Karen D. Pyke
A distinctive feature of immigration to the United States is its emphasis on family reunification. Fully two-thirds of US immigration involves family migration unlike most industrialized nations whose immigration is employment driven (Kofman, 2004). So when we talk about American immigrants, we are usually talking about immigrant families.
When families immigrate to the United States, race and racialization in the American context are central to their post-immigrant experience, symbolically as well as materially. As a system of inequality, race shapes immigrant identities, family structures and living arrangements, who marries whom and who is likely not to marry at all, where families reside and children go to school, levels of educational attainment, marital and nonmarital fertility, the kind of jobs people do and how much they earn, exposure to crime, access to healthcare, and how long people live. Understanding the long-term prospects for immigrant and second-generation families requires consideration of the racial structure of the society in which they live out their lives.
Not only does race affect immigrant families but immigrant families affect race. Immigrants are not simply the passive recipients of imposed racial identities and categories in their new homeland. Their mere presence can usher in dramatic changes in the racial–ethnic configuration of the receiving society. Immigrant families also engage racial strategies in forging their identities and social location in the American context with the aim of enhancing their racial status and share of resources in the new society. Over the past decade, scholars have devoted greater attention to how the large influx of racially and ethnically diverse immigrant families is affecting a dramatic demographic transition in the racial order of the United States and, moreover, how that changing system will affect the racial futures of immigrant and second-generation American families. Indeed, the rapidity with which immigration is transforming US society and its racial system requires the adaptation of all Americans, not just the newcomers.
This chapter opens with a review of the recent literature on the immigrant-inspired racial transition currently underway as the US population shifts to a majority of racial minorities, complicating the black/white racial paradigm that has dominated the American consciousness for centuries. It next considers how immigrant family trends of interracial marriage and the formation of multiracial families and identities are shaping a US racial order that is both old and new. Finally, this chapter considers how immigration policy affects Hispanic families with undocumented members, potentially affecting downward assimilation for generations and contributing to structural fissures that could cut new racial boundaries along class lines within the Hispanic population. The focus of this chapter is on Hispanics and Asians – the two largest racial categories of US immigrants who, some argue, are achieving proximal whiteness and creating greater distance between black and nonblack/white Americans. As the emphasis is on the racial implications of immigrant family patterns, several aspects of the literature on immigrant families are touched on briefly or not at all, including immigrant family living arrangements, intergenerational relations, and transnational families. These topics are covered in greater depth elsewhere (on transnational families, see Baldassar et al., Chapter 8, this volume, and Treas, 2008; and for more general reviews, see Curran et al., 2006; Pyke, 2007; Clark, Glick, and Bures, 2009; Glick, 2010; and Shaw, Chapter 9, this volume).
Long perceived as a nation of immigrants, the United States receives more immigrants than any other country, absorbing a fifth of the world’s migrant population (Doucet and Hamon, 2007; Rumbaut, 2008, pp. 196–197). Immigration, not fertility, drives the population growth of this industrialized nation – the fastest growing in the world (Fortuny, Hernandez, and Chaudry, 2010). Nearly one-third of the 40 million foreign-born residents in the United States arrived since 2000 (US Census Bureau, 2009). The majority of Asians in the United States are foreign born, and despite the flow of immigrants arriving from Mexico for well over a century, most Mexicans in the United States today are immigrants or the second-generation children of immigrants (Kao and Thompson, 2003). Immigrants are 13% of the US population, slightly less than the peak of 15% in 1890 but significantly higher than in 1970 when their numbers sunk to 5% (Grieco et al., 2012). In contrast to 1890 when the vast majority of immigrants came from Europe, today’s US immigrants come primarily from non-Western nations and territories in Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa and are more racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse.
The foreign-born and the American-born children of immigrants are the prime movers and shakers of that nation’s demographic trends. Immigrants are younger and bear more children than native-born Americans. Overall, one of every four American children lives in an immigrant family, and fully 80% of children of immigrants are native-born Americans (Hernandez, Denton, and Macartney, 2008). Children of immigrants accounted for the entire growth in the number of American children under the age of 9 between 1990 and 2008, given declines in the number of children of native-born parents (Fortuny, Hernandez, and Chaudry, 2010).
