Immigrant families and US immigration laws

Significance:With the exception of the late 2010s, US immigration laws and policies have emphasized the goal of family reunification, making it relatively easy for relatives of US citizens and immigrants already in the United States to enter the country. However, after arriving, immigrants must use their own resources to adapt. Families are a significant source of social, economic, and emotional support for immigrants.

Before 1882, the US government imposed few restrictions on foreign immigration. With the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, Congress began a pattern of ever more restrictive immigration laws that were in force into the 1960s. Despite their restrictions, however, each immigration law granted special exemptions to family members. For example, the Immigration Act of 1924 imposed quotas limiting the numbers of immigrants from specified countries, but it allowed two exceptions for family members. Wives were permitted to immigrate to join their immigrant spouses; however, husbands of immigrant wives were not granted the same exemption. Also, unmarried children under the age of eighteen of parents who were US citizens were admitted without limitation from countries in the Western Hemisphere.

Post–World War II Changes

During the 1940s, immigration restrictions were eased to support American wartime allies and to assist refugees. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 eliminated racial and gender discrimination but otherwise left the national quota system unchanged into the 1960s. By that time, the civil rights movement had begun to change public attitudes about racial minorities and discrimination. Nevertheless, some political conservatives continued to support immigration quotas to preserve what they regarded as racial and ethnic balance. However, cosmopolitan attitudes, expanding cultural awareness regarding discrimination, and liberalism of the 1960s led to replacing immigration quotas based on nationalities with quotas based on hemispheres.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, ended the practice of using national quotas to regulate immigration to the United States from non-Western countries. After receiving overwhelming support in Congress, the act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on October 3, 1965, and went into effect on July 1, 1968. The law permitted up to 120,000 immigrants per year from the Western Hemisphere and 170,000 from the Eastern Hemisphere, with a limit of 20,000 from any single country. However, while the law allowed for 290,000 total immigrants, the actual numbers of immigrants who entered the United States was higher, as the law continued to allow exceptions for family members. Family reunification visas were unlimited.

In contrast to earlier immigration laws that emphasized the national origins of immigrants, the 1965 immigration law emphasized the goals of family reunification and bringing in skilled immigrants. The law awarded visas first to unmarried adults whose parents were US citizens, followed by spouses and offspring of permanent residents and skilled professionals, scientists, and artists. Initially, parents of American citizens could enter regardless of the law’s quotas. However, in 1976, the law was amended to require children be at least twenty-one years old before their parents were permitted to immigrate. Before then, pregnant mothers could enter the United States without documentation, have children who automatically became citizens, and then claim citizenship for themselves as the mothers of American citizens.

The 1965 law provided an impetus for increased immigration through the ensuing decades, especially from non-European countries. Most of the 22.8 million people who immigrated to the United States between 1966 and 2000 were family members of recent immigrants.

Chain Migration

Chain migration—or officially, family reunification—facilitates the assimilation of new immigrants. It occurs when recent immigrants maintain connections with family and friends in their home countries. After individuals have immigrated to their new country and established themselves, other members of their families and friends often follow. Typically, husbands, unmarried sons and daughters of working age, or young, married, childless couples migrate first.

Early immigrants establish patterns of residency and help recruit, support, and socialize new immigrants, most often family members. Many immigrants choose residential and occupational destinations because of kinship ties in the area. The flow of information about job opportunities in the new country encourages others to migrate and leads to ethnic concentrations such as Scandinavians in the Midwestern United States and Germans in Pennsylvania.

Ethnic enclaves first arose in American cities as products of chain migration from such European countries as Ireland, Germany, Scotland, England, and Italy during the nineteenth century. In some cases, entire European communities regrouped in the United States, where they preserved their family ties and traditions within their new enclaves. This process continued well into the twentieth century. During the 1980s, for example, Filipino immigration increased dramatically, and at least three-quarters of new Filipino immigrants were sponsored by family members already in the United States.

