Vivian Louie is an associate professor of education at Harvard University. A former Visiting Scholar, she is the author of Keeping the Immigrant Bargain: The Costs and Rewards of Success in America, which examines the journey of Dominican and Colombian newcomers whose children have achieved academic success one generation after the arrival of their parents.
Q: Let’s start with the title of your book – what exactly is the "immigrant bargain"?
A: The immigrant bargain is one made between immigrant parents and their American-born and/or raised children. The children try to make up for their parents’ sacrifices with migration by successfully going on to college, a transition that would hopefully help them be upwardly mobile.
Q: Your book seeks to explain the sources of academic success among the children of Latino immigrants in America. One popular narrative, which you challenge, argues that culture largely determines why some immigrant groups do better than others. According to this theory, Asian-Americans generally do well in school chiefly because their culture values education more. Why do you think we should be cautious about accepting this explanation?
A: Motivation and optimism, which lie at the heart of the cultural narrative about success, are definitely both important to becoming successful. What we need to think more about, however, is where this motivation and optimism actually come from, and how they are maintained or depressed by the opportunities and constraints immigrants and their children find in the United States. By emphasizing family cultures, the cultural argument shifts the emphasis away from powerful institutional and other factors outside the family, which are crucial to understanding success.
The research I have done with the children of Chinese, Colombian, and Dominican working-class immigrants reveals that a key factor in their paths to college was having access to resources that provided critical help at important times, like referrals to a gifted class, a better middle school, after school programs, and quality college-counseling.
My comparative research also highlights the role of residential segregation and of ethnic community wealth in shaping different opportunities. First, the working-class Chinese were less residentially segregated, and thus had access to better public schools. Second, even when they lived in ethnic communities with substantial rates of poverty, e.g., a Chinatown, these communities also had a lot of transnational (from Asia) and ethnic wealth, which allowed for educational investments; as a result, the working-class Chinese had access to institutions that helped with schooling and ties to middle- and upper-middle class Chinese that provided key schooling information. Both are key advantages that were not as available to the Dominicans and Colombians, despite the fact that they were also highly motivated to help their children with schooling in America.
Q: As part of your interview and survey study, you interviewed foreign-born Dominican and Colombian parents, as well as their children. Why did you feel it necessary to include the voices of both generations? And did parents and children express different levels of optimism about integration with American society?
A: Migration, at least to the United States, is largely a family affair, and certainly, the immigrant bargain has to do with the different opportunities and expectations available to immigrants and their children. And yet, we often do not get to hear the voices of both generations.
This dual generation approach shows how parents and children expressed different levels of optimism about integration with American society. Both parents and children were optimistic about the possibility for economic opportunity in America. But unlike their parents, the children believed being seen as Latino by Americans and seeing themselves as Latino did not automatically preclude them from being American. And unlike their parents, the children were more likely to believe that they simply belonged in America. The children claimed the voice, agency, and sense of inclusion that the immigrant parents we interviewed did not believe could be theirs, at least, not to the same extent as the American-born and/or raised. The children’s experiences confirmed the families’ assumptions that the 1.5 and second generations would be more fully accepted into the American mainstream than the first.
Q: One factor that is extremely important to your study is the interaction between schools and immigrant families. Interestingly, in your interviews with them, students said their parents were not involved as much, at least not in conventional terms. How did their parents engage, and what barriers prevented them from doing more?
A: Children spoke of their parents’ involvement with their education largely as knowing the children were healthy, going to school and not behaving badly. The strategies largely involved getting the children what they needed for school, making sure they went to school and avoided trouble. At home, the parents had children do homework (but did not necessarily actively check the quality of the homework) and tried to restrict how much T.V. the children could watch and what kinds of programs.
So the parents provided moral and verbal support but not the direct support with homework and engagement with their children’s schools that both the schools and children expected from parents. Parents could not participate in these conventional ways because of a lack of time, a language barrier, and lack of comfort with engaging with their children’s schools. We need to remember that immigrant parents face a steep learning curve about how schools are organized in the U.S., and what their children need to do to be academically successful and to apply to college.
Q: In your book’s concluding chapter, you write that access to different institutions can have a major impact on the level of success different groups of immigrants enjoy. What can policymakers do to improve issues related to access and integration?
A: National policies have tended to focus on control of immigrant flows, rather than the actual integration of immigrants and their children. Local and state initiatives for immigrant integration would definitely benefit from more guidance and collaboration with and an overarching vision from the federal government.
Schools should be respectful of parents, non-immigrant and immigrant, and inclusive of them from the outset through home visits, and interpreters for parents needing them. It is important for schools to listen to what parents think they need and want to know and having some parents serve as sources of information. Community-based organizations serving immigrant families should also be included in parental involvement efforts. While community schools are one end of the spectrum, other kinds of public schools would benefit from at least some kind of relationship with community organizations.
At the same time, we need to be aware that the children of immigrants are already attending to crucial processes on their own. We also need to understand that some conventional forms of parental engagement (dramatically increasing the capacity of homework help from parents and their knowledge of the American higher education system) might not be doable, in the short-term, given the time involved with learning these things. So it would make sense for parental involvement programs to collaborate closely with youth programs.
Public schools assume a key role in the path to success and not just for immigrant children but the many children educated at public schools. Teachers need to know the children– as individuals, their cultural backgrounds, and their stage of development – this is as important as knowing the content being taught. Teachers also need to know themselves individually, culturally and developmentally. Of course, schools are made up of more than teachers. We need to help principals to develop programs that can support teachers in these important tasks.
Finally, we should prioritize and invest in afterschool programs, broadly defined, which perform a vital service with helping working-class children to meet their academic and developmental needs. They include the better-known federal TRIO programs, notably Upward Bound, along with the less known but nonetheless very valuable services provided by community based organizations.
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