In driving the US population growth, the foreign born and their children are generating dramatic changes in the nation’s racial composition. Between 1960 and 2010, the percentage of the foreign born from Europe plummeted from 75% to 12%. Meanwhile, the immigrant population from Latin America soared from 6% to 53%, and from Asia grew from 5% to 28% (Schmidley, 2001; Grieco et al., 2012). Although Hispanics are a panethnic and multiracial group, they are considered whites in US official statistics, which divides whites into Hispanics and non-Hispanics. In this chapter, the author joins with race scholars and many Hispanics themselves in regarding them as a distinct racial group. The author uses the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” interchangeably, at times distinguishing between black and nonblack Latinos. Because they are the largest immigrant group in the United States, the author frequently refers to Mexicans specifically.
Mexico has long been the number one sending country of US immigrants. Thirty percent of all immigrants in the United States today hail from Mexico, and half of them are unauthorized immigrants (Portes and Rumbaut, 2001; Jiménez, 2008; Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2012). There are more immigrants in the United States from Mexico alone (12 million) than the total number of immigrants living in any other country in the world. In 2000, Hispanics surpassed African Americans as the largest racial minority group in the United States (Ramirez and de la Cruz, 2002; Vallejo and Lee, 2009). By 2011, Latinos were 17% and African Americans 14% of the US population (US Census Bureau, 2012).
Immigration flows to the United States continue to take dramatic, often unanticipated, turns in response to ever-dynamic internal and external pressures. Around 2007, immigration from Mexico came to a standstill. For the first time in over two decades, the population of unauthorized Mexican immigrants declined significantly due to several factors in the United States, including tighter border controls, a virulent anti-immigration discourse, a weakened job market, and high rates of deportation. With the slowing of Mexican immigration, Asian immigration to the United States outpaced that of Hispanics for the first time ever (Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2012).
Another dramatic turn has been the rise in black immigration from Africa. While Caribbean black immigrants, including large numbers from Haiti and Jamaica, comprise 70% of black immigrants, there was a 40-fold increase in immigration from Africa between 1960 and 2007, most of which occurred after 1990 when the number of sub-Saharan African immigrants tripled (Massey et al., 2007; Terrazas, 2009). In some major cities like New York, immigrant blacks are over 25% of the black population (Kent, 2007). The largest wave of African immigrants since the importation of slaves was outlawed in 1808 is occurring largely under the radar (Robinson, 2010, p. 164). Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean occupy a distinct social location from latter-generation African Americans and are greatly diversifying the population of American blacks. Young native-born African Americans live in an era when being a black American does not mean one is necessarily a descendent of slaves or has a family history confronting white racism.
The influx of immigrants is rapidly transforming the United States to a nonwhite majority–minority nation. The US Census estimates that non-Hispanic whites will be a numeric minority by 2030 (Sanburn, 2011). This transition is occurring faster in some regions of the country, especially around metropolitan gateways of immigration. In 22 large US cities, racial minorities are now a majority (Sanburn, 2011; US Census Bureau, 2012). And five states have a majority of racial minorities: California and New Mexico are 60% nonwhite; Texas is 55%; Washington, DC, is 65%; and Hawaii is 77%, which is the only state that is majority Asian. At the same time, immigrant groups are spreading out within the interior of the United States, settling in places that have long been primarily white (Waters and Jiménez, 2005).
The demographic shift to a majority–minority has already occurred among the nation’s youngest citizens who are the most racially heterogeneous age group. In 2011, racial minorities constituted 50.4% of newborn Americans (US Census Bureau, 2012). As a result, young white Americans are growing up in less racially isolated residential, school, and work settings than did older white cohorts and see race differently than majority-white World War II and baby boomer generations, many of whom grew up in the era of Jim Crow legal segregation. Younger whites and nonwhites view racial boundaries as more permeable regarding friendship, dating, and marriage than do older generation Americans (Passel, Wang, and Taylor, 2010; Hochschild, Weaver, and Burch, 2012;). In short, younger Americans are assimilating to the new racial order faster than are their parents and grandparents.
These conditions have prompted a convergence of interest in the race and immigration literatures. While European scholars have long overlapped research on immigration and race (see Shaw, Chapter 9, this volume), this is not the case in the United States where immigration and race have distinct histories, partly due to the fact that not all nonwhites in the United States arrived as immigrants or arrived at all in the case of Native Americans. Hence, race and immigration scholarship pursued divergent lines of inquiry and occupied separate scholarly domains, sometimes to their mutual detriment. Immigration scholars focused on the acculturation and assimilation of immigrant families using models based on European immigrants and thus devoted less attention to racism (Pyke, 2007). This has been changing in recent years, as immigration scholars engage segmented assimilation theory to examine new racialization processes, suggesting that some segments of immigrant groups are downwardly assimilating to the ranks of the black underclass while others enjoy upward assimilation to the white middle class, leading to the formation of racial categories that cut across current racial groups (Zhou, 2004; Lee and Bean, 2007; Hildalgo and Bankston, 2010). At the same time, race scholars, who have long studied racism using a black/white paradigm based in the experience of American descendants of enslaved Africans, now acknowledge the insufficiency of this model for a society whose nonwhite immigrants are generating great racial diversity and complexity (e.g., Bonilla-Silva, 2004; Warren and Twine, 2007; Jiménez, 2008). It is only in recent years that these two intellectual streams are merging around a shared interest in how immigrant families and their descendants are affecting the US racial order and how the US racial order is affecting immigrant families (Burton et al., 2010).