Later immigrants from Mexico and Central American nations had similar patterns of chain migration. Immigrants generally choose as their destinations communities that offer a familiar culture and family connection. Gateway cities, where immigrants first enter the United States, such as Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, attract disproportionate numbers of ethnic families because well-established social institutions, churches, and schools are already in place to provide social and economic support.

By the early 2020s, legal permanent residents could sponsor their spouses and unmarried children for legal permanent residency, while naturalized citizens were allowed to sponsor their parents, married children, and adult siblings. Immigrants whose family members sponsor them do not receive automatic residency or citizenship, but rather must wait months or years to apply for a green card; the length of the waiting period depends on the country of origin.

Some critics have charged that the family provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 tended to shift control of who was allowed to immigrate into the United States in the hands of foreigners through its kinship formulas. They have also charged that chain migration tends to discourage immigrants from assimilating into American society, threatens national security, and harms native-born US job seekers. Some, including Donald Trump, US president between 2017 and 2021, even advocated the termination of family reunification and the adoption of a solely skills- or merit-based immigration system. However, others have argued that the law’s family priority system and subsequent chain migration has actually helped immigrants to adapt and succeed by increasing the social capital of immigrant communities, thereby strengthening American society and reducing dependence on government assistance. Immigrant families often form close-knit, extended family units whose members help raise one another’s children and cooperate economically.

Immigrant Families

Historically, the success of immigrant groups has been closely tied to the ability of their members to establish strong families in the United States. Immigrant families demonstrate striking diversity. Their members migrate for different reasons, with different kinds of resources, and from vastly different homelands. Nevertheless, they all face similar challenges, including ethnic prejudices and discrimination and economic exploitation that can limit occupational and educational opportunities. The close ties among many immigrant families and communities are thought to contribute to the immigrant advantage, in which immigrants tend to do better on a number of measures—such as lower rates of divorce and higher earnings—than native-born Americans in certain areas of the country, particularly the Midwest and South.

The close family ties that typify many immigrant groups have fostered surprisingly good levels of health, despite the challenges faced by immigrants in their countries of origin and while assimilating to their new homeland. For example, immigrant Mexican women tend to have low infant mortality rates and to bear babies with healthy birth weights, despite the fact that they typically come from great poverty. This apparent paradox has been explained, in part, by the close family ties that Mexican immigrants enjoy. However, the longer immigrants reside in the United States, the poorer their health becomes. This deterioration may be the result of changes in their diets and lifestyles. Moreover, immigrant families often experience difficulty obtaining access to health care because of language barriers.

By 2018, many had become concerned about the future of immigrant families in America due to the Donald Trump administration's dedicated crackdown upon undocumented immigration. In early September 2017, the Department of Justice announced that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which former president Barack Obama had implemented through executive action during his tenure and was designed to protect individuals from deportation who came into the country without documentation as children with their parents (also known as Dreamers), was being rescinded and eventually ended. Unless Congress devised and passed a replacement program, hundreds of thousands of people who had been protected under the program would become subject to deportation. In several cases, this meant that people with DACA status who had raised children who are US citizens were concerned that they could potentially be separated from them and sent back to their home countries. Additionally, some of those who gave information to the Department of Homeland Security as part of their application for DACA, which often included such data as their parents' address, worried that this information could be used against any undocumented family members as well.

However, protests and legal challenges in 2018 resulted in injunctions that at least temporarily kept the Trump administration from ending the program and required the continuation of DACA renewals. While a large number of states simultaneously brought a case to district court to argue the unconstitutionality of DACA, decisions, including in appeals, argued in favor of the injunctions and left the program operating. After the case reached the Supreme Court in 2019, the court's majority decision in the summer of 2020 found that the rescinding of DACA had not been sufficiently justified by the government. As an order was given in December by a federal district court judge for the US government to begin the acceptance of new DACA applications once more, some states continued legal petitions against the constitutionality of the program.

