The Specificity Principle in Acculturation Science

Setting condition: Reason to migrate

Migration may be voluntary or involuntary, temporary or permanent. Some migrants leave their homelands by choice, in search of family reunion and marriage, economic opportunity and employment, the promise of a stable and prosperous future for themselves and their children, or a more compatible sociopolitical climate as in expatriation (Perreira, Chapman, & Stein, 2006). A frequent pathway to acculturation, accounting for about two-thirds of permanent immigration to the United States, for example, is through desired family reunification as promoted by the Immigration Act of 1965 (and analogously Canada’s Immigration Act of 1952). Economic theory posits that migration is also motivated by the desire to maximize economic well-being (Borjas, 1987). As voluntary migrants to the United States, Jamaican families profess to emigrate for better economic and educational opportunities rather than to escape oppression or human rights violations (Ferguson, Bornstein, & Pottinger, 2012). Temporary sojourners (foreign students, religious proselytizers, occupying soldiers, guest workers) usually relocate on a time-limited basis with intentions to return to their country of origin (Berry, 2006; Schwartz et al., 2010).

By contrast with these classes of voluntary migrants, involuntary migrants may be brought permanently into contact with a new culture for political reasons or through slavery, escape, abuse, persecution, defection, financial extortion, sexual exploitation, conquest, or colonization (Gieling, Thijs, & Verkuyten, 2011; Ogbu, 1991). During the reigns of the generals in South American countries such as Argentina and Chile, droves of the middle class sought refuge in their ancestors’ home countries in Western Europe. Refugees displaced by war or natural disasters are currently estimated at 15.1 million persons worldwide (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2015). Asylum seekers from war zones and terror regimes pursue sanctuary in a new country because of fear of persecution or violence. Since 2013, Europe has witnessed a sharp increase in the number of such asylees. In Germany, more than 35,000 people applied for political asylum in the month of June 2015 alone (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, 2015). The United States has witnessed a surge of families and unaccompanied minors since 2014 that originated in Central America on account of drug trafficking, gang violence, and extreme droughts across the Golden Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. North Korea is unwittingly fostering clandestine “chain migrations” among family members who escape hunger and repression to the South and then mount funds to bribe brokers and secret relatives out of the North in seriatim. These different motives surrounding migration—voluntary versus involuntary, temporary versus permanent—and the vulnerabilities and strengths that each introduces condition different pathways of acculturation.

Impetuses and experiences of immigrants, who choose their culture of destination versus ones who do not, differ qualitatively and in ways that shape the drive or opportunity of each to adapt to their new culture (Akhtar, 1999). For example, historical reasons for migration have been invoked to explain why contemporary African American mothers parent in one way and Mexican American mothers parent in a different way: Individuals with family histories of voluntary immigration for economic reasons display less resistance to the dominant culture than individuals with family histories of forced migration through enslavement (Ispa et al., 2013; Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2010). Holroyd, Molassiotis, and Taylor-Pilliae (2001) compared three types of biculturals, keeping overarching cultural context constant: immigrants who permanently relocated from one cultural context to another (Mainland Chinese immigrants to Hong Kong), sojourners who worked in the foreign culture for limited periods of time (Filipina domestic helpers in Hong Kong), and majority individuals who came into contact with a second cultural group and language in their home culture (college students in Hong Kong and in Mainland China). Each group followed a distinct path of acculturative change.

Setting condition: Place

Place, a second setting condition, has several construals, each of which moderates acculturation. One reading of place is the culture of origin. Unlike their Western European immigrant peers to Israel, immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU) to Israel were not able to withdraw their savings before emigration; these contrasting financial constraints had contrasting consequences for the subsequent economic independence and security of each group as immigrants (Mirsky & Barasch, 1993). Although 95% of authorized immigration to the United States from Mexico occurs for reasons of family unification, percentages appealing to that rationale vary dramatically among the top nations sending emigrants to the United States: Philippines (77%), Vietnam (68%), Taiwan (59%), and India (43%). Acculturation among Latin American immigrants to the United States similarly depends on their country of origin (Mendoza, Javier, & Burgos, 2007): Dominican American and Mexican American infants’ vocabulary acquisition differ, even though both are Spanish speaking and living New York City (L. Song, Tamis-LeMonda, Yoshikawa, Kahana-