Growing Up American: The Challenge Confronting Immigrant Children and Children of Immigrants
Growing Up American: The Challenge Confronting Immigrant Children and Children of Immigrants
Growing Up American: The Challenge Confronting Immigrant Children and Children of Immigrants
ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, immigrant children and children of immigrant parentage have
become the fastest growing and the most extraordinarily diverse segment of
America’s child population. Until the recent past, however, scholarly attention
has focused on adult immigrants to the neglect of their offspring, creating a pro-
found gap between the strategic importance of the new second generation and the
knowledge about its socioeconomic circumstances. The purpose of this article
is to pull together existing studies that bear directly or indirectly on children’s
immigrant experiences and adaptational outcomes and to place these studies into
a general framework that can facilitate a better understanding of the new second
generation. The article first describes the changing trends in the contexts of the re-
ception the new second generation has encountered. The article then discusses the
ways in which conventional theoretical perspectives about immigrant adaptation
are being challenged and alternative frameworks are being developed. Thirdly, it
examines empirical findings from recent research and evaluates their contribution
to the sociology of immigration. Finally, it highlights the main conclusions from
prior research and their theoretical and practical implications for future studies.
INTRODUCTION
The phenomenal increase in contemporary immigration to the United States has
given rise to a record number of children who, regardless of place of birth, are
raised in immigrant families. Since the 1980s, a new generation of immigrant
children and children of immigrants has become the fastest growing and the most
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IMMIGRANT CHILDREN 65
has discussed not only US-born children—the true second generation—but also
contemporary immigrant children who have arrived in the United States before
they reach adulthood (Gans 1992, Portes 1996). The latter group is also known
as the “one-and-a-half generation,” a term coined by Rubén Rumbaut to char-
acterize the children who straddle the old and the new worlds but are fully part
of neither (Pérez Firmat 1994, Rumbaut 1991). Usage of these generational
terms has not been consistent (Oropesa & Landale, forthcoming). Depend-
ing on social and historical processes of immigration and particular nationality
groups under study, the second generation is sometimes broadened to include
foreign-born children arriving at pre-school age (0-4 years) because they share
many linguistic, cultural, and developmental experiences similar to those of
immigrant offspring (Zhou & Bankston, forthcoming). The one-and-a-half
generation, on the other hand, is sometimes broken down into two distinct co-
horts: children between 6 and 13 years of age as 1.5-generation children and
those arriving as adolescents (aged 13 to 17) who are similar to first-generation
children. Although scholars may vary in their ways of defining the new sec-
ond generation, they have generally agreed that there are important differences
between children of different cohorts of the one-and-a-half and second gener-
ation, particularly in their physical and psychological developmental stages, in
their socialization processes in the family, the school, and the society at large,
as well as in their orientation toward their homeland.
The main characteristics of the new second generation mirror those of con-
temporary immigrants, which are extraordinarily diverse in national origins,
socioeconomic circumstances, and settlement patterns. Always the defining
character of America, however, the composition and meaning of diversity today
have changed significantly since the turn of the century. Most notably, con-
temporary immigrants have been predominantly non-Europeans. According
to the Immigration and Nationalization Service, of the 7.3 million immigrants
admitted to the United States during the 1980s (not counting undocumented
immigrants), 87% came from Asia and the Americas, compared to the 8.8 mil-
lion admitted during the 1910s who were predominantly from Europe. In the
past decade, Mexico, the Philippines, China/Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam
were the top five sending countries, followed by the Dominican Republic, India,
El Salvador, and Jamaica. Immigrants from Mexico alone accounted for more
than one fifth of total legal admissions as well as half of illegal immigrants.
The diversity in national origin has, accordingly, become a salient feature
of the new second generation. The 1990 Census has shown that the foreign-
born child population under 18 years of age is made up of 52% Latinos
(53% of whom are Mexicans) and 27% Asians, and that the US-born co-
hort with at least one immigrant parent is made up of 48% Latinos and 24%
Asians (Oropesa & Landale, forthcoming). More strikingly, about one out of
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three foreign-born children has at least one Mexican-born parent (Perlmann &
Waldinger 1996).
Also different from the turn-of-the-century inflows, contemporary immi-
grants have come from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. The 1990 Census
has attested to the vast differences in levels of education, occupation, and income
by national origins. For example, over 60% of immigrants (aged 25 years or
older) from India and Taiwan report having attained college degrees, three times
the proportion of average Americans, but less than 5% of those from Cambodia,
Laos, El Salvador, and Mexico so report. Among the employed workers (aged
16 years or older), over 45% of immigrants from India and Taiwan have man-
agerial or professional occupations, more than twice the proportion of average
American workers, but less than 7% of those from El Salvador, Guatemala, and
Mexico so report. Further, immigrants from India report a median household
income of $53,000, compared to $30,000 for average American households;
those from Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Laos,
and Mexico report a median household income below $22,000.