To evaluate whether contemporary nonwhite immigrant families are merging into whiteness, scholars typically use as a model the process by which earlier European immigrant ethnics became white. Hence, they look to economic, educational, and marital assimilation into whiteness. Most attention on the shifting racial order focuses on Asians and Latinos who have dominated the immigrant flows for half a century, while less scholarly attention has been heaped on African, Afro-Caribbean, Arab, and Middle Eastern immigrants.
Noting that whites tend to regard Latinos and Asians as more culturally similar to themselves than blacks, and conversely, Latinos and Asians regard themselves as closer to whites than blacks, several scholars suggest the category of whiteness is stretching to incorporate subsets of Latinos and Asians as “honorary whites” (Lee and Bean, 2007). They argue that a new black/nonblack divide that pivots around the continued subordination of black Americans is emerging (Yancey, 2003; Lee and Bean, 2004; Lee and Bean, 2007; Warren and Twine, 2007; Bean et. al., 2009). They liken this process to that which occurred across the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries when the American-born children of Irish, Jewish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants racially transitioned from nonwhite ethnics into whiteness and experienced a concomitant decline in the salience of their ethnic identity – a social process marked by their movement out of ethnic neighborhoods, educational and occupational mobility, intermarriage to other white ethnics, and efforts to assert their superiority to blacks through the adoption of white racist attitudes (Waters, 1990; Ignatiev, 1995; Warren and Twine, 1997; Brodkin, 1998; Jiménez, 2008). Blacks have long served as the fulcrum for defining whiteness as well as proximal whiteness for immigrant groups. There are some indications that native-born Asian-American ethnic groups with a long-term presence in the United States (e.g., Japanese Americans) have become “honorary whites” and lighter-skinned, middle-class, latter-generation Mexican Americans have integrated into whiteness (Foley, 2005).
As the social trends driving a new US racial order are dynamic, complex, contradictory, and vulnerable to unforeseen events, it is impossible to offer more than educated guesses as to the future of race in the United States. One presumption that scholars seem to share is whites will remain at the top of the US racial hierarchy and blacks at the bottom. Everything else, as Hochschild notes, “is up for grabs” (2005, p. 81). In the following section, the author reviews some of the evidence regarding the racial prospects of today’s US immigrants. The author focuses on interracial marriage and the birth of biracial and multiracial children among recent generations of nonwhite immigrant groups and the creation of multiracial families involving whites and their nonwhite immigrant children who become families through international transracial adoption.
Immigration scholars have long considered the outmarriage of racial/ethnic immigrants to whites as the final stage of assimilation, while race scholars have regarded high rates of romantic pairings between nonwhites and whites to be the harbinger of eroding racial boundaries (Gordon, 1964; Song, 2009; Bean and Lee, 2010). Patterns of cross-racial intimacy and marriage signal a narrowing distance between groups with the likely merging of distinct racial groupings into a newly shared racial category. Such patterns also signal a declining commitment among immigrant groups in maintaining ethnic practices. As the second-generation children of today’s immigrants have entered adulthood, the rate of interracial intimacy has climbed. In the 2010 Census, interracial partnering accounted for 10% of married couples (up from 7% in 2000) and 18% of unmarried cohabitating couples (Lofquist et. al., 2012). Between 2008 and 2010, 22% of all marriages in the western United States were interracial (Wang, 2012). While rates of intermarriage have increased between immigrant groups and whites, interracial marriage with blacks remains relatively low, signaling the distancing of Asians and Latinos from blackness (Passel, Wang, and Taylor, 2010). Children growing up in immigrant families in the United States are part of an American generation that is more open to interracial marriage than any generation before them (Kasinitz et. al., 2008). If left to their own devices, they would likely outmarry at even higher rates than they actually do. But immigrant parents exert great pressure on their children’s marital choices.
