Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [36]
They experience cultural bereavement. The old country may have been a terrible place, but it was home. It was the repository of all their stories, memories, and meanings. Many times newcomers' bodies are in America, but their hearts remain in their homeland.
Ideally, the third stage is the beginning of recovery. Newcomers begin to grasp how America works. In the fourth stage, also ideally, newcomers are bicultural and bilingual. They can choose to participate in many aspects of the culture.
In general, there are four reactions refugees' families have to the new culture—fight it because it is threatening; avoid it because it's overwhelming; assimilate as fast as possible by making all American choices; or tolerate discomfort and confusion while slowly making intentional choices about what to accept and reject. Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut published the results of long-term studies on newcomer adaptation in a book called Legacies. They found that this last reaction, which they called "selective acculturation," was best for refugees.
They described two other less-adaptive ways of adjusting. Dissonant acculturation is when the kids in the family outstrip the parents. This can undercut parental authority and put the kids at risk. Consonant acculturation is when members of the family all move together toward being American. At one time this rapid acceptance of American ways was considered ideal, but now it appears that this makes families too vulnerable to the downside of America.
In Legacies, Portes and Rumbaut report that most immigrants move into the middle-class mainstream in one or two generations. That is the good news. The bad news is that if they don't make it quickly into the middle class, they won't make it at all. With the passage of time, drive diminishes, and by the third generation, assimilation stops. If two generations fail to make it into the middle class, the following generations are likely to be stuck at the bottom.
Failure to succeed will drive refugee families away from mainstream culture into what Portes calls "reactive ethnicity." Newcomers will revert to enclaves and see failure as inevitable, thus, in many cases, dooming their children to fail.
Portes's research obviously has implications for social policy. We need to help refugees and immigrants early with job training, education, language, and business loans. It's hard to study physics when one is sick and hungry, or to attend GED classes when one has worked all night at a factory. If we miss our chance to help them, we miss our chance to create well-adjusted, well-educated citizens.
I will discuss our environment and the ways we do and do not help refugees in the next chapter, but first I want to tell an archetypal success story. The family arrived here badly traumatized after wandering across many countries looking for a home.
But they were a strong family with many attributes of resilience. In Nebraska, their community helped them survive and their hard work enabled them to build a life for themselves. Thirty-seven million people watched the last episode of the TV show Survivor. This family's story and the stories of most refugees are much more compelling than any contrived reality-television program could ever show.
KAREEM AND MIRZANA
"I could smell freedom in America."
I interviewed Kareem and Mirzana at their high school. Mirzana was small and blond. Kareem was heartbreakingly handsome, with thick eyebrows and black hair. But he was shy and let his older sister do most of the talking.
Their family had lived in a village in northern Bosnia. Their father was an engineer, and their mother worked in a store. They were a hardworking middle-class family. Mirzana said she and Kareem had an easy life, consisting mainly of school and play. Their grandparents lived nearby. Kareem said, "We had everything we wanted. We were never lonely."
Nearby there was a war in Croatia, but their parents didn't think the war would come to Bosnia. One day the Serbs came and