The socioeconomic diversity suggests that the pathways to social mobility
will not be a straight line nor unidirectional. While many immigrants continue
to follow the traditional bottom-up route, significant numbers of new arrivals
have bypassed the bottom starting line and moved directly into mainstream
labor markets while dispersing into suburban middle-class communities. The
implications for the new second generation are profound, since the current state
and future prospects of immigrant children are related to the advantages or
disadvantages that accrue to the socioeconomic status of their parents.
A third salient feature of contemporary immigrants is their geographic con-
centration. Unlike earlier European immigrants whose destinations were in
the Northeast, contemporary immigrants have been disproportionately concen-
trated in the West. California accounted for over a third of the total arrivals of
legal immigrants in the 1980s, while New York, the traditional largest receiving
state, accounted for only 14% (Portes & Zhou 1995). The impact of geographic
concentration is also felt in public schools in high immigration states. Again,
California alone accounted for some 45% of the nation’s immigrant student
population, more than one out of ten school-aged children in the state were for-
eign born, and over a third of the state’s school-aged children spoke a language
other than English at home (Cornelius 1995).
IMMIGRANT CHILDREN 67
contemporary immigrants and their children has changed dramatically over the
past three decades to create additional obstacles to “melt” the diverse body of
immigrants and their offspring into a single mainstream.
Unlike earlier European immigrants, contemporary immigrants have been
received in a peculiar circumstance: an emerging “hourglass” economy in which
opportunities for social mobility shrink even among native-born Americans and
a welfare state that is highly contested by the general public. Several major
trends are especially unfavorable for the adaptation of the nation’s newcomers
and their children.
First, the gap between rich and poor, which progressively narrowed for most
of the twentieth century, has been widening in recent years as it has been affected
by globalization and economic restructuring. Only a portion of the American
work force has seen its economic advantages steadily increase as information
technology and management become more critical to the economy; most have
experienced worsening conditions. During the 1980s, 80% of American work-
ers saw their real hourly wages go down by an average of about 5% (Mishel
& Bernstein 1992). Blue collar jobs, the kinds of jobs generally available to
newly arrived immigrants, not only pay less than in previous years, but they are
also disappearing at a particularly rapid rate, resulting in expanding classes of
poor and rich and a shrinking middle class. In such an economic structure, even
US-born Americans find their chances for economic mobility lessening. The
situation for many immigrants is bleaker, except for the unusually fortunate,
the highly educated, and the highly skilled (Waldinger 1996).
Contemporary economic hardships are different from the hardships of the
Great Depression and hardships in many Third World countries. Although
there is a growing class of poor Americans, there are relatively few deaths from
starvation in the United States. Until the early 1990s, the welfare state had made
access to public assistance relatively easy (Rumbaut 1994a, Tienda & Liang
1994). While opportunities for stable jobs with good incomes were rare for low-
income individuals, food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children
were readily available. Public assistance did not provide a comfortable way of
life, for welfare payments averaged less than half the amount defined as poverty
level income (Sancton 1992:45); it did, nonetheless, provide a means of exis-
tence for the chronically poor, unemployed or underemployed. Yet, members of
this expanding class of poor were not being offered chances for socioeconomic
improvement; they were, for the most part, being fed and housed and main-
tained in their social and economic limbo. Such unfortunate circumstances
were exacerbated just prior to the 1996 presidential election when President
Bill Clinton signed a Republican welfare reform bill. The bill, which limits
public assistance to two continuous years and mandates a five-year lifetime
maximum, with neither public jobs nor childcare for recipients who exceed the
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limit and nothing for their children. This has changed the nature of the welfare
state in new and significant ways: It cuts off the lifeline of the poor, especially
children, driving them into deeper poverty; it also excludes legal immigrants
from much access to basic forms of assistance, forcing poor immigrant families
to swim or sink. Long-term effects of the welfare bill remain to be seen, but
certainly millions of children will be thrown into poverty, and chances for the
truly disadvantaged to get out of poverty will be even bleaker.
Second, poverty has been highly concentrated. The poor are not, of course,
being housed evenly across the American landscape. Even before new infor-
mation technologies and the globalization of production, the contraction of
American manufacturing and the suburbanization first of the middle class pop-
ulation and later of middle class jobs have displaced the American working
class. The disappearance of industrial jobs in urban areas where racial minori-
ties concentrate has detached the middle class from the working poor, causing
a high concentration of poverty in the most disadvantaged segments of the
minority population in inner-city ghettos (Wilson 1987).
