Introduction

Demographic trends indicate that cross-border population movements are occurring from predominantly non-White nations to the United States at a higher rate than ever before. The US Census Bureau reports that in the year 2000, 28. 4 million foreign-born people lived in the United States, constituting 10.4 percent of US residents (Poe, 2002; Sadowski-Smith, 2002). With the US attracting 24 percent of the immigrant population worldwide, Doyle (2002) has characterized the US as the leading global destination for newcomers.

Youth (under age 18) make up 10 percent of all the immigrant population residing in the US. Nonetheless, the literature on at-risk youth, (Besharov, 1999; Furstenberg, Cook, Eccles, & Sameroff, 1999), has failed to give considerable attention to immigrant youth. This disparity has existed amidst the challenging life experiences of immigrant youth, many of whom were child soldiers and consequently suffer residual effects of war-trauma, and have also undergone repressive political and social conditions and violence including rape. Undoubtedly, these experiences put immigrant youth at-risk of failure in family, school, and community. Indeed, the scant attention that immigrant youth continue to receive in the academic literature on youth development, positive youth development, and/or community youth development ought to be reversed.

Following the traditions of Delgado, Jones, and Rohani (2005) and Lee (2005), who are beginning to strengthen the sparse works on immigrant youth development, this paper sets out to shed light on the unique acculturation challenges that immigrant youth face, described elsewhere as their American identity formation process (Lee, 2005). The specific immigrant youth that are the focus of this paper are those who hail from non-White nations, many of those nations may either be undergoing war, recovering from the effects war or political instability, and/or facing overwhelming governance and economic challenges.

The Immigration Debate: A Brief Review

The Bush Administration’s immigration policy can be summarized as one that favors a guest worker program and concurrently advocates for strengthening border control. Differences have deepened from both sides of the immigration debate with opponents of the current immigration policy mounting pressures that the US Congress initiate reforms and build walls across the US-Mexican border to keep the influx of undocumented immigrants from coming into the US. Arguments against the current immigration policy revolve around two key considerations: national security and economic security. Opponents of the current immigration policy argue that immigrants take jobs from US citizens, and thus erode the quality of life for Americans and legally documented foreigners living in the US. No one would argue against the viability of these two ideals, but it is the tone of the rhetoric that evokes concerns. However, when their arguments are interrogated thoroughly, the policy recommendations that are proposed such as constructing a wall to close the Mexican-US border and charging undocumented immigrants with felony are extremely harsh and acerbic. But one wonders if the loss of US jobs to foreign nations: India, China, Mexico, etc, given that US companies are moving their businesses abroad could be making these harsh arguments politically palpable. Or with mid-term elections due in November 2006, could the Republican-led legislative branch (legislators who are up for elections), seeing the plummeting poll numbers, be seeking ways to reverse and halt this downward spiral?

Proponents of the current immigration policy posit that labor shortages in certain industries: agriculture and healthcare, for example, leave employers with no choice but to hire immigrants who are willing to do jobs that American citizens often do not want to do. They go on to suggest that demographic changes such as the aging of baby boomers place demands on the American economy, especially in healthcare and food processing as well as hospitality where immigrant labor is able to address the shortages. They argue further, America is essentially an immigrant nation, and the only reason why opponents are mounting such a resistance is that the newer immigrants are largely people of color, thus, a charge of post September 11th xenophobia.

Could it be that the immigration debate is not exclusively motivated by the race, but by job insecurity among some American citizens? It is important to add that labor mobility to the US is also not only attributed to labor shortages or the desire of immigrants to seek economic opportunities, but by a US foreign policy that has made the ongoing war on terrorism a cultural war of sorts. Claiming the cultural superiority of the United States, and touting the freedoms and opportunities that the US offers, through such outlets like the United States Information Service (USIS) or Voice of America (VOA) also attracts newcomers to the US.

