March 2019 Newsletter
The 1.5 Generation: A Personal Culture Clash 7.5
Westy Egmont, Director IIL
I hope every social worker has seen Lion or read A Long Way Home. While it is about adoption, it is about an immigrant child having to find himself. It speaks to the struggles of defining oneself, as identity is a complex issue, begging for clarity. Likewise, listen to Rami Malek when he won the Academy Award for his performance in Bohemian Rhapsody this year. He is moved to say, “This film is about identity; it is about a gay immigrant who lived unapologetically… played by the son of an Egyptian.” Identity is not political, not policy, not static, and not bestowed. The issues of Identity formation are hard fought over time for most of the 1.5 generation--the children of migration who live a life so different from their family roots that Rami, for example, describes himself as “unimaginable to his own inner child.” In Lion, the protagonist Saroo cannot continue toward his adulthood until he stops and answers the basic existential questions of his existence: “Who am I and where do I belong?”
There is one group of people who are particularly impacted by the issue of identity: The 1.5 generation. “1.5 Generation” was coined in the 1960s by Ruben Rumbaut, a sociology professor at UC Irvine and a Cuban-American who immigrated to the United States as a child. Rumbaut defined “1.5 Generation” immigrants as “stuck in-between” cultures as they are not quite first-generation but not quite second-generation citizens. For those on the front lines of education, social work, law, and clergy, this population appears integrated but often faces a period of time when the past and the future collide and choices are made about “who I am” in terms as dramatic as one “coming out” regarding sexual identity. The fortunate, leaning on their assets, feel enriched by two cultures while compatriots never feel enough of either culture. They express exhaustion by code switching between home and their American culture at school and in their neighborhood. They hunger to just be themselves when self is not a clear image reflected in the mirror. Rumbaut and Feliciano have just released a new study that tracks the lifelong identity formation issues and the de-ethnic identity of many while noting the robust claiming and transmitting of ethnicity by the majority. “We find that ethnic identity labels are used more consistently in adulthood than in adolescence, and overall, are much more stable than fluid.” Age brings other identities to the forefront, such as parent, worker, spouse, and seems accompanied by the acceptance of one’s ethnic identity even while answering the inevitable question – “What are you?” – with various answers according to the context. With coethnics, the answer is one word. With coworkers and neighbors, the answer varies, often adding hyphens, depending on the context.
What are the challenges to the children immigrants? Acceptance of self. Acceptance by others. Developing a personal narrative and negotiating the culture clashes are serious work. Cawo Abdi gives voice to the realities of color. Assimilation works very differently for Whites than for those of color. Does the Somali have a choice of which America is their new culture? How marginalized will the barriers of race, religion, and ethnicity leave one immigrant child over their Bosnian or Syrian counterpart? Who will accompany those on a journey within themselves as they answer profound questions about who they can be and who they want to be in their new surroundings?
Legal status is an equally great barrier to freedom of choice and an aspirational identity. Becoming conscious of legal status is a significant moment that many migrants recall. “We can’t, we shouldn’t, we are…” compounds the issues in adolescent identity development. Segmented assimilation is the theoretical explanation. The context controls the pace of inclusion. It closes off options in education and employment, and fears for oneself often accompany it, and one’s loved ones that impact focus and achievement. Life develops asymmetrically from peers, impacted by legal issues that are binding and generally accompanied by race and cultural prejudices that further thwart the actualization of aspirations. Despite the barriers, resilience and drive lead countless individuals through the gauntlet to celebrate joy in accomplishing goals. Stories of the Dreamers and the DACAmented are of those who persevere and who challenge the barriers, wanting policy change that chases away the onerous shadows of status.
Is the schooling of immigrant children a safe space? One would hope, but the reports are quite mixed. Increasingly, both old Gateway Cities and new destination cities are responding with integration programs. Since 2016, Boston Public Schools has offered a Newcomers Academy, focused on language and culture for teen arrivals. Impactful on reducing dropouts, these options are still far and few between across the country. With about 5 million English Language Learners in U.S. public education, most are in elementary school, and few schools have specialized programs. BRYCS and Welcoming America are both lift models to foster school based integration. Annie Casey Foundation has pursued a two-generation program to lift the family. Prejudiced dismissals of immigrant parents as “uninformed” and “lazy” overlooks common patterns of immigrant parents being forced to work two jobs with little flexibility and also language barriers. Casey also funded some excellent tools for academics with the Urban Institute:
- Part of Us: A Data-Driven Look at Children of Immigrants – nine charts about children of immigrants and their families that shed light on the diversity of their experiences, characteristics, and backgrounds.