The problem of poverty concentration has worsened under large-scale eco-
nomic restructuring, which has reduced the demand for low-skilled and semi-
skilled immigrants and trapped them in unemployment and social isolation sim-
ilar to that commonly facing native-born minorities in the most impoverished
stratum of the society. The implication for members of younger generations
is profound. Immigrant children from middle-class backgrounds benefit from
financially secure families, good schools, safe neighborhoods, and other sup-
portive formal and informal organizations, which ensure better life chances
for them. Children with poorly educated and unskilled parents, in contrast,
often find themselves growing up in underprivileged neighborhoods subject to
poverty, poor schools, violence and drugs, and a generally disruptive social
environment. Many immigrant children attend public schools in their neigh-
borhood with a clear numerical majority of minority students. In Los Angeles
County, for example, 57 unified school districts out of a total of 83 contain over
half of nonwhite students, and 34 have more than three quarters of US-born
minority and other immigrant students. In major immigrant-receiving cities
such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Miami, at least a third of
the students in the entire school system speak a language other than English at
home.
Third, there has been a drastic increase in the proportion of American children
in one-parent families. Hernandez (1993) observed that between 1939 and 1988
the proportion of the officially poor children who lived in mother-only families
increased from 10% to 57%, and that such an increase was counterbalanced
by a virtually identical decline in the proportion living in two-parent families.
The rise of single-parent families has aggravated the overall poverty trends for
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perceive their entry into the middle class as almost impossible, and to be in
schools where learning is strongly discouraged by peers. It would be wise to
avoid passing judgment on the children in these schools and to avoid blaming
them for their responses to the world around them. Merton long ago (1938)
described rebellion as an adaptive response to a gap between socially approved
goals and available means of achieving those goals. Lowered chances for mo-
bility create frustration and pessimism for all American young people, but
these emotions are most strongly felt by those at the bottom. When those at
the bottom are also members of historically oppressed minority groups, the
frustration is mixed with the need to maintain self-esteem, so that rejection of
middle class mores and opposition to authority become important strategies for
psychological survival.
In underprivileged neighborhoods, in particular, immigrant children meet in
their schools native-born peers with little hope for the future and are thus likely
to be pressured by their peers to resist assimilation into the middle class as
expected by their parents. These trends pose a challenge to all parents, but the
challenge is especially daunting for immigrant parents with limited educational
backgrounds, frequently limited English skills, and few resources.
IMMIGRANT CHILDREN 71
But he argued that acculturation did not necessarily lead to other forms of inte-
gration into the host society (i.e. large-scale entrance into the institutions of the
host society or intermarriage). Ethnic groups would remain distinguished from
one another depending largely on the degree to which groups gained the accep-
tance of the dominant population (p. 159). Gordon anticipated, nevertheless,
that ethnic minorities would eventually lose all their distinctive characteristics
and cease to exist as ethnic groups as they pass through the stages of assimi-
lation, eventually intermarrying with the majority population and entering its
institutions on a primary-group level (pp. 70–71).
From the point of view of assimilation theorists, distinctive ethnic traits
such as old cultural ways, native languages, or ethnic enclaves are sources of
disadvantages that negatively affect assimilation (Child 1943, Warner & Srole
1945). Although complete acculturation to the dominant American culture may
not ensure all immigrants full social participation in the host society, immigrants
must free themselves from their old cultures in order to begin rising up from
marginal positions. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, America seemed to have
absorbed the great waves of immigrants, who arrived primarily from Europe.
Sociological studies have indicated progressive trends of social mobility across
generations of immigrants and increasing rates of intermarriages, as determined
by educational attainment, job skills, length of stay since immigration, English
proficiency, and levels of exposure to American cultures (Alba 1985, Chiswick
1977, Greeley 1976, Sandberg 1974, Wytrwal 1961).
Observed Anomalies
Beginning in the 1960s, the conventional assimilation perspective with its ap-
plication to the more recently arrived non-European immigrant groups has
been met with challenges. Instead of eventual convergence in the outcomes
of immigrant adaptation, several anomalies have been observed in recent re-
search. The first anomaly concerns the persistent ethnic differences across gen-
erations. Studies on intergenerational mobility have found divergent rather
than convergent outcomes, revealing that early and insignificant differentials in
advantage result in substantial differences in educational and occupational mo-
bility in later years (Becker 1963, Goffman 1963). In their study of educational
attainment of 25 religio-ethnic groups in the United States, Hirschman & Falcon
(1985) have found that neither generation nor length of US residence signifi-
cantly influences educational outcomes. Specifically, children of highly edu-
cated immigrants consistently fare much better in school than do fourth- or fifth-
generation descendants of poorly educated ancestors regardless of religio-ethnic
backgrounds. In a study of the Irish, Italian, Jewish, and African Americans
in Providence, Rhode Island, Perlmann (1988) found that, even with family
background factors held constant, ethnic differences in levels of schooling and
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economic attainment persisted in the second and later generations and that
schooling did not equally commensurate with occupational advancement for
African Americans as for other European-Americans across generations.