Admittedly, one cannot dismiss the validity of the assertion that locked within the soft underbelly of the immigration debate is the polarizing national discourse about race and race relations in the US. The national discourse on race is unyielding and shrinks participants into inflexible groupings (liberal versus conservative; democrat versus Republican; or Black versus White) (Gilliman & Bales, 2004). Equally so, the insecurity that people on either side of the debate feel, whether it be job security or social justice for immigrants leads them intuitively to retreat to their places of comfort with dogged determination, unwilling to devise sustainable solutions that are born out of compromise. As such, it is much easier to blame and to validate one’s own position (provide causes and justifications) without devising measured and sustainable solutions to the problem. How can the national conversation on immigration depart from the accusatory tenor and invite compromise? I believe that by reframing the lens to reflect on the needs of immigrant youth, whose issues are less threatening, this might be a starting point, while still achieving the accompanying goal of increasing the knowledge base on immigrant youth development.

The immigration debate has also spurred a tendency among immigrants toward political activism and protest politics, which are staples of US democracy, but one with which many immigrants from despotic nations are generally unfamiliar. Mass demonstrations by immigrants and their supporters in numerous states have underscored the efficacy of grassroots organizing. Truly, many immigrants do not come to the US with a strong sense of individual and collective political rights. They hail from despotic societies, where political coercion and outright repression have rendered many fearful of confronting their oppressors. The recent turnaround must have positive meaning for immigrant rights advocates who have not been able to pierce the lethargy that has stranglehold their constituents from participating in civil rights advocacy. Could it mean that immigrants are truly inculcating the civic political norms of the US by seeking change on their own behalf? Should their opponents not welcome this change and stop ascribing negative valuations to their advocacy?

Scant Attention to Immigrant Youth

As the adults hammer out the contours of these debates, often left out are immigrant youth in general, and immigrant youth of color in particular. This paper examines the immigration debate and weaves it with the burgeoning literature on immigrant youth development. Immigrant youth of color constitute a “new visible minority.” They are often not distinguished from their American-born minority counterparts, and when attempts are made to dissect their identity, they are treated as a subjugated or subordinated subset of the minority underclass. Their experiences are therefore lumped with at-risk minority youth, who are wrongfully caricatured as unmotivated, trouble- prone, and having conduct difficulties by some detractors within the dominant culture and even some people of color that make up the social and political elite. Many of these negative valuations and generalizations fail to account for the pervasiveness and persistence of inequalities, distributive injustices, institutional discrimination and the concomitant privileges that many people in the dominant populace receive. How would immigrant youth emerge from beneath the negative stereotypes attributed to African-American youth and by extension to themselves? Resolving the plight of immigrant youth begins with increasing our understanding of their plight and/or life experiences, about which very little research has been done compared to their American-born counterparts.

Defining Visible New Minority

The term “visible new minority” refers to new immigrants that hail from non-White nations of the world. Moreover, based on their race they cannot blend physically into the dominant US White population. The life experiences of these non-White immigrant youth are different in many respects from their American-born counterparts - historic minority groups: African-Americans, Native Americans, second, third, fourth generation Latino/a, and Asians. One important feature distinguishes these new minority youth from their immigrant counterparts from Western and Eastern European nations. Immigrants from predominantly White nations can assimilate easily in US society due principally to their close racial identification with the dominant racial group. Even when they are unable to readily acquire the linguistic and other “cultural” requirements often used to gauge if non-White immigrants have fully integrated into the American body politic and cultural landscape, White immigrants seemingly face the least resistance to their integration into the American cultural milieu. If even this cannot be substantiated empirically, at least, that is how some non-White new immigrants describe as their lived experience.