- Visualizing Trends for Children of Immigrants – a map tool that presents snapshot and trend data on these children and their families for each state and the top 100 metropolitan areas from 2006 to 2017. These data include information on citizenship and length of residence in the US; income, employment, and benefits; education and schooling; household structure; and more.
- Children of Immigrants Data tool – explore and download the chart feature and map visualization figures as well as more data on children of immigrants and other kids’ groups for each state and the top 100 metropolitan areas from 2006 to 2017. This year’s update includes new data additions such as years foreign-born parent(s) have lived in the US, housing cost burden, adults in the family with a disability, and health insurance coverage.
The 1.5 Generation is easily assumed to be integrating quickly in that most achieve English proficiency in K-6, but this belies the identity development and the inequitable psychic cost of swimming twice as hard to come out even. Negative stereotypes are common. One parent reported teammates asking at what Taco Bell his father worked? They could not accept that his father taught at Harvard and that he was a straight-A student and an excellent athlete. There is a barbell pattern. On the one hand, children of immigrant parents make up 30% of dropouts; however, on the other hand, more immigrant children attain a college degree than native-born children (36% vs. 29%). There is no single story, and immigrant children on both sides of the extreme as well as those that fall somewhere in the middle on the spectrum all face their unique difficulties as they try to navigate the clash of worlds that they are forced to live in. Awareness, acknowledgement, engagement, and investment are strategies with notable payback to communities.
While it is fair to say “let children be children,” young foreign-born children bring migratory stress in their DNA. Refugees and many others have lived through traumatic events. Uprooted, a powerful series of losses and a disorienting world of new stimuli are worthy of high priority efforts by school adjustment counselors, classrooms teachers, ECC providers, and youth organizations. My colleague Ximena Soto notes there is another side of the 1.5 experience: “the resilience that comes from being an immigrant and the benefits: being a bridge builder, having chameleon superpowers of navigating culture; having the ability to connect with people of multiple identities because you know that there are alternative ways of being.” An NIH study by Tan TX affirms 1.5ers have protective factors from their experience which fosters mental health.
In the classic film Spanglish, daughter Christina’s application essay touches the wishful heart of parents. She writes a charming reflection to Princeton on identity struggle: Though, as I hope this essay shows, your acceptance, while it would thrill me...will not define me. My identity rests firmly...and happily… on one fact: I am my mother's daughter.
Research
Feliciano, C., & Rumbaut, R. (2018). Varieties of Ethnic Self-Identities: Children of Immigrants in Middle Adulthood. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal Of The Social Sciences, 4(5), 26-46. doi: 10.7758/rsf.2018.4.5.02
Conventional wisdom often suggests that identity formation is dealt with in adolescence and early adulthood. For children of immigrants, however, grappling with ethnic identity proves to be a more complex matter. This longitudinal study examines how ethnic self-identity often changes between mid-adolescence and middle adulthood for children of immigrants. It shows that self-identity is often not stabilized until middle adulthood. More precisely, in their late thirties, children of immigrants report more solidified ethnic identities that range from strong ethnic affiliations to indifference. Of particular relevance, these identities impacted political views, behaviors, interethnic friendships, and cultural traditions, but showed no influence on interethnic romantic relationships. For social workers, these findings hold particular utility as they highlight how intricate ethnic identity formation can be for children of immigrants. With this knowledge, social workers should bear in mind that children of immigrants may still be forming key parts of their ethnic identities well into adulthood.
Basu, S. (2018). Age-of-Arrival Effects on the Education of Immigrant Children: A Sibling Study. Journal Of Family And Economic Issues, 39(3), 474-493. doi: 10.1007/s10834-018-9569-4
For child immigrants, the age of arrival appears to be an essential factor that influences educational achievement. More specifically, children who immigrated at a younger age were found to have better educational outcomes than children who immigrated at an older age. This study found that a key reason for this difference was language acquisition. While children who immigrated before the critical ages of 8-10 were able to learn English more easily, older children had more difficulty. This difference was associated with differing levels of educational attainment, with younger child arrivals attaining a higher degree of education in comparison with older ones. For social workers, this study highlights the increased needs that older child immigrants may have in achieving success. Given this, social workers should seek to develop and implement programs to assist older immigrant children in promoting their empowerment, improve their access to education, and maximize their capacity for social integration.
