Challenges Immigrants Face Essay Example

For centuries, the United States has been one of the largest recipients of immigrants in the world. According to the American Immigration Council, nearly 50 million immigrants from various countries around the world reside in the United States, with 2.5 million of them children. Immigrant families, both first and second generation alike, face many unique challenges. From discrimination, to assimilating into a new country and culture, or fear of deportation for illegal immigrants, the challenges that immigrant families face daily can make family life difficult. However, laws and legislation such as The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), protects immigrant children who were illegally brought into the United States at a young age from deportation. While the United States has welcomed millions of immigrants and protected many families, in recent decades, issues have arisen over how to limit the number of illegal immigrants from crossing the border unlawfully. For the immigrants that are living in the United States, one of the   major issues that many immigrant families face is discrimination and contrasting views of culture or community that can make it difficult for immigrant families to assimilate. The transition that many immigrant families experience also can lead to many mental health issues that can impact immigrant families and their relationships. Overall, the struggles and challenges that families face upon immigration can greatly impact families and their relationships with one another. 

Upon immigrating, one of the biggest issues that immigrant families face is adapting to a new culture. Often times, the rate of acculturation between parents and their children differs, with children assimilating to a new culture and taking on the values of the culture much faster than their parents. Acculturation differences between parents and their children have often times been linked to lower social competence, self-esteem, life satisfaction, and increased anxiety (Costigan, 2006) While the flexibility that children have to adapt to the new culture faster than their parents is important for their social development, children and parents’ assimilation can have negative consequences for both the children and parents. Gaps between the acculturation of immigrant parents and their children have also been found to cause greater family conflict, which can lead to youth maladjustment (Huq, 2006). Another study found that first generation immigrants often placed a higher value on family relationships than second generation immigrants did, which in most cases, led to family conflict (Chuang & Gielen, 2009). Across multiple studies, immigrant families experienced disagreements and conflict due to acculturation and the differences in how parents and children adapted to new cultures. Across the studies families from different countries and cultures were studied, however a majority of the studies failed to explain the composition of the families, and how it could have affected the results of the studies. Understanding how acculturation can affect the relationship between parents and their children can help both children and parents to understand the challenges of adapting to the different cultures and values and see and understand the challenges that they are each facing.  Support programs for immigrant parents have been proven to help strengthen relationships between immigrant parents and their children, with children whose parents participated in the support program reported far less family arguing, as well as an improvement in the quality of their relationship with their children, problem solving communication, and family functioning (Hamari et al., 2021). Understanding the stress that immigration can have on parents and their children, and providing them support during a difficult change in their life that they are experiencing is important to maintain both the mental and physical health immigrant families.

As immigration can be a difficult and stressful experience, many immigrant children and children of immigrant parents struggle with mental health issues upon immigrating. Differences in acculturation between children and their families have often been linked to depressive symptoms in children, and cause children’s feelings of isolation (Costigan, 2006). However, discrimination that many families face also contributes to depression in children of immigrants, as studies show that children whose immigrant parents faced discrimination are more likely to show signs of depression (Deng & Li, 2021). While children often show carry signs of depression and other mental health issues, parents also had feelings of depression and isolation after immigrating. While many aspects of the immigration process can be difficult immigrant families, families who participated in parent support programs were found to have positive outcomes for mental health. As various cultures may have different norms with dealing with mental health issues, for some immigrant families it can be difficult to acknowledge mental health issues that a person may be facing. However, after the support programs, fathers were more likely to see and acknowledge the depression that many of the mothers in the program carried, while both parents reported higher feelings of happiness, and fewer feelings of loneliness and isolation (Hamari et al., 2021). Through providing support to immigrant parents, feelings of depression can be lessened for both parents and their children, and lead to a better relationship for the families. Understanding the challenges that immigrant parents face and providing them intervention programs that are easily accessible can benefit both the family’s mental health, as well as help to bring families closer together. 

While millions of families immigrate every year, the challenges that they face with both the relationships in their families and metal health issues that they may face are not commonly discussed.  After reviewing the research and learning about challenges that immigrants face both in the United States and within different countries, culture plays a role in the integration and acculturation of immigrant families. Learning about how immigrants to different countries besides the United States are accepted and how they integrate into the country that they immigrated to shows that culture plays a role in immigrant families. Furthermore, after reviewing the research, most of the research that was reviewed tended to be deficit-based. Most of the research focused on the issues that the immigrant families faced, such as issues with acculturation, family conflict and depression and other mental health issues, rather than highlighting the many strengths that immigrant families’ posses. Overall, learning of the difficulties that many immigrant families face and being aware of both the issues and how they can be resolved can help immigrant parents to not only improve their relationships with their children, but with themselves and spouses as well. Learning of the impacts that immigration has on so many families is important to help maintain a strong parent-child relationship for immigrant families.