The new visible minority youth is not a monolithic group. Instead, this is a diverse group ranging from their countries of origin and ethnic and cultural backgrounds. What non-White immigrant youth have in common is that their physical features cannot be easily morphed into that of the dominant group without trace. Their physical features, particularly their race always stands out. Their accent is often highlighted although in the case of their White counterparts that is less an issue (Lee, 2005). Among minority groups, there is also the notion of a “model or superior minority” as a distinguishing feature of those immigrants that are able to assimilate easily, especially within the intellectual and economic fabrics of the US. Asian American youth have been featured by Newsweek, People Magazine, New York Times, Sixty Minutes, and other media outlets as been science or spelling bee whizzes. True, Asian American writers such Frank Wu (2002) and Stacey Lee (2005) have rejected the broad application of these caricatures to a whole population, the myth still endures. The model minority label has endured in large part because it serves as a source of vindicating the consciences of those from the dominant culture who ride them for purposes of derisively suggesting that other immigrants have failed to achieve success solely out of their own doing. Systems and structures that perpetuate racism and discriminate against people of color in general, and immigrant youth in particular are not named as culprits in the disparities that exist between youth of color and their White counterparts.

Overview of their Pre-Migration and Migration Experiences

Generally, many immigrants come to the US to escape persecution from the sending nation. They also emigrate in order to escape natural disasters, although not negating that some come to seek economic opportunities. Whatever the case, America is a giant magnet that attracts citizens from all over the world, seeking to become parts of the capitalist and democratic projects that the US touts as its heritage.

If they come from war-torn nations, many of these youth have been exposed to unparallel violence and the residual psychological effects. In addition, many immigrant youth must face the effects of sustained separation from their loved-ones, including their parents and siblings, who may have migrated to the US before them (Delgado et al, 2005; Dolo, 2006 in press). Due to the instability and the chronic nature of poverty in their sending nations, many may have only known a life characterized by continuous interruptions of school and sporadic access to curative healthcare and no access to preventative health care services. Escaping the war may take them through a transit nation or life in a refugee camp with minimum or no human services. These youth bring with them, gruesome narratives of their past (personal and/or collective), as well as stories of resilience and survival. Having faced all these “disruptions and transitions” (Delgado, et al, 2005), it is only logical to expect that adjustment to their host society would be enormously challenging. Succeeding in their host society requires an understanding of the challenges that they face in evolving an American identity - integrating in family, school, and community.

Evolving their New American Identity

At settlement, immigrant youth start to evolve their American identity, processes that involve simultaneously embracing and rebelling against specific identities and the values that they reflect. This identity development process is complex and complicated and occurs within the crucible of several competing pressures. An important underlying context is their marginality and subordination as a sub-class of the minority underclass. Depending on the lens of the observer and their purpose (Machiavellian or otherwise), the immigrant youth may be accorded a status several notches below or above the historic minority groups. This is because the social system known as the American society consists of a social hierarchy that places the hegemonic group (the dominant racial group) at the top and minorities at the bottom (Sidanius & Pratto, 1993).

Put differently, race and institutional racism influence where immigrant youth fits, and the social status or stigma that they are assigned, which in turn, affects their self-identity formation processes. Lee (2005) makes this point well: “Non-White immigrant youth discover that they must negotiate their identities within a racial hierarchy where Whites are positioned at the top” (p.2). Being non-White in a society where race has enormous salience in defining status and stature, the paradox is that non-White immigrant youth and even their elders may be seeking not to be defined by the “color of their skin, but by the content of their character” failing to realize that their entire existence is defined by race first, before other social variables like competence, skill, demeanor, and character come into play.

The world that immigrant youth must navigate is no longer homogeneous as the one they left behind in their home country. The new world that they inhabit is multiracial and multicultural and exerts an enormity of psychosocial, economic, physical, and cultural stressors, each seeking to out-do the other in a competition, whose purpose is to determine, who can approximate “the ideal” the most. The ideal, oftentimes, might be to approximate the lifestyles and choices of the dominant classes. The ideal, oftentimes, might be to approximate the lifestyles and choices of the underclass. The ideal might also be encapsulating the values and norms of their parents. Squeezed between these diametrically opposing forces, and being forced to choose sides, immigrant youth may also be struggling to build their own identity, reposition and position themselves to embark on a life journey that even the adults making demands on their lives, have only being able to reduce to polarized choices. Never mind, creating one’s own identity when any choice you make seems as if you are negating one person or groups of persons (all of importance to you) for the other, only results in a schizophrenic response that manifests as resistance.