Another anomaly is what Gans (1992) describes as the “the second gen-
eration decline.” Gans notes three possible scenarios for today’s new second
generation: education-driven mobility, succession-driven mobility, and niche
improvement. He observes that immigrant children from less fortunate so-
cioeconomic backgrounds have a much harder time than other middle-class
children to succeed in school, and that a significant number of the children of
poor, especially dark-skinned, immigrants can be trapped in permanent poverty
in the era of stagnant economic growth and in the process of Americanization
because these immigrant children “will either not be asked, or will be reluctant,
to work at immigrant wages and hours as their parents did but will lack job
opportunities, skills and connections to do better” (pp. 173–74). Gans predicts
that the prospects facing children of the less fortunate may be high rates of
unemployment, crime, alcoholism, drug use, and other pathologies associated
with poverty and the frustration of rising expectation (p. 183). Perlmann &
Waldinger (1996) call this phenomenon “the second generation revolt.” They
argue that such revolt is not merely caused by exogenous factors, such as racial
discrimination, declining economic opportunities, and the exposure to the ad-
versarial outlooks of native-born youths, but also by endogenous factors inher-
ent in the immigration process, including pre-immigration class standing and
the size and the nature of immigrant inflows.
Still another anomaly is the peculiar outcomes of immigrant adaptation. To-
day, neither valedictorians nor delinquents are atypical among immigrant chil-
dren regardless of timing and racial or socioeconomic backgrounds. For exam-
ple, in the past 15 years, the list of top-ten award winners of the Westinghouse
Science Talent Search, one of the country’s most prestigious high school aca-
demic contests, has been dominated by the 1.5- or second-generation immi-
grants. Many of these immigrant children are “FOBs” (fresh off the boat) and
from families of moderate socioeconomic backgrounds (Zhou 1997). While
immigrant children are overrepresented on lists of award-winners or on aca-
demic fast tracks, many others are extremely vulnerable to multiple high-risk
behaviors, school failure, street gangs, and youth crime. Even Asian Americans,
the so-called “model minority,” have seen a steady rise of youth gang mem-
berships. Some of the Asian gang members are from suburban middle-class
families, attend magnet schools, and are exceptionally good students. These
anomalies immediately question the applicability of straight-line assimilation.
IMMIGRANT CHILDREN 73
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youth culture and the freedoms (particularly personal choices in dress, dating,
sexual practices) unavailable in their old country that, because of the sheer at-
tractiveness of American culture, they may not be willing to accept immigrant
parental work norms or to work in “un-American” conditions as many of their
parents do, and that they may be unwilling to endure their parents’ painstaking
efforts toward upward social mobility. Perlmann & Waldinger (1996), how-
ever, caution that the deteriorating prospect in the new second generation is not
simply a matter of exposure or Americanization but also a result of structural,
group, or individual disadvantages associated with pre- and post-immigration
experiences.
Moreover, the elusiveness of ethnic characteristics creates problems in the
use of the pluralist framework as an explanatory tool. Each generation passes
cultural patterns, often subtle patterns, to the next, but the mechanisms of this
process are unclear, and many assumptions and attitudes of ethnic group mem-
bers are hard to identify and measure (Archdeacon 1983). Also, the constituents
of American diversity are not equal; maintaining a distinctive ethnicity can
both help and hinder the social mobility of ethnic group members. For exam-
ple, first-generation members of some immigrant minority groups, such as the
Mexicans, have seldom been able to motivate their children to excel in school
and move upward in the host society, while other groups, such as the Asians,
have far more often succeeded in pushing younger people toward upward social
mobility (Perlmann & Waldinger 1996).
Another major theoretical stance is the structural perspective, which offers a
framework for understanding the differences in social adaptation of ethnic mi-
nority groups in terms of advantages and disadvantages inherent to social struc-
tures rather than in the process of acculturation or selective Americanization.