Crea T.M., Lopez, A., Hasson R.G., Evans, K., Palleschi, C., Underwood U. (2018) Unaccompanied immigrant children in long term foster care: Identifying needs and best practices from a child welfare perspective. Children and Youth Services Review, 92, 56-64. 10.1016/j.childyouth.2017.12.017.
As the number of unaccompanied youth migrating from Central America has increased in recent years, their unique needs in long-term foster care have not been adequately examined. This study attempts to identify strategies to support social integration of child immigrants from Central America (35%) who placed in long-term foster care. Current strategies to assist this population include obtaining culturally competent foster placement, English-language training, community relationships, and adequate health care. However, many of these strategies have proven insufficient, especially for unaccompanied youth who lack English proficiency and formal education. For this population, culturally appropriate trauma-informed assessments and care are recommended. Given this finding, social workers should bear in mind the unique needs of marginalized child immigrants and seek ways to implement trauma-informed care.
Liu, X. (2017). Redefining “Immigrants” Through Diaspora: Educational Experience of 1.5-Generation Chinese Youth in Cupertino. Diaspora, Indigenous, And Minority Education, 11(4), 177-189. doi: 10.1080/15595692.2016.1264384
Traditional notions of immigration suggest that the process is straightforward and one-directional. This study, which combines ethnographic and narrative methods to examine experiences of Chinese youth in the 1.5 generation, instead suggests that the process is much more complex. Namely, Chinese youth report feeling that the term “diaspora,” rather than immigration, more aptly describes the complexity of their experiences. In particular, much of this complexity derives from a sense of an ambiguous meaning of home and a longing for flexible citizenship that would honor a transnational sense of identity. Based on this study, social workers should bear in mind that conventional labels like “immigrant” may not appropriately describe the intricate identities many members of the 1.5 generation have.
Sullivan, A., & Simonson, G. (2016). A Systematic Review of School-Based Social-Emotional Interventions for Refugee and War-Traumatized Youth. Review Of Educational Research, 86(2), 503-530. doi: 10.3102/0034654315609419
For child refugees, the school setting is a major access point for mental health services. Researchers in this study examined the utility of various therapeutic modalities for refugees in schools and found that school-based interventions could be useful in reducing trauma-related symptoms and impairment for child refugees. As such, social workers should note this specific setting as a potential place to effectively treat this population of children. Researchers noted the high utility of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), and clinicians seemed to effectively implement CBT interventions because clinicians' education includes training in this modality. Mixed results were found for those centered on creative expression and multimodal interventions, and the article suggests that these interventions may be useful if clinicians can attain more specialized training in those areas. For social workers, this study highlights the effectiveness of school-based interventions for child refugees and suggests CBT as the first line of treatment for this population at this time.
Resources to Serve and Support the 1.5 Generation
Spotlights
Organizational Spotlight
Read more about how ourBRIDGE supports the refugee and immigrant communities by offering a one-of-a-kind enrichment program for newly arrived and 1st generation American children.
Faculty Research
Read about Professor Oliveira's research in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and education.
Related Events
New American Dreams: The National Immigrant Integration Conference 2019
Detroit, MI: October 20-22, 2019
Now in its 12th year, NIIC is the largest conference on immigration in the U.S. and plays a central role in the powerful, diverse and broad immigrant and refugee rights and integration field. A core project of the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA) and its member organizations—37 of the largest regional immigrant rights organizations in 31 states—NIIC convenes policymakers, academics, corporate and community leaders, researchers and practitioners, faith and labor leaders and funders from across the country. At the NIIC, the many different spokes of this field gather to develop relationships, build campaigns, amplify shared values, be inspired, build relationships, and share ideas, strategies, lessons learned and new information and innovations. It is an important space for leaders and organizations, and strengthens collaborations and partnerships that power work at the local, regional and national level. NIIC also encapsulates NPNA’s commitment to an inclusive democracy that welcomes, integrates and uplifts all refugees and immigrants, recognizing the vital contributions and impact they have on our nation. Each year, NPNA co-hosts the NIIC with member organizations in a different region of the country. The conference, which runs for three days, includes plenary sessions on the mainstage, over 30 break-out issue area track sessions, affinity group caucuses for informal networking and strategizing, film screenings, author talks, an Expo, and more.