The new visible minority group also includes Southeastern Asians, hailing from Vietnam Lao, etc. Nearly all these nations and the ones mentioned above have social traditions that are communal in nature and different from the individualistic culture of the host nation. We cannot therefore discuss the plight of the youth from these sending societies without mentioning their parents and/or their entire households or community. The term household is used here deliberately instead of family, since within the American society; family is narrowly defined in terms of a nuclear structure: man, wife, their children, and perhaps, their pets. On the contrary, household best grasps the meaning in the immigrant context because it integrates a broad spectrum of constituents that make up a robust network of supports, including aunts, uncles, grandparents, and non-biologically related persons.

Familial supports, in such an expanded form, are known in youth development literature to have one of the strongest impacts on the growth and development of youth. This knowledge base has for generations, being the fulcrum upon which communal cultures have built their support structures. This is often reflected in the metaphor: “it takes a village to raise a child.” The youth development literature also suggests that when families are involved in the lives of their children, the children often adjust well socially. Having access to people in whom they have confidence, and trust, and can depend on, for assistance, if the need arises, helps increase their resilience against corrosive or decaying social forces. For many immigrant youth, family – the blend of biologically and non-biologically related people is generally a buffer against distractions and detractors. Immigrant youth also tend to find support in religious institutions, mutual aid associations, as well as sports and recreation activities within their own communities as well as among American-born counterparts. Another well-known source of support from which immigrant youth benefit is an intergenerational dialogue that emanates from the presence of several generations in one household or within very close proximity.

But as immigrant youth get ingrained into the fabric of American consumerist culture and get held increasingly tighter and tighter by its tentacles. They may eventually get lured into social patterns that break their ties to their culture of origin – their parents’ culture. Peer influence becomes mechanisms for adopting patterns of speech, lifestyles, routines, and habits that include alcohol and drug use, smoking, and “illicit” ways of dress, that eventually engender parent-youth disagreements and/or conflicts. Studies note that the competition for a youth’s attention between their parents and peers is divided into specific spheres. Parents hold sway over their children on matters that pertain to religious beliefs, moral values, and political beliefs while peers have the strongest influence in such areas as social preferences: music, fashion, and related matters (Savin-Williams & Berndt, 1990; Steinberg & Morris, 2001).

These conflicts are not always exclusively driven by the actions of the youth. In addition to subscribing to conservative sending country social norms, immigrant parents and parent surrogates, often face other hardships and sources of stress. Many face difficulties in accessing employment opportunities that are commensurate with their professional skills and competence. Those who were trained in their native society may face difficulties transferring their credentials to the host nation. Others who trained even within the host nation itself, may face challenges rooted in institutional racism and xenophobia, the latter made potent by the post-September 11th national security policies (i.e., the Patriot Act) that have morphed into hysteria and the profiling of a select number of immigrants, mainly people of Arab descent and Moslems, more specifically.

Immigrant youth negotiate power at different critical junctures in the acculturation process with their peers, parents, and the dominant systems/cultures. Their American-born visible minority peers exert pressure on them to show solidarity with them by integrating into their culture. Their teachers and administrators from the dominant culture exert pressure on them to integrate into the middle-class Eurocentric culture. Their parents also exert pressure that their children retain the honor and purity of the rather conservative sending country norms and values as opposed to the liberal and even permissive norms and values of American society. They also face personalized hormonal processes that are natural facets of adolescent development, combined with the unique challenges of having faced warring situations that are not normative in American society. Caught between these powerful polarizing powerful forces, new immigrant youth from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and most recently Sudan are confused and even ambivalent about how to resolve these tensions. It would be difficult to dispute that these different players advocate for their claims believing in the efficacy of the outcomes that each could produce. Simply, each has good intentions for their competing claims on the immigrant youth. But unfortunately, despite their well-meaning intentions, they all are participants in a process that only mimics the same ruptures that are the ultimate outcomes of the immigration debate.