The issue shifted again with the election of Joe Biden as president in 2020. As legal challenges to the DACA program continued to mount during Biden's administration, threatening to revoke protections for thousands of Dreamers, Biden worked to protect the program. In an effort to emphasize his commitment to DACA, Biden issued a "final rule" in August 2022, which served to formally categorize DACA as a federal regulation. However, critics deemed the effort lacking as it failed to offer Dreamers much immediate protection and did not allow new DACA applications to be submitted. Experts further warned that even after the rule took effect in October 2022, DACA could still be struck down by courts or overturned by another administration in the future, and many Democratic politicians argued the need for permanent congressional legislation. In early 2023, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a proposed expansion of health-care access for DACA recipients, and in June the bipartisan American Dream and Promise Act, designed to facilitate immigrants' ability to achieve residency status and citizenship, was reintroduced in the House of Representatives.

In the mid-to-late 2010s, the US government also changed how it handled undocumented immigrant families crossing the US–Mexico border. Family detentions increased in 2014, under President Barack Obama, in response to rising rates of undocumented immigration but ended because of a legal challenge. Then, under the Donald Trump administration, in the spring of 2018, immigration officials separated undocumented migrant parents from their infants and children after they crossed the border, criminally charged them, and held the parents and children in different detention centers. Amid public outcry and bipartisan opposition, Trump ended the family separation policy. He instead moved to resume family detentions, remove the legal time limit on detaining children, and expedite hearings and deportations. Immigrant-rights activists argued for increased use of alternatives to detention, such as electronic monitoring, community management, and release on bond, as both more humane and cost-effective measures. Advocates feared that the immigrant children would have long-lasting trauma from the experience. By the end of 2020, however, the impacts of the abandoned policy continued, as activist and justice groups reported that more than six hundred migrant children's parents had still not been located by that point, and at least hundreds more still remained separated. In February 2021, the Biden administration formed a reunification task force by executive order; at the same time, apprehended immigrants largely continued to be turned away due to the emergency rule put in place by the Trump administration during the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden's task force began reunifying families in May 2021. By May 2023, it had helped to reunite about seven hundred children with their parents and also provided mental health services to those families. Though in 2023 Biden's administration ultimately lifted the emergency rule, Title 42, implemented during the pandemic, a new policy put in place limited asylum eligibility to those who had sought refugee status in a transit country prior to coming to the United States.

Another Trump-era policy concerning Mexican immigrants was the "Remain in Mexico" policy, implemented in January 2019, which required asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while awaiting hearings in immigration courts in the US. Human-rights activists opposed the policy, citing its inhumane treatment of migrants who were forced to endure difficult conditions in Mexico as well as a lack of access to lawyers while awaiting hearings. Biden suspended the program on his first day of office, and the Department of Homeland Security announced the program would officially end in August 2022, after the Supreme Court ruled the Biden administration had the right to end the policy earlier that year. However, a federal court challenge led to a decision in December of that year that forced a suspension of the ending of the program.

Elderly Immigrants

Immigrant families face generational conflicts complicated by the immigration process. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed many late-life immigrants to reunite with family members. About two-thirds of elderly immigrants are parents of US citizens. Older immigrants tend to be poorer and less likely to speak English than younger ones. Because many immigrants maintain strong family ties, many older parents live with their adult children. Given this familism, parents provide their adult children high levels of emotional and child-care support, allowing younger family members more opportunities for wage-earning. However, because intercultural expectations can differ greatly, the presence of older parents in households may contribute to family conflicts. For example, many older immigrants expect their children to remain submissive and deferential, even as adults—traits less valued in the United States than in many other countries. Elderly immigrants who arrive in the United States expecting to live with their children and become involved in their day-to-day lives can experience high levels of depression when they are disappointed in their hopes.

Gender Roles and Immigrant Families

After passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, many new immigrants to the United States came from patriarchal societies in which men were expected to dominate their families and that had well-defined divisions of labor between husbands and wives and between parents and children. Many immigrants from Latin America, Asia, the West Indies, and the Middle East viewed paid labor as undesirable for women. They believed that having women work outside their homes could contribute to a loss of ethnic identity because it symbolized the failure of husbands to provide for their families. In practice, however, many immigrant women must work outside their homes because of the husbands’ difficulties in finding adequate employment. When women enter the work force, it contributes to “Americanizing” families and undermining traditional family structures and gender roles.

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