Immigration, Diversity, and Student Journeys to Higher Education, 2nd edition

FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION

Peter Guarnaccia and I met while we were both Fellows at the Russell Sage Foundation in the mid-1990s. At the time, Peter’s work focused on medical anthropology and particularly mental health. In 1994–1995, Russell Sage hosted a contingent of scholars focused on immigration and particularly second-generation immigrants. As a keen observer and listener, Peter absorbed the questions that we immigration scholars posed. As he notes in the Introduction to this book, he eventually turned his attention to this topic, successfully wrote a grant, and conducted the study whose important results are reported here.

Immigration, Diversity, and Student Journeys to Higher Education highlights a crucial U.S. resource that has received relatively little public or research attention—the educational efforts and successes of the children of immigrants. Embodying Robert Merton’s wisdom that more is learned from examining a single case of success than from multiple failures, Immigration, Diversity, and Student Journeys to Higher Education concentrates on the children of immigrants who have made it to a selective, major public university. Through analysis of focus group data with an especially diverse group of 1.5 and second-generation immigrant students at Rutgers University, Peter Guarnaccia elucidates not only the positive academic orientations that characterize these children of immigrants but also what factors contribute to their access to higher education and their success in college.

Public attention and, until recently, most scholarly research has focused on first generation, adult immigrants. Not until the past 20 years or so have many researchers devoted attention to the children of these new immigrants. Some of these children were born in the U.S. and therefore labeled second-generation immigrants. Others were born abroad but brought to the U.S. when they were young and are often labeled the 1.5 generation of immigrants. Since second generation and 1.5 generation immigrants have at least one immigrant parent, but have grown up in the U.S., they constitute a unique population that confronts the conflicting forces of U.S. society. These include structural racism that pressures them to Americanize, the competing pressures they may feel from their immigrant parents to maintain their distinct cultural heritage, while excelling in U.S. institutions.

The rapidly expanding research on this unique population has demonstrated that children of immigrants generally have a positive educational orientation (see, e.g., Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, & Waters, 2004; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001), that is, they want to do well in school at the same time that they confront structural racism (e.g., Stepick, 1998 in the case of Haitian Americans; Telles & Ortiz, 2009 in the case of Mexican-Americans). Immigration, Diversity, and Student Journeys to Higher Education adds to the research on how these immigrant students find pathways to college and the attendant struggles and challenges they have confronted and overcome. Many of the students in the sample have parents with postsecondary education. However, that education was nearly always completed abroad, leading to gaps in the U.S.-specific knowledge and cultural capital that could help facilitate access to U.S. higher education for their children.

Using a theoretical lens that resurrects early anthropological conceptualizations of acculturation (Redfield, Linton, & Herskovits, 1936) rather than traditional sociological assimilation theory, Guarnaccia confirms that immigrant integration is not a one-way replacement of one’s parents’ cultural heritage with American culture. The anthropologist Gibson (1988) coined the phrase “selective acculturation,” in which immigrants and their children adopt some aspects of American culture, such as learning English, while maintaining their own traditional values, such as respect for elders and parents’ beliefs that educational achievement is more important than extracurricular activities or just spending time with friends.

However, this process of selective acculturation is decidedly unbalanced, as structural and cultural forces cause U.S. culture to almost always dominate (Stepick, Grenier, Castro, & Dunn, 2004). The dominance of the host society can enforce acculturation through the political process, direct violence, and repression, and/or with symbolic violence through ethnocentrism that claims that established resident norms are superior to others (Beals, 1962). Still, immigrants develop creative means of resistance and accommodation (Stepick & Stepick, 2002). Guarnaccia further substantiates early anthropological conceptualizations of acculturation that noted that immigrant parents are often the guardians of cultural continuity, while children become the agents of change, a relationship that may produce intergenerational tensions and threats to family unity (Spiro, 1955; see also Stepick, Stepick, Eugene, Teed, & Labissiere, 2001).

In his analysis of the students’ evolution of their pathways to higher education and how their identities changed between high school and college, Guarnaccia highlights how the students often came to appreciate their parents’ strict discipline. They assert that this discipline kept them from getting into trouble, which meant they were not distracted from their and their parents’ educational goals for them. The focus group discussions reflect the widespread process of what Louie (2012) labels the immigrant bargain, wherein immigrant parents work hard to provide their children with educational opportunity and in return their children work hard in school.

This book’s combination of a broad sample of national origin groups along with nuanced qualitative data yields insights unobtainable by either just large sample surveys or qualitative data on small samples. Previous research tends to be either large sample surveys with highly diverse samples but limited in-depth data, or qualitative research with rich data but restricted, relatively homogenous samples. There are some exceptions of large-scale projects that gather qualitative data on a broader range of national origin children of immigrants, but they are the exception. This qualitative analysis is one of those exceptions—rich with nuanced data from respondents of diverse national origins, and crucially centers the voices of these 1.5 and second-generation immigrant students.

The data in this book confirms that the educational experiences of 1.5- and second-generation immigrant students are not monolithic, even when the analysis is limited to a sample of students in one university. In gaining access to higher education, these students confront structural barriers and variable prejudices of institutional gatekeepers. A telling example that Guarnaccia elaborates in Chapter Four is a Chinese American student whose first high school guidance counselor asserts a model minority stereotype and tells her she will gain admission to Harvard because the student is of Chinese heritage and has good grades. However, this same student’s second high school guidance counselor attempts to instead encourage her to apply for community college. Most of the students faced similar negative stereotypes, with teachers or counselors trying to temper their educational ambitions.

While the students confronted barriers to success in mainstream institutions, Guarnaccia argues that immigrant ethnic institutions, ranging from religious institutions to university student organizations and more, may advance educational goals. Here again, this book adds to the literature that demonstrates how such institutions may buffer the effects of discrimination (Zhou & Bankston, 1998), and promote the formation and maintenance of social ties that facilitate information sharing about educational opportunities (Louie, 2012; Louie & Holdaway, 2009).