Should the debate be about the whole system: the immigrants, their hosts, the businesses that benefit from recruiting low-wage earning immigrants, the immigrants’ families in their host nations who benefit from remittances sent to relatives living in the sending country, the human rights violations that their sending governments mete out at them with impunity, and the global superpowers that turn a blind-eye to these crimes because of the benefits that accrue to them…..? The lack of a systemic analysis of the problem and polarized configuration of the debate only reflects the gaping hole in the strategies advanced to address the immigration issue in the US. What the global systems grapples with in the immigration debate is nothing less than a racial divide that has haunted us over human history – the mythological role that race and institutional racism have played in the nation building debate in the US.

The trappings of a consumerist culture and the need for youth to acquire the new trends in fashion and gadgets have the tendency to also strain parent-youth relations. That is if you place the discussion in the following context. Immigrant families face poverty and hunger in higher numbers than their American-born counterparts (Van Hook, Brown, & Kwenda, 2003; New School University Report, 2004). As a consequence, many immigrant parents have to work two to three jobs to maintain housing and other basic needs. Many immigrant parents face difficulties maintaining health insurance for their children. Out of fear of being prosecuted or being deported to their countries of origin, undocumented immigrants are reluctant to access public health programs for preventive care (Children Defense Fund, 2000). In essence, many immigrant families are strapped and face difficulties to accumulate the disposable income to satisfy what parents perceive as luxuries. There are some who can afford these luxuries for their children, but the greater majority cannot afford IPOD NINOs, the newest cell phones: razor, and the likes. Instead, parents urge their youth to place significant stock in education, because it is through academic achievement that their children can prevent their difficult fate.

Clearly, immigrant youth are not free from the enticements offered by gangs and criminal networks that offer a different kind of supports and sense of belonging. For immigrant youth who participated in wars as child soldiers and now must revert to being children having played adult roles, face the challenge of role reversal. In the sending nations, the youth carried guns and protected their family members from being harassed, exploited, abused, and/or killed by other members of the insurgent forces. In the US, they must now become compliant and docile, a transition that is often met with resistance. Worth mentioning, the help-seeking behaviors of immigrants and refugees, especially for mental health and related services is slowed by cultural norms that do not generally support exposing individual or group vulnerabilities for fear of stigma and collective guilt (Dolo, 2005).

Immigrant Youth Identity Formation: A Capsule

Emigration being a transitional process that involves ongoing youth identity formation or development, presents us with significant challenges. Youth identity development is closely linked to the quality of their experience within the school setting. Studies define school climate using the following indicators: classroom policies and procedures, positive relationships with adults, perception that adults do not discriminate based on their appearance, and opportunities for creative engagement (Whitlock, 2003; Kirby, 2001).

In some secondary schools, immigrant youth report being the victims of teachers and administrators that subscribe to a straight-line assimilation theory. It is the theory, which asserts that there is a linear trajectory between strict adherence to middle-class American values and the life outcomes that accrue to a person. Proponents of this view use code words like “self-reliance, hard work and merit” to suggest that immigrants might not be integrating if they are not adhering to those standards. The degree to which a person is able to integrate these critical values into their daily repertoire determines their level of success, a proxy for Americanization (Gilliam & Bales, 2004; Lee, 2005).