Immigrant parents from India, the Middle East, and other societies where arranged marriages are common and dating is associated with sexual promiscuity can exert immense control over the marital choices of their children – especially daughters whose failure to conform can bring dishonor to the family. In such communities, marriage traditions are important for the intergenerational maintenance of ethnic and religious identities (Manohar, 2008; Samuel, 2010; see also Shaw, Chapter 9, this volume). Many daughters conform to parental directives so as to maintain their family reputation and connection; others only appear to do so while dating men of their choosing in secret, away from the prying eyes of family and coethnic community members – typically doing so only after they are well into adulthood. This can be very stressful given the deep attachment many feel to their parents and the centrality of marital practices to ethnic identity. Some second-generation members cast a bicultural spin on dating by defining its aim as marriage (Manohar, 2008). Indeed, as more mainstream American youth shun monogamous dating relations, engage in the new “hookup” culture of casual sexual encounters, and delay marriage or opt out altogether (Armstrong, Hamilton, and England, 2010), dating might acquire greater respectability and acceptance as a means to marriage in immigrant communities. Perhaps, US mainstream culture will come to regard dating that leads to marriage as traditional, thus serving up such practices as a way to mark ethnicity. In other words, as new norms replace American dating practices, dating in pursuit of marriage could become associated with immigrant ethnic retention and tradition.
Immigrant parents not from cultures that practice arranged marriages also pressure children’s endogamy to preserve family connection, ethnic practices, and a shared ethnic language into the next generation. In part because women are seen as the primary transmitters of culture, parents often exert more pressure for endogamy on their daughters than sons (Kasinitz et. al., 2008; Manohar 2008; Samuel 2010; Morales, 2012). This is not always the case, though. Some immigrant mothers encourage daughters to outmarry as a strategy for avoiding traditional gender arrangements that favor men’s interests (Nesteruk and Gramescu, 2012). And many Chinese and Korean immigrant parents, who look to their sons to maintain the blood line and to provide filial care, place more emphasis on sons’ than daughters’ endogamy (Kibria, 2003), even though a coethnic daughter-in-law is no guarantee she will assume filial duties without resistance (Shih and Pyke, 2010). Some sons might outmarry as a strategy for resisting filial obligations, though much research indicates that children of immigrant parents value parental care as a means of showing love, paying parents back for the sacrifices they endured, and demonstrating their adult status (Pyke, 2000; Kasinitz et. al., 2008). Preferences for endogamous marriage can greatly limit one’s marriage pool and encourage transnational marital arrangements (Thai, 2008; see Baldassar et al., Chapter 8, this volume) or contribute to lifelong singlehood, as Ferguson found in her study of never-married Chinese and Japanese American women (2000).
When second-generation children have a difficult time finding a suitable coethnic partner and reach an age when their marital prospects begin to diminish, parents are more likely to accept exogamy. Among nonblack Latino and Asian immigrant parents, there is a clear racial hierarchy in their preferences for exogamy. In general, they prefer coethnics of the same racial group (particularly those seen as culturally similar) or whites, with blacks typically considered unacceptable marriage partners. Many immigrant parents arrive on US shores having already imbibed antiblack racial and skin tone biases in their homeland. They often obscure their racism by basing their opposition to their children’s romantic pairing with blacks or dark-skinned Latinos on the grounds of cultural distance or concern that such a union would subject their children and grandchildren to racism (Kibria, 2003; Kasinitz et. al., 2008; Morales, 2012).
Parental racial preferences overlap with children’s actual marital practices. Among US-born Hispanics and Asian-Americans, rates of interracial marriage are nearly 40% and 60%, respectively, and fully 92% of interracial marriages are to whites (Qian, 2005). Skin tone and racial identity are extremely important in Hispanic outmarriage with those who identify as black less likely to marry whites (Shin, 2011). Asian-Americans are more likely to outmarry someone who is white than a member of another Asian ethnic group (Chow, 2000). Only 9% of married Asian-Americans born in the United States after 1965 had an Asian-American spouse of a different ethnic group, suggesting that the panethnic Asian identity that some predicted would emerge through interethnic marriage has not come to pass (Kibria, 2003). Structural and cultural assimilation is positively related to outmarriage to whites; it is higher among those who speak English fluently, are college educated, and are US rather than foreign born and among the third and subsequent generations of Americans compared to the second (Stevens, McKillip, and Ishizawa, 2006; Passel, Wang and Taylor, 2010; Shin, 2011; Pew Research Center, 2013).
