Negative Impacts of Immigration on Family
Immigration has been a controversial issue within the American society for years. The United States is the country that has the most immigrants in the world. Over 40 million people that live in U.S. today were born in another country, which accounts for about a fifth of the world migrants as of the year 2017 (Radford, 2019). As of the year 2017, the population of foreign born individuals in U.S. was at 44.4 million. Today, immigrants account for 13.6% of the U.S. population which has nearly tripled from the 1970s where it was 4.7% (Radford, 2019). There are those that support immigration and there are those that do not. There are three major concerns that host countries attribute with immigration; there is the issue of reduced wages for the domestic workers because of the competition with the immigrants. The other issue is in regard to the pressure that immigration puts on education and health facilities. And lastly there is the issue of the pressures that tax payers have to deal with because of the increasing population (Casey, 2013). For the immigrants, migration presents a means for an improved standard of living with significant economic development potential for them and their families. Though immigration is beneficial and it provides economic benefit to both the immigrants and the host countries, it has major effects on families. The challenges range from family separation to difficulties of integration in the destination countries which greatly changes the intra family gender roles.
One major cause and need for immigration is over population in under developed and slowly developing countries. This has resulted in scarcity of resources and job opportunities which has forced both the skilled and unskilled people to seek opportunities in the developed nations (Booth et al., 2012). Lack of a means to provide for a family can lead to failure of the whole family in a societal setting. People are being forced to move from their countries to other developed countries like the U.S. which they consider to have more job opportunities that can help give their families a better life (Gulasekaram, 2018). During immigration, a person may consider moving along with his or her family, or else, go and, make a new family in the destination country. Circumstances can at times force an individual to leave his or her family behind, which leads to family separation.
The aspect of family presents different viewpoints of an individual to the external world. People who spend much time with their families show their value of love, communication, and appreciation. It also depicts an individual’s ability to socialize with other people, make positive relations, and help one another in achieving a common goal (Bales & Parsons, 2014). A family can be regarded as the first lesson of making relationships with one another. A family, means a lot to an individual in characteristic stages of growth and development, since one feels secure, and can get solutions of solving problems around a family. A family is also a base through which one gains the right skills and attitudes as per the societal expectations. It is through the family that people learn to respect one another and be responsible (Chaloff & Poeschel, 2017). There exist family traditions which also ought to be followed to showcase ones worth of his or her identity. These traditions might be experiences that families may create together regularly. Such traditions provide a family with memories, besides giving family members with a stronger sense of belonging. Nonetheless, many families make society. It is through such societies that common norms, values, and disciplines are set for the common good of all society members (Hardin, 2005). Self-aid values like responsibility, hard work, respect are gained, which in turn helps society live in unity and harmoniously.
A family is the baseline by which human beings receive love, support, and a framework of values from one another. A family is held together by morals, faith, ideals, hope, encouragement, comfort, and understanding between one another (Booth et al., 2012). The support offered by a family helps an individual to gain an individualistic form of self-worth, and purpose. A family is the primary roof of any individual, where one learns about self-identity. This is from the fact that when a child is born, it fully depends on its family for protection and other main basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing (Chaloff & Poeschel, 2017). It is through the family’s values that a child gains a basis to develop his code of moral conduct.
After arriving and settling in the home country, the urge of self-identity may make the immigrants to start looking for new a new family life. Considering that immigration to many people means an avenue of job opportunities, and better life, an individual intending to immigrate may have insufficient finances to support himself. Support of family associates is often vital for guaranteeing financial capability of new settlers most particularly those that have narrow monetary resources (Caldwell, 2016). When these extended relations are not present, the immigrants have a habit of looking for replacements and this is where new family systems are formed. Immigrants form families of all unconnected persons of both related and unconnected personalities who begin to consider each other as family (Caldwell, 2016).
Family values should always be protected to ensure maintenance of a smooth code of conduct in the lineage of a family to help its future generations. Family coordination and organization is the basis through which humans have been able to reach their massive developments in time (Booth et al., 2012). When the immigrants join in with strangers and form new families, they cut off the connections with their family back at home and this affects the concept of family unit. This is an individual who leaves home to go into a different country to find greener pastures so that they can help their families back at home. The new families that they form affect their thinking and they forget their main objective which ends up affecting the survival of that family unit. A failure in any element in a family sums up to a total fail in the society.
Immigration also greatly affects traditions and cultural beliefs. Various countries have variant cultural beliefs that they follow. This traditions change with time as the world continuous to develop and people change their mindsets about various issues of life. An immigrant may choose to stick to past customs of their home country, after comparing them with those of the new country that he moves into (Mahalingam, 2006). Being away from home and without any connection to his or her family back at home, the immigrant may lack enough knowledge about feasible changes that the home country has undergone. This can lead this individual to be left behind when it comes to cultural growth where he may choose to interpret the present customs based on the remembered past (Booth et al., 2012). This may affect the individual’s ability to socially interact with other people, who do not agree with his past grounded mindset in regard to various life issues.