Youth must therefore learn to assimilate, starting with speaking English in ways that are completely devoid of their sending country accent. Immigrant youth must dress in clothing that denotes being Americanized/westernized (Lee, 2005; Portes & Rumbaut, 1996). Embedded in these expectations are meanings of integration that discount the cultural beliefs and norms of the sending country and reinforce dominant definitions of what it means to be an American. Similarly, immigrant youth suggest that infused in these expectations are entrenched notions that their failure is inevitable. In so doing, the underlying structures of inequality that constrict opportunities for people of color and contribute to perceptions of “laziness, and chronic underperformance” are reinforced. Accountability for the roles of ineffective systems and policies often go unacknowledged in such skewed presentations.

As youth explore their sexual identity, musical tastes and preferences, dress codes, choice of friends, romantic interests, and specific moral conducts, to which they must cling, they engender fear and trepidation in the hearts of their parents and parent surrogates, if not the community at large. As members of a marginalized minority caught in the clenched fist of the host nation’s racial divide, they are stuck between retaining the values and norms instilled by their parents, maintaining ties with the minority culture, and being relegated to an underclass or building ties with the dominant culture – while still being portrayed as sell-outs by their minority counterparts, yet, not being fully considered as Americans. Where do immigrant youth land their feet without being marginalized and/or disempowered?

Conclusion

In the discourse about immigration, there is a point at which race, class, gender, and ethnic politics converge. People of color seeking to grasp at opportunities that would render them authentic Americans – achieve the normative goal of being middle-class. In the process, they are challenged by gender role reversal and status changes among them brought on by the differential availability of opportunities for women to become breadwinners in record numbers, which is taxing for the traditional male hierarchal structure transported from their sending nation. Add to this fact, that among many immigrant groups, interethnic and cross-class marriages may occur with greater frequency in their host nations than their countries of origin, uniting groups kept apart by culture, war or other divisive social tendencies, together, in record numbers. All these changes may seem unimportant to a non-immigrant or a person who just may be unaware of their critical importance for daily survival among immigrants.

Acculturation is an inter and intra-cultural exchange process that involves not only the immigrants adjusting to the ways of life of their hosts, but the host society also has to adjust to the ways of life of the newcomers. It is in such an atmosphere of mutuality that immigrants and their host accommodate and respect one another. Moreover, beyond accommodation, resides the need for the host society to provide the newcomers economic opportunities and remove the institutional barriers that hold immigrants back from participating fully in the life of their community and society at-large. Integration can also not merely be reduced to acknowledgements of the contributions that immigrants make to the economic bottom line, but to the vibrancy that they contribute to social and cultural life within the communities that they reside. If it were not for the lifetime of contributions made by other immigrants, America would still be many steps behind in its development. This means that immigrants’ contributions must be viewed on a long-term continuum. The contributions of their sons, daughters, and grandchildren will add to the sustainability and improvements of the quality life that all in America enjoy today.

Finally, scholars have identified risk and protective factors that either diminish or enhance the living conditions as well as the prospects for youth to succeed. These risk and protective factors are found in the multiple settings or three cultural groupings that youth encounter in their bid to survive in society. Risk factors contribute to negative outcomes and protective factors help youth surmount risks inherent in their lived experience and result in positive outcomes (Easter & Refki, 2004). We must ask, “What risk and protective factors exist in each of these situations: the sending nation culture, the historic minority culture, and the dominant host culture, that may undermine or enhance the achievement of full integration for immigrant youth who come from the visible minority group? In a study by Feliciano (2001) on Latino and Asian youth, she noted that when youth are exposed to a bicultural way of life, their chances of dropping out of school is reduced considerably, hence, a protective factor. In an increasingly global landscape, bi-lingual skills have become an asset especially for accessing job and leadership opportunities in a society that has all but become multilingual. In addition, “the adoption of immigrant children to American behavioral norms which can increase their health risk can be slowed by the reinforcement of native ethnic values and norms” (Easter & Refki, 2004, p.1; Harris, 1999). Empathy lies with the immigrant youth who must find a roadway that leads them out of these distressing conflicts without hindering their relations with all the actors represented in this difficult discourse.

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