Some scholars suggest that over time Asian-Americans and Latinos will merge into whiteness or an expanded racial category defined by being not black (Lee and Bean, 2007; Feliciano, Robnett, and Komai, 2009; Hidalgo and Bankston, 2010). However, racial outmarriage is affected not only by attitudes of acceptance for interracial marriage but also by demographic factors such as the size of the immigrant group and the ratio of men to women within that group (Landale, Oropesa, and Bradatan, 2006). Ongoing immigration has been replenishing the Latino and Asian population, thus increasing the numbers available for endogamous marriage. This has contributed to some slowing in outmarriage among second-generation Americans alongside an increase in marriage between native- and foreign-born Asian-Americans and a similar though less dramatic pattern of mixed-nativity marriage among Latinos. These trends signal the possible resurgence in racial/ethnic identity and a retrenchment of racial boundaries that could contribute a larger number of third-generation Americans who speak the language of their immigrant grandparents and share their racial/ethnic identity (Lichter et. al., 2007; Okamoto, 2007; Jiménez, 2008; Qian and Lichter, 2011; McManus and Apgar, 2012). These marital patterns signal a bifurcated trend with some Asian and Latino Americans integrating into white society and others maintaining a strong ethnic identity and ethnic cultural practices, a pattern noted for years among those who study acculturation of the 1.5- and second-generation American offspring of immigrant parents (Pyke and Dang, 2003). As discussed next, outmarriage to whites can differ substantially across gender, as they do among Asian-Americans, indicating that men and women of the same race might not be accorded the same proximity to whiteness.
Gendered racial stereotypes of Asian men and women contribute to a strong gendered pattern of outmarriage. White men often perceive Asian women as better marriage partners than white women due to stereotypes that cast them as more family-oriented, subservient, and dutiful. Asian men, on the other hand, are stereotyped as threatening, patriarchal, and poor marriage partners relative to white men (Chow, 2000; Kim, 2006; Min and Kim, 2009; Nemoto, 2009; Pyke, 2010). In a study of white racial preferences in online dating, white men were more likely to include Asian women and exclude black women as potential daters, while white women were more likely to exclude Asian men (Feliciano, Robnett, and Komaie, 2009). As noted in this study, whites tend to exercise greater control on racial outmarriage than do nonwhites. Among those married in 2008, 40% of Asian women wed outside their race, mostly to whites, while only 20% of Asian men did so. Meanwhile, Hispanic rates of outmarriage were the same for men and women at 25% (Passel, Wang, and Taylor, 2010). So if outmarriage is an indicator of becoming white or an honorary white, there is evidence that women of Asian descent are more readily accepted into whiteness than Asian men. On the other hand, given the role racial and gendered stereotypes play in intermarriage patterns, it is not certain that intermarriage indicates racial assimilation. While some individuals married to whites might be able to reduce their “otherness” in the eyes of the whites with whom they interact, that is a far cry from all whites viewing all Asian or Latino Americans as white (Zhou, 2004).
That women of Asian descent are more likely to outmarry whites than are men of Asian descent suggests a gendered dynamic to racial incorporation of immigrants that will affect sex ratio imbalances leading to a surplus of single Asian-American men. Such a surplus might encourage Asian-American men to seek Asian brides from abroad. Marriage migration is the largest category of family-sponsored immigration to the United States, and most arrivals in this category are women of the same race as their spouse (Thai, 2008; Monger and Yankay, 2012). Gender imbalances already affect transnational marriages among first-generation Vietnamese American men. With a shortage of Vietnamese immigrant women in the US marriage pool and a corresponding shortage of marriageable men in Vietnam, many Vietnamese American men are seeking wives from Vietnam (Thai, 2008). While the American men regard women in the homeland as more gender traditional than Vietnamese American women, women in Vietnam presume they will find greater gender equity in marriages with Vietnamese men in the United States. These “clashing dreams” can create profound marital conflicts (Thai, 2004, p. 285). While this could contribute to divorce, Thai notes that the stigma associated with divorce in Vietnamese culture and the shame divorce can bring to the couple’s parents might mean they will remain married – “for better or worse” (2004, p. 285; see Baldassar et al., Chapter 8, this volume).
While interracial marriage can signal patterns of assimilation and proximal whiteness among nonwhite immigrant groups, the racial identities of their multiracial children can provide even greater insight into the long-term effect racial intermarriage will have on the racial order (Lee and Bean, 2004). Most racial outmarriages involve one white partner, and most interracial families – over 85% – contain white and nonwhite individuals (Lee and Edmonston, 2005). Whether children of mixed-race parentage assume a multiracial or monoracial identity, and the extent to which those who identify monoracially self-identify as white or nonwhite, tells us a lot about the salience of racial distinctions.” Must have “identify” here or doesn’t make sense.