This perspective presents American society as a stratified system of social in-
equality, in which different social categories—whether birth-ascribed or not—
have unequal access to wealth, power, and privilege (Barth & Noel 1972). The
ethnic hierarchy systematically limits access to social resources, such as oppor-
tunities for jobs, housing, and education, resulting in persistent racial/ethnic dis-
parities in levels of income, educational attainment, and occupational achieve-
ment (Wilson 1987). Consequently, the benefits of “becoming American” de-
pend largely on what stratum of American society absorbs the new immigrants.
Overall, the structural perspective raises skepticism about eventual assimila-
tion and interethnic accommodation suggested by the assimilation perspective
and implied by the pluralist perspective, because of inherent conflicts between
the dominant and subordinate groups in the hierarchy. On the issue of immigrant
adaptation, this perspective maintains that the process of becoming American
may not lead uniformly to middle-class status, but rather to the occupation of
different rungs on the ethnic hierarchy.
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central place in immigrant aspirations (Ogbu 1974). Studies on the new second
generation have generally concerned a central question: How do various as-
pects of class, race/ethnicity, social capital derived from particular patterns of
social relations within the immigrant family and the ethnic community, inter-
generational relations, language skills, and ethnic identity affect the process of
educational attainment of the children of contemporary immigrants? In this
section, I review how these issues are addressed in recent research and show
how new concepts are derived from empirical findings.
IMMIGRANT CHILDREN 77
did better if they attended schools where classmates were predominantly from
higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Davis (1993) found that poor African-
American and Latino-American families who moved from inner-city neighbor-
hoods did better in school and in labor markets than those left behind. The pat-
tern generally held true for immigrant children who attended suburban schools.
Moreover, differences in outcomes of schooling have historically been linked
to residential segregation on the basis of class and race. Minority children
have suffered from unequal distribution of economic and educational resources
that seriously curtail their chances in life and trap them in isolated ghettos.
Ghettoization, in turn, produces a political atmosphere and a mentality that
preserve class divisions along racial lines, leading to the greater alienation
of minority children from American institutions and further diminishing their
chances for upward mobility (Fainstein 1995).
But how would one account for the fact that immigrant children tend to
do better than their US-born peers of similar socioeconomic background and
attending public schools in the same neighborhood? Ogbu (1974) attributed
different outcomes to a group’s social status in the receiving society. He dis-
tinguished between immigrant/voluntary minorities and castelike/involuntary
minorities. In his line of reasoning, either group members of racial minorities
could accept an inferior caste status and a sense of basic inferiority as part
of their collective self-definition, or they could create a positive view of their
heritage on the basis of cultural and racial distinction, thereby establishing a
sense of collective dignity (also see De Vos 1975).
While this was true for both immigrant minorities and caste-like minorities,
the difference lay in the advantageous or disadvantageous aspects of racial or
group identity. Ogbu (1989) showed from his research on Chinese-American
students in Oakland, California, that in spite of cultural and language differences
and relatively low economic status, these students had grade point averages that
ranged from 3.0 to 4.0. He attributed their academic success to the integration
of these students into the family and the community, which placed high values
on education and held positive attitudes toward public schools.
The benefits of deliberate cultivation of ethnicity also appeared in the work of
Gibson (1989), who found that the outstanding performance of Punjabi children
in a relatively poor rural area of Northern California was a result of parental
pressure put on children to adhere to their own immigrant families and to avoid
excessive Americanization. Similarly, Caplan and his associates (1989) found
that Indochinese refugee children (not including Cambodians and Hmongs) ex-
celled in the American school system, despite the disadvantaged location of their
schools and their parents’ lack of education and facility with English. Caplan
and his associates attributed academic achievement to cultural values and prac-
tices unique to Indochinese families. Even among Indochinese refugees, the
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ethnic effect was significant. Rumbaut & Ima (1988) found that Vietnamese
high school students did much better in both GPAs and test scores than their
Cambodian and Laotian peers, and that, overall, the strongest predictor of GPA
was the measure of ethnic resilience.
More recently, Portes & Rumbaut reported findings from a large random
sample of second-generation high school students in Florida and southern
California, showing that parents’ socioeconomic status, length of US resi-
dence, and homework hours significantly affected academic performance, but
that controlling for these factors did not eliminate the effect of ethnicity (Portes
& Rumbaut 1996, Rumbaut 1995, 1996). Kao & Tienda (1995) found, based on
data from the National Education Longitudinal Studies (known as NELS), that
parental nativity and children’s birthplace had different effects on children’s aca-
demic outcomes depending on race and ethnicity. Portes & MacLeod (1996),
also using NELS, reported that the negative effect of disadvantaged group mem-
berships among immigrant children was reinforced rather than reduced in sub-
urban schools, but that the positive effect of advantaged group memberships
remained significant even in inner-city schools.
