Post Migrational Stress
...And yet, there is a paradox: In the short term, at least, immigration may have profound stress-precipitating consequences (Palinkas 1982). (Bensira)
In 1980, the U.S. Census Bureau counted 14 million foreign-born persons living in the United States, of whom 1.7 million, or 11.9 percent, were living in New York City. New York had more immigrants than any other city in the nation. If all undocumented aliens had been counted, the numbers for New York, as for many cities, would have been higher.
In 1984, the most recent year for which published statistics were available in early 1987, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) admitted 543,903 aliens as legal permanent residents of the United States, of whom 92,079, or 16.9 percent, said they intended to live in the New York metropolitan area. The city has received an increasing number of legal immigrants each year since 1965, with an average of about 75,000 a year. It has received a probably rising number of undocumented aliens as well.
Immigration necessitates "acculturation," that is, cultural exchange resulting from continuous, first-hand contact between two distinct groups (see Redfield et al. 1936). Berry contends that acculturation is not only a group-level but also an individual-level phenomenon, which he calls "psychological acculturation." At this level, acculturation refers to changes of overt behavior and covert traits in an individual whose group is collectively experiencing cultural change.
Immigrants must undergo changes in a wide range of areas: physical changes, such as a new place to live, different (and frequently problematic) housing; biological changes, such as different sources of nutrition, unfamiliar diseases; political changes, such as a different type of government and political procedures; economic changes, such as different types of employment, which require different...
View Full Essay