Children born to Asian/white or Latino/white couples are not automatically perceived as monoracially Asian or Latino, and they are less likely to identify as Asian or Latino than those born to monoracial parents (Landale, Oropesa, and Bradatan, 2006). Using data from the 1990 Census that required parents to choose a monoracial identity for mixed-race offspring, Qian (2004) finds that Asian-American/white parents were most likely to identify their children as white and children of African American/white couples least likely. Interestingly, parents were more likely to choose a white racial category for their children when the black parent is foreign born rather than US born. This might indicate a greater desire among immigrant blacks to distance themselves from the latter-generation American descendants of enslaved Africans, as noted elsewhere (Guenther, Pendaz, and Makene, 2011). While some research finds that children of nonwhite/white parentage are more likely to be identified as nonwhite when their father, rather than mother, is the racial minority parent (Qian, 2004), other research finds fewer consistencies, with children in Asian/white families most likely to share their mother’s racial identity regardless of whether she is white or Asian; children of white/black couples more likely to identify with their father’s race, especially if he is white; and other mixed-race children (e.g., Latino/white) more likely to identify as white regardless of which parent is white or Latino. Racial context and social class seem to affect the racial identity of multiracial children, with those living in nonwhite neighborhoods or attending nonwhite schools more likely to identify as nonwhite and those of higher socioeconomic status, with the exception of white/black multiracial children, more likely to identify as white (Brunsma, 2005; Bratter and Heard, 2009). Meanwhile, parents who are multiracial are more likely to identify their children as white, indicating a gradual merging into whiteness (Bratter, 2007).
While evidence suggests that children of Asian/white and nonblack Latino/white parentage have more leeway in how they self-identify than children born to black/white couples, the latter are more likely to identify as multiracial or white than in the past (Rockquemore and Brunsma, 2002; Roth, 2005). Unfortunately, this scholarship does not examine the role of phenotype on the racial classification of mixed-race children, a factor that contributes to the confinement of children born to black/white couples to the category of black due to the one drop of black blood rule (e.g., President Barack Obama is biracial but identifies as black and is regarded as black by others). Racial identity also appears to be dynamic across situation and time (Harris and Sim, 2002). Some individuals switch from a white to a black self-identity after experiencing unemployment, impoverishment, or incarceration (Penner and Saperstein, 2008). The importance of class to racial categories might indicate an emerging detachment of race from phenotype in the new racial order.
In response to the growing numbers of children born to interracial couples and pressure from multiracial Americans, the US Census allowed individuals for the first time in 2000 to select all the racial categories to which they feel they belong. Hence, in its official statistics, the United States has moved away from the single-race concept that has defined the racial order for centuries and now allows for and counts multiracial individuals – though to comply with civil rights policies, the Office of Management and Budget also includes multiracials in their component racial categories (Bratter, 2007). The ability to officially identify as multiracial is likely to accelerate the number of multiracial individuals who will do so, not only on official forms but also in their everyday lives. Thus, the racial order in the United States appears to be changing with a synergistic swiftness.
Scholarly discussions of immigration tend to overlook the influx of foreign-born children through international adoption even though Americans adopt more children from abroad than any other country. The quiet migration of foreign-born infants and children increased dramatically in the 1990s, after which the US Census added the category “adopted son/daughter” as a family relationship category in 2000 (Selman, 2002; Kreider, 2003). The rate of foreign-born adoption peaked at 23,000 in 2004 and then reversed dramatically in 2012 to its lowest level since 1994 after several top-sending countries put bans or heavy restrictions on international adoptions due to corruption or political tensions with the United States, which, some speculate, might increase the adoption of children from other nonwhite regions, including Africa (Associated Press 2013). The main sending countries of transnational adoptees to the United States have been China, Russia, South Korea, and Guatemala. The majority of immigrant adoptees are nonwhites adopted by white middle-class parents. Even though their numbers are small, they contribute to the growth of multiracial families headed by native-born white Americans (Selman, 2002; Dorow, 2006; Lee et al., 2006).