In the most recent research on adolescent development, though originally not
intending to focus on ethnic differences, Steinberg (1996) revealed a surpris-
ingly prominent and strong role that ethnicity played in structuring adolescents’
lives, both in and outside of school. He found that Asian-American students out-
performed European-American students who, in turn, outperformed African-
American and Latino-American students by significantly large margins, and
that the ethnic differences remained marked and consistent across nine dif-
ferent high schools under study and after controlling for social class, family
structure, and place of birth of parents. He also found that the ethnic effect
persists in important explanatory variables of school success, such as the belief
in the payoff of schooling, attributional styles, and peer groups. Steinberg con-
cluded that ethnicity emerged as just as important a factor as social class and
gender in defining and shaping the everyday lives of American children.
However, the advantage of ethnicity may be limited for caste-like minorities.
If a socially defined racial minority group wishes to assimilate but finds that
normal paths of integration are blocked on the basis of race, the group may be
forced to take alternative survival strategies that enable them to cope psycho-
logically with racial barriers but that do not necessarily encourage school suc-
cess. Further, caste-like involuntary minorities may react to racial oppression
by constructing resistance both as conformity—“unqualified acceptance of the
ideological realm of the larger society”—and, more frequently, as avoidance—
“willful rejection of whatever will validate the negative claims of the larger
society” (Fordham 1996:39). As a consequence, it is the willful refusal to
learn, not the failure to learn, that affects academic outcomes of the children of
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language classes for their general academic orientations, these are forms of so-
cial support inherent in particular patterns of social relations within the ethnic
community. When, on the other hand, a group member experiences disapproval,
or even ostracism, from co-ethnics for failing to attain a respected occupation,
this is a form of social control. Zhou & Bankston (1994, forthcoming) proposed
a model of ethnic social relations based on their study of Vietnamese adoles-
cents in New Orleans. In the Vietnamese community in New Orleans, they
observed that Vietnamese adolescents were constantly reminded of their duty
to show respect for their elders, to take care of younger siblings, to work hard,
and to make decisions upon approval of parents not simply within a particu-
lar family but in the community where other families practiced similar values.
In this “watchful and ever-vigilant” community, young Vietnamese found little
competition from other desiderata because the social world of their families was
restricted to the closed and highly integrated circles of the ethnic group. Since
what was considered good or bad was clearly specified and closely monitored
by these networks, young people found it hard to “to get away with much.”
The researchers concluded that the conformity to traditional family values and
behavioral standards required a high level of family integration into a commu-
nity that reinforced these values and standards. The outcomes of adaptation,
therefore, depend on how immigrant children fit in their own ethnic commu-
nity, or in their local environment if such an ethnic community is absent, and
how their ethnic community or the local environment fit in the larger American
society. In the case of the Vietnamese, being part of a Vietnamese network
appears to offer a better route to upward mobility than being Americanized into
the underprivileged local environment, or for that matter, into the native-born
mainstream youth subcultures.
While family ties function as an important source of support and control,
recent research has found evidence to indicate that the cohesion of family ties
tends to deteriorate with longer duration of US residence, as in the case of
refugees from Central America (Gil & Vega 1996). Researchers have also
cautioned that even strong cultural identities and social ties, which may be con-
sidered as sources of social capital, may sometimes be insufficient because of
racial or class disadvantages. In a study of a ghetto African-American commu-
nity, Stack (1974) showed that African-American families depended on patterns
of co-residence, kinship-based exchange networks for survival. This means of
survival, however, demanded the sacrifice of upward mobility and geographic
movement, and it discouraged marriage, because of structural constraints such
as the inexorable unemployment of African-American women and men. Wel-
fare policies disrupted the support networks and conspired against the ability
of the poor to build up equity. Similarly, Fernández-Kelly (1995) found, in
a study of teenage pregnancies in a Baltimore ghetto, that kinship networks
in ghettos were often graced with strong family and friendship bonds but that
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these networks lacked connections to other social networks that controlled ac-
cess to larger sets of opportunities. Moreover, symbols of ethnic pride and
cultural identity that developed in reaction to social isolation and racial domi-
nation (e.g. the sparkling mounds of braided hair of young African-American
women) became signals that barred access to resources and employment in the
larger society. Such truncated networks and reactive ethnicity could severely
limit the ability of children to envision alternative paths out of the ghetto and
to turn cultural capital into resourceful social capital (Fernández-Kelly 1995,
Fordham 1996, Kohl 1994).
