Segmented Assimilation Theory and the Life Model: An Integrated Approach to Understanding Immigrants and Their Children

Nearly a century ago, Jane Addams (1910) observed that immigrants needed help integrating their European and American experiences to give them meaning and a sense of relation: Power to see life as a whole is more needed in the immigrant quarter of the city than anywhere else.... Why should the chasm between fathers and sons, yawning at the feet of each generation, be made so unnecessarily cruel and impassable to these bewildered immigrants? (p. 172) The inability of some immigrant families to integrate the cultural capital from the world left behind with the demands of the new society creates a gulf of experience between immigrants and their children that can undermine the parental relationship. Today, the issue of family cohesion in the face of acculturative stressors remains central to the immigrant experience and creates a sense of urgency because it is so linked with the success of the second generation. The size of the immigrant population and the role their children will play in future labor markets (Morales & Bonilla, 1993; Sullivan, 2006) moves the problem from the realm of the person to the status of a larger public concern. Immigrant families are rapidly becoming the "typical" American family. More than one in seven families in the United States is headed by a foreign-born adult. Children of immigrant parents are the fastest growing segment of the nation's child population (Capps, Fix, Ost, Reardon-Anderson, & Passel, 2004). The U.S. Census Bureau (2003) reported that slightly more than 14 million children (approximately one in five) live in immigrant families; the percentage is even higher (22 percent) for children under the age of six (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001). At a structural level, these changing demographics create large-scale and long-range effects that bear on many social services and many issues of social policy (Sullivan, 2006). Specifically, the population growth of native-born children in nonwhite immigrant families, in the context of an aging white population, has implications for intergenerational and interethnic justice. The native-born children of immigrants will make up a large portion of the future workforce--and of the future contributors to the social security-recipient population (Morales & Bonilla, 1993; Sullivan, 2006). For many immigrants, relocating to the United States means leaving one cultural universe and entering a new one--a life transition that, unlike other forms of life transitions, can span decades and affect subsequent generations. Immigrant families must grapple with a distinct set of cultural adjustments. Aside from adapting to a new society, immigrant adults rear children in a cultural context that is different--sometimes vastly so--from the one in which they themselves were socialized, and often that context includes speaking a language other than English. Although contemporary immigrants and their native-born children--the second generation--face the same type of parental estrangement as earlier immigrants did, the social context has changed dramatically. Immigrant families today face the challenges of adaptation in an era of eroded social safety nets and heightened scrutiny of citizenship status (Engstrom, 2006). The industrial era long ago gave way to a more technologically complex society, and the labor market has bifurcated into two sectors: high-skilled work and low-skill work, the latter with correspondingly low wages and often with no benefits (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Wilson, 1980, 1987). Many immigrants work in low-wage jobs that provide few or no benefits and little opportunity for advancement. Segmented assimilation theory identifies factors that contribute to the different rates of acculturation among parents and their offspring; it also explains how intergenerational acculturation patterns affect the way the second generation confronts external obstacles to social mobility (Portes, 1996; Portes, Fernandez-Kelly, & Haller, 2005; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Portes & Zhou, 1993; Waters, 1996). …