Aspiration Squeeze: The Struggle of Children to Positively Selected Immigrants

Abstract

Why is it that children of immigrants often outdo their ethnic majority peers in educational aspirations yet struggle to keep pace with their achievements? This article advances the explanation that many immigrant communities, while positively selected on education, still have moderate absolute levels of schooling. Therefore, parents' education may imbue children with high expectations but not always the means to fulfill them. Swedish data on children of immigrants from over 100 countries of origin support this view: net of parents' absolute years of schooling, a high rank in the sending country benefits children's aspirations, attitudes, and educational choices, but not their test scores or school grades. The upshot is an "aspiration squeeze" where, to emulate their parents' relative place in the education distribution, children are left struggling against the momentous tide of educational expansion.

Status Loss: The Burden of Positively Selected Immigrants

“…Following earlier contributions, we define the origin country's reference group as people born in the same year and of the same gender (Ichou 2014, Feliciano and Lanuza 2017, Engzell 2019). Barro and Lee (2013) report educational attainment distributions by 5-year cohorts, so to obtain a distribution specific to each birth year, we interpolate distributions linearly to span the intermediate years within each 5-year groups.…”

Students’ Occupational Aspirations: Can Family Relationships Account for Differences Between Immigrant and Socioeconomic Groups?

“…For example, social position theory refers to the generalized desire to avoid downward mobility between generations (Boudon, 1974; Erikson & Jonsson, 1996), a desire that could theoretically be internalized in children through subtle parent–child processes related to expectations (Jeynes, 2018), cultural habits (Lareau, 2011) or social modeling, which are all difficult to observe in large‐scale data. However, the only way of applying the immigrant effect to this narrative is to refer to parents’ position in their country of origin (Engzell, 2019), but it appears unlikely that this would account for the large aspirational advantage that we found for children of non‐European background. Other potential explanations are that children of immigrant background are “over‐advised” in schools (van de Werfhorst & van Tubergen, 2007) that they underestimate the demands at higher levels of education (Dollmann & Weissman, 2019), or that they believe a high education helps to protect against discrimination in the labor market (e.g., Jonsson & Rudolphi, 2011).…”

“…Although there is a variation between subgroups (Jonsson & Rudolphi 2011; Heath & Brinbaum, 2014), immigrant parents tend in general to hold particularly high hopes for their children’s future (Feliciano & Lanuza, 2016; Raliegh & Kao, 2010) and may consider education as a strategy through which such ambitions can be realized, thus communicating a high value placed on school engagement to their children. This may be especially so as many of them are drawn from the upper part of the educational distribution in their country of origin but have experienced blocked opportunities in the host country (e.g., Engzell, 2019; Feliciano & Lanuza, 2017).…”

Spanning Borders, Cultures, and Generations: A Decade of Research on Immigrant Families

“…Past research has extensively explored how immigrant adolescents traverse the transition to adulthood in destination settings (e.g., Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, Waters, & Holdaway, ; Portes & Rumbaut, ; Waters, ; White & Glick, ). Research in the past decade continues to show how this critical part of the life course is strongly shaped by generational status and social acculturation, socioeconomic status, and discrimination (e.g., Haller, Portes, & Lynch, ; Jeong, Hamplová, & Le Bourdais, ; Treas & Batalova, ) both in the United States and in Europe (e.g., Engzell, ).…”