Intergenerational Relations
The clash between two social worlds is the most commonly cited problem of
intergenerational relations. In fact, intergenerational conflicts are not simply
a unique immigrant phenomenon (Berrol 1995, Child 1943); they are also an
American phenomenon rooted in the American tradition of a “moral rejection
of authority” (Gorer 1963:53). In a recent study of Latino adolescents, Suárez-
Orozco & Suárez-Orozco (1995) found that intergenerational conflicts are more
common among European-American adolescents who are more ambivalent
toward authority and schooling and are more peer-oriented than among Latino-
American adolescents who are more respectful of authority and more family-
oriented. They attribute this gap to the impact of changing American youth
culture that glorifies contempt for authorities and a peer orientation, implying
that assimilating into the American youth culture may cause more harm than
good for immigrant adolescents.
In the United States, immigrant children often become Americanized so
quickly that their parents cannot keep up with them. There is a fear in the
older generation that their children will leave them, become like other Ameri-
can youth, and forget about their roots. This fear, however, has originated not
from the process of acculturation but from the migration process itself. Mi-
gration disrupts normal parent-child relationships in a number of observable
ways, shown in a number of case studies and surveys on immigrant children
(Berrol 1995, Kibria 1993, Rumbaut 1994b, Sung 1987, Waters 1996, Zhou
1997). First, many immigrant families suffer lengthy separation from the fa-
ther or mother or older siblings because of delayed reunification. When all the
members are reunited, they have to make an effort to adapt to each other in a
new situation. Second, working outside the home has become the norm and an
economic necessity for women. This work role gives women some measures
of independence but creates difficulty in child-rearing and weakens the status
and authority of men. Also, face-to-face interaction between parents and chil-
dren decreases as both parents are usually out working for long hours. Third,
because parents lack proficiency in English, children often act as interpreters
and translators for their parents. Such role reversal usually leads to greater
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84 ZHOU
IMMIGRANT CHILDREN 85
86 ZHOU
Chinese children around to mitigate the dilemmas that they encounter. When they are
among their own, the Chinese ways are better known and better accepted. The Chinese
customs and traditions are not denigrated to the degree that they would be if the immigrant
child were the only one to face the conflict on his or her own (1987, p. 126).
IMMIGRANT CHILDREN 87
88 ZHOU
IMMIGRANT CHILDREN 89
in New York City’s Chinatown, Sung (1987) found that bilingual students had
higher student retention rates, more graduates, and higher self-esteem. She
suggested that these positive outcomes were associated with the acceptance of
distinctive ethnicity. Other researchers have found that language maintenance
bilingual programs, as opposed to transitional bilingual programs, helped stu-
dents learn the language of the dominant society effectively (Cazden & Snow
1990, Cummins 1980, 1981, Bhatnager 1980).
A recent two-period (1986–1987 and 1989–1990) study of the entire high
school student cohorts in San Diego Unified School District (the nation’s eighth
largest) reported that, with the main exception of some Hispanic students who
were generally of much lower socioeconomic status, all of the non-English
immigrant minorities were outperforming their English-only co-ethnics as well
as majority European-American students. This finding applied to both bilin-
guals (designated by the District as having fluent English proficiency—FEP)
and semi-bilinguals (designated as having limited English proficiency—LEP),
though FEP students did better than their LEP coethnics. In standardized tests,
while English monolinguals tended to have the highest scores in reading com-
prehension, FEP students showed significantly higher scores in math than
English monolinguals, for every nationality. The same study also reported that
Vietnamese students, who are mostly members of the one-and-a-half genera-
tion, were among the ethnic groups with the highest GPAs, trailing only after
Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. In terms of dropout rates, however, the re-
sults were mixed. While FEP, or truly bilingual, students consistently showed
much lower dropout rates than English monolingual students across all ethnic
groups, LEP students were observed to be at the greatest risk of dropping out
(Rumbaut 1995, Rumbaut & Ima 1988). Bankston & Zhou (1995) reported
similar findings concerning the effect of literacy in the parental native language
from their study of Vietnamese high school students in New Orleans.
Moreover, the ethnic language is intrinsic to ethnicity. Under certain condi-
tions, it allows immigrant children to gain access to some kind of social capital
generated from a distinctive ethnic identity, such as support and control from
bilingual or non-English-speaking parents and ethnic communities. Bankston
& Zhou (1995) found that literacy in the ethnic language was strongly associated
with ethnic self-identification, which in turn, contributed to academic excel-
lence. They concluded that advanced ethnic language abilities, such as literacy,
were related to achievement because ethnic language skills tied immigrant chil-
dren more closely to their traditions, their families, and their communities that
enforce the values of academic achievement.
