pattern of family conflict during the family reunification phase [Glasgow & Gouse-Shees, 1995; Sciarra, 1999]. This literature suggests that over time, the substitute family system for the child left behind may have evolved in such a way that it excludes the parent who has been away, making reunification of the family system difficult [Falicov, 2007; Partida, 1996]. Parents tend to expect their children to be grateful for their sacrifices, but often find that their children are ambivalent about joining their parents in the migratory process [Boti & Bautista, 1999; Rousseau et al., 2009; Sciarra, 1999]. Also, children may be disappointed for how their real parents turn out to be, compared to their fantasies and expectations about...