Preserving and practicing family traditions is considered essential in reinforcing inherent family behaviors and values. However, immigration may affect the social relations of the immigrant such as in maintaining the traditional family life. A traditional family life believes that a woman is a home maker and the man is the breadwinner (Mahalingam, 2006). A woman even with a career is always expected to take care of the children and ensure that everything in the home is running properly. A man on the other hand is expected to always ensure that the family is well provided for even if the wife also has a job the man is one that is expected to take of all the bills. The western culture however has a different thinking when it comes to gender roles, there are no gender roles (Mahalingam, 2006). A man can take the role of taking care of the children while the woman can be the bread winner. In the new country, the earnings of the woman and the man are all put together as one to help sustain the family, something that may not have ben common at the home country.
This mindset of family traditions has greatly been affected by the fact that there is an imbalance between the ratios of men to women in a host country. Immigration has greatly affected the aspect of marriage where immigrants have been forced to accept and incorporate other ethnic groups in the family lineage (Booth et al., 2012). This new form of life can however be influenced by the ways of the host country and past cultural customs of the home country. In cases where the immigrant still has connections to the home country, they may tend to hang on bicultural adjustment and integration. It is very conceivable for an individual to search for a marital spouse from their home country because they want to preserve their traditions. Young settlers as likened to their parentages and females more than males are more probable to integrate western cultural values commonly because they signify liberation and independence from some of the out-dated gender roles (Alan et al., 2017).
There is an approximately 1.8 million refugees within the U.S., these are people living in poverty and most of them are homeless (Booth et al., 2012). Most of these people that undergo challenges as immigrants are people that do not have legal documents and so they have problems acquiring jobs. Some of the other challenges include; language barriers, lack of the required skills to find a job in the host country, education and cultural barriers, discrimination and racism (Hardin, 2005). In some of the countries, expertise is essential for an individual to be able to get a job, thus, lacking the required skills can lead an immigrant to low pay jobs without benefits. The few available jobs for the non-skilled individuals offer very low wages. All this challenges greatly affect family life of the immigrants which leads them to live in more poverty than they did in their home countries.
Migrant’s population include thousands of children who are from low economic status that experience many complex difficulties. It has become a very common story where in an immigrant’s family lineage; there is always an enslaved child that gets taken from their parents which breaks the family unit (Hardin, 2005). So many children get separated from their parents at the borders where they come to seek help. This children end up in child protection services where they are forced to live with strangers far away from their parents. Other parents chose to migrate alone, leaving their children back at home which has its positive and negative effects on the children. the migrant parents that manage to get jobs are able to send some financial support back home which help to finance education, healthcare, food and good housing for the children (Wood, 2018). Parents migrating can also have some negative effects on the children in regard to both their emotional and psychological development. The children that migrate with their parents also face some challenges which include racial discrimination from their peers at school, language barrier, economic security of their parents and challenges in matters of rights to citizenship. In cases where the parents do not acquire good jobs to help sustain the family, children end up lacking basic needs like food and shelter which can greatly impact on their growth and development (Wood, 2018). These children are forced to learn new languages in order to fit in the new societies which are not easy. They are forced to adopt a new life culture that is different from what they knew back at home and it can negatively impact on their understanding of life choices. At the new schools that they join, 70% of these children experience discrimination on the bases of race which affects their academic performance, their social lives and overall self-esteem (Caldwell, 2016).
Life in the host countries is not easy for the immigrants; parents have to take up more than two jobs low paying jobs to help meet the family needs. The parents that do not have any job skills struggle even more because they rarely find any well-paying jobs to help sustain them. As for the ones with some special skills, they have to compete with the natives to get jobs and they are forced to take lower wages because few employers are willing to trust them with their businesses (Mahalingam, 2006). This struggle to survive in the new country leads to a disconnection between the parents and the children, because they rarely have time to be together as a family. The children are also forced to take up any jobs that they can get when they are not in school to help support their struggling parents with the bills (Caldwell, 2016). As a result of little or no parents control and care, children may end up engaging in immoral activities like indulgence in drugs and criminal gangs. This happens as they try to fit in and find comfort in the new society that they have no one to guide them into. Most of the criminal activities that happen in the American society are conducted by immigrants. 4% to 7% of the over 1.5 million people that are in American prisons are an immigrant (Gulasekaram, 2018). This helps to illustrate the situations that immigrant children get themselves into when the parents are busy working two or more jobs to make ends meet. All this situations may end up negatively impacting on the future lives of these children who may have had a much better life in their home countries.
Immigration is a complicated phenomenon; people leave their homes not knowing what to expect in the new countries that they are moving into. When people think about America, all that comes into their mind is the achieving the American dream. They see the migration chance as a path way to a better life, a life of luxury and wealth. They are however wrong, migration is not the answer to poverty and lack of job opportunities. Immigration is illegal and illegal immigrants in America are always jailed and deported back to their home countries. There are many challenges that come with migration; there is discrimination, low wages, family separation and loss of culture among many others. Children who are innocent suffer as a result of migration choice by their parents. They are forced to live a life of fear in the new country that they are taken to and they have to deal with discrimination which affects the rest of their lives. It is right to say that migration has some economic benefits and better opportunities or the migrants where they are able to get better education facilities for their children, better health facilities and also better jobs than they had at their home countries. However, the challenges that they face are more and better policies need to be created to help minimize the challenges and help immigrants settle in much better.
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