However, not all immigrant children can benefit from bilingualism because
patterns of language use are affected by class, race/ethnicity, length of US resi-
dence, and other contextual factors. In an earlier study, Lopez (1976) found that
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90 ZHOU
CONCLUSION
For immigrant children and children of immigrants, growing up American can
be a matter of smooth acceptance or of traumatic confrontation. Immigrant
children are generally eager to embrace American culture and to acquire an
American identity by becoming indistinguishable from their American peers.
In some cases, however, they may be perceived as “unassimilated” even when
they try hard to abandon their own ethnic identities. In other cases, they may be
accepted as well-adjusted precisely because they retain strong ethnic identities.
In the long journey to becoming American, the progress of today’s one-and-
a-half and second generation is largely contingent upon human and financial
capital that their immigrant parents bring along, the social conditions from
which their families exit as well as the context that receives them, and their cul-
tural patterns, including values, family relations, and social ties, reconstructed
in the process of adaptation. The host society offers uneven possibilities to
different immigrant groups. These unequal possibilities may limit the oppor-
tunities of immigrant groups, but they do not necessarily constitute a complete
denial of opportunity.
Immigrants are today being absorbed by different segments of American so-
ciety, but becoming American may not always be an advantage for immigrant
children and children of immigrants. When immigrants enter middle-class com-
munities directly, or after a short transition, it may be advantageous for them to
acculturate and assimilate. When they enter the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy
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IMMIGRANT CHILDREN 91
of drastic social inequality, the forces of assimilation come mainly from the
underprivileged segments of this structure, and this is likely to result in distinct
disadvantages, viewed as maladjustment by both mainstream society and the
ethnic community. In this case, young immigrants or children of immigrants
may benefit by cultivating their ethnic ties in their ethnic communities to de-
velop forms of behavior likely to break the cycle of disadvantage and to lead
to upward mobility.
The interest in immigrant children and children of immigrants has recently
been growing. However, there is still a big gap between the strategic impor-
tance of the new second generation and current knowledge about its conditions
(Portes 1996). Data on which the existing body of research is based come
mostly from regional survey research and ethnographic studies on selected
immigrant groups. Census data sources have been, or are being, scrutinized
by some researchers to describe the current state of immigrant children, their
geographic distribution and demographic and socioeconomic characteristics,
school attendance, fertility patterns, labor market opportunities facing entrants
to the labor force, and the establishment of independent households (Hirschman
1994, Jensen & Chitose 1994, Mollenkopf et al 1995, Landale & Oropesa
1995, Zhou & Bankston, forthcoming). A major drawback of the census data
(1980 and 1990) is that a critical variable—the birthplace of parents—has been
dropped from the decennial census since 1980, making it impossible to identify
directly the children of immigrants (Hirschman 1994). Researchers have to use
the ancestry question as a proxy. This treatment of ethnic origin variable is
problematic. Perlmann & Waldinger (1996) note that, because of high rates of
intermarriages in the third generation, the respondent’s choice of ethnic identity
is selective, making it difficult to accurately predict the independent effect of
ethnic origin on intergenerational mobility.
Moreover, the census data do not have any direct measures for contextual
effects of the family, the school, the neighborhood, and the ethnic community,
nor do they have detailed information on school performance. There are a
few other national surveys that offer important data that the census lack, such
as NELS and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (known
as “Add HEALTH”). These data sets have over-sampled some minority and
immigrant groups and have detailed information about contextual influences
of the family, the school, and the community on adolescent health, behavior,
family life, peer relationships, goals, aspirations, academic performance, and
related variables. However, they do not contain viable subsamples of the most
recently arrived national-origin groups within broader regional categories to
conduct comparative analyses.
For further theoretical inquiry, the following questions may offer some stim-
ulus: Will members of a generation born or reared in the United States gradually
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92 ZHOU
be pulled away from a heritage vastly different from those of the Europeans
who arrived over the course of this century? Will those who rebel against this
heritage be the best-adjusted, socially and economically? Will racial barriers
limit the participation of immigrant children in American life? How would
being hyphenated Americans influence the ways in which immigrant children
become assimilated, and why may some of these ways be more advantageous
than others? Will immigrant families and ethnic communities persist in affect-
ing the lives of children of the second generation? Will cultural distinctiveness
of hyphenated Americans eventually melt down into a pot of Anglo-American
homogeneity? If not, what will ethnic diversity mean for the offspring of today’s
new second generation? Each of these questions has theoretical as well as prac-
tical implications. Given the unique characteristics of and the scanty knowledge
about the complex ways in which the second generation of new immigrants are
“becoming American,” future studies are both urgent and necessary.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and a UCLA Fac-
ulty Career Development Award. The author wishes to thank Rubén Rumbaut
and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful suggestions, but she is exclusively
responsible for the contents.
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