In a study of the narratives of white adoptive parents of Chinese girls, Dorow finds white adoptive parents regard Asianness as more racially flexible than blackness, which affects their adoption choice. Asians are racially constructed as different, but not too different alongside the “too different” construction of blackness (2006, p. 371). It is easier for a Chinese daughter to be absorbed into the family’s whiteness than if she were black. As one adoptive parent notes, “I’ve gotta admit that if I had a black child, I’d probably think of us as more biracial” (2006, p. 371). Many white adoptive parents emphasize accepting and liking Chinese people and culture as important to raising their daughters with a positive ethnoracial identity. However, they often engage in a kind of “cultural tourism” involving “the selective appropriation and consumption of renovated cultural symbols, artifacts, and events that serve as the source of identity construction” (Quiroz, 2012, p. 527). Such “staged authenticity” contributes to weaker ethnoracial identities among transracially adopted children than found among their American-born ethnoracial counterparts raised by biological immigrant parents (Quiroz, 2012).
It is not simply the identities of transracial immigrant adoptees that are affected by their incorporation into white families. For many adoptive parents, their “white identities are made flexible, potentially transformed through their Chinese children” (Dorow, 2006, p. 371). While the rise in interracial marriage suggests that the category of whiteness might be expanding to include Asians, as well as Latinos, white adoptive parents of nonwhite immigrant children can also experience an expansive transformation of their own white identities by identifying with the race and ethnicity of their adopted children – making them more ethnically interesting and diverse than those whites enmeshed in “bland white culture” (Dorow, 2006, p. 371). The racial flexibility and proximity to whiteness of Chinese children adopted by whites, for example, contribute to the expansive racial flexibility of the parents as well. As the transracial international adoption of children who are Asian unsettles the category of whiteness, it does so by reproducing the distance between whites and blacks (Dorow, 2006).
The rise of interracial marriage and the birth of multiracial identities are just one pathway by which an immigrant group can experience a bifurcation of its racial identity over time. A plethora of research into patterns of segmented assimilation across various racial/ethnic groups finds the social capital of immigrant parents greatly affects whether children assimilate upwardly through educational attainments and occupational status to the white middle class or experience fewer educational and occupational achievements alongside a downward assimilation to nonwhite lower-class communities (Portes and Rumbaut, 2001; Pyke, 2007; Rumbaut, 2008; Portes, Fernández-Kelly, and Haller, 2009; Glick, 2010; Haller, Portes, and Lynch, 2011). This bifurcation within Asian and Hispanic racial groups is what some refer to as the “Princeton or prison, jail or Yale” phenomenon (Suárez-Orozco and Gardner, 2003). As described next, recent increases in deportation rates of undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans, many of whom have native-born American children, will affect segmented assimilation of future generations of Latino Americans.
Among the undocumented immigrants living in the United States, 76% are Hispanic and 59% are Mexicans. And they tend to live in families. The undocumented are more likely than native-born US citizens to reside with a spouse and children. Nearly half (47%) of all households headed by an undocumented immigrant consist of couples and children, more than double that of households headed by US citizens in which only 21% comprise a couple and children. Three out of every four children living with an undocumented parent were born in the United States, which automatically accords citizenship to all who are native-born, and their numbers doubled between 2000 and 2009 (Passel and Cohn, 2009, 2011). There has recently been a push to end birthright citizenship in the United States, which, if passed, would increase the number of undocumented children (Passel and Cohn, 2011). As these figures indicate, many undocumented immigrants live in mixed-status families – a family whose members have different immigration statuses.
The marginalized status of those who are unauthorized affects the entire family and delays their incorporation into the mainstream society relative to those who are not unauthorized (Abrego and Gonzales, 2010; Bean et al., 2011). As the undocumented live with the constant threat of arrest and deportation, they typically live in the shadows where many social services and community resources are out of reach. Undocumented parents are less likely to access healthcare and police services out of fear of being deported, undermining their own health and well-being as well as that of their children (Menjívar, 2006). Those with citizen children are often uninformed about the public services to which their children have legal access or are too afraid to seek out such services. Hence, citizen children of unauthorized immigrants are denied many of the benefits of citizenship to which they are entitled, and they tend to be the children most in need of those benefits, thus undermining their life chances and access to social citizenship and creating greater inequality among citizen children (Fix and Zimmerman, 2006; Leiter, McDonald, and Jacobson, 2006; Abrego and Gonzales, 2010). Given their vulnerabilities and lack of protections, noncitizen children and the citizen children of undocumented parents are functionally stateless.
At present writing, undocumented Latino children can attend public school through high school but have restricted access as adults to a college education and financial aid. Knowing they are restricted from attaining a higher level of education can weaken their academic motivation and performance, contributing to the high rate of Latino students who drop out before finishing high school. Their undocumented status limits them to an underground economy of low-paying jobs where they are not asked to provide legal documents (Abrego, 2006). Mixed-status families often live in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods with poor, underfunded schools. Some parents, fearing for their children’s safety, send them to Mexico or Central America to live with relatives, often enduring many years without seeing their children (Menjívar, 2006).
In recent years, the United States has implemented stricter and more punitive immigration policies and laws, stepping up worksite raids and border patrols (Capps et. al., 2007) and contributing to the racial profiling of Mexican Americans as undocumented “aliens” (Aguirre, 2004). Deportations more than doubled over the first decade of the new millennium, with more than 70% of deportees being Mexican, including some who had lived in the United States for decades (Passel and Cohen, 2011). Citizen children of undocumented parents as well as undocumented children are at risk of being separated from their parents. For every two adults who are deported through worksite raids, one child is affected (Capps et al., 2007). A US immigrant policy and a public discourse that regards unauthorized immigrants simply as lawbreakers obscure the fact that many of the deported are parents raising citizen children (Yoshikawa, 2011). In contrast to the immigration policies implemented in 1965 that gave special priority to family reunification as a criterion for immigration, both as a means of enhancing family stability and promoting immigrant adaptation, today’s policies are splitting families apart (Abrams, 2007). Children in single-parent families or those where both parents are deported are the most vulnerable. Some deported parents just disappear without time to contact family members, adding to their children’s emotional trauma (Capps et al., 2007). The loss of a deported parent’s presence and earnings creates tremendous financial hardship, psychological stress, vulnerability, and social isolation for the children left behind. And it is not only the young offspring that are vulnerable; the deported often leave behind elderly parents, adult children, and young grandchildren to whom they had been providing care and other kinds of assistance (Treas and Mazumdar, 2004; Treas, 2009; Kanstroom, 2012).
Even when parents are not deported, living with the fear that deportation is a possibility creates stress and hardship for parents and children alike (Yoshikawa, 2011). Children growing up in undocumented families fare worse across many indicators, including cognitive development, than those in immigrant families with documentation (Brabeck and Xu, 2010; Yoshikawa, 2011). The unauthorized status of mothers in particular undermines the educational and class attainments of their second-generation children (Bean et al., 2011).
One of the most important factors determining the incorporation of second- and latter-generation children is the legal status of the first generation. The large number of undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States today is unlike earlier waves of European immigrants whose pathways to structural incorporation were not legally blocked. Unless legal status is accorded to today’s undocumented children, they will grow into English-speaking undocumented adults who are denied access to higher education and economic opportunities. They will thus be forced to live in the social and economic margins of society, where they will raise another generation in lower-income, nonwhite communities who, in turn, will have fewer opportunities for higher education and upward mobility. This segment of the Mexican American population will likely be racialized as nonwhite, while other segments of the Mexican American population, including descendants of legalized residents, will more likely experience upward social mobility to the white middle class and racial outmarriage. These dynamics could bifurcate current racial groups into proximal whites and proximal blacks in the new racial order.
Immigrant families are playing a pivotal role in changing the racial order in the United States. Immigrants’ segmented assimilation, high rates of interracial marriage, contribution to multiracial births and identities, as well as the formation of white-headed multiracial families through the transracial adoption of immigrant children highlight structural and attitudinal changes that are shaping dramatic changes in how Americans think about and organize race. While there is much uncertainty about how racial categories will be organized, scholars tend to agree that whites will remain at the top of the racial hierarchy as some nonwhite immigrant segments merge into whiteness or enjoy some racial privilege as proximal whites, with blacks once again confined to the bottom. Due to segmented assimilation, such as occurs among Latinos with documentation and those without, scholars predict that some racial group members who assimilate to the white middle class are more likely to live among and marry whites and enjoy the racial privileges associated with proximal whiteness, while their counterparts who downwardly assimilate and live in nonwhite communities will experience greater racial oppression as proximal blacks. That is, the racial categories we associate with today’s immigrant groups can fracture along class lines and thus even along family lines. If that occurs, social class might trump phenotype as the primary mechanism for sorting individuals into racial groups. This could divide families racially. Siblings born to the same parents could be assigned into different racial groups, as occurs in some Latin American societies (Bonilla-Silva, 2004). However, in Latin America, it is phenotype, not class, that racially divides families. The growth of interracial marriages and multiracial births also presents challenges to current monoracial categories. On the other hand, increases in the flows of certain immigrant streams can generate new opportunities for intraracial marriage, a strengthening of racial/ethnic identities, and reinforce the current order marked by distinct monoracial categories. Only time will tell what the new immigrant-driven US racial order will look like, precisely how it will be determined, and how it will affect and be affected by ongoing flows of immigrant families to the United States. Given the rate of change, we will not have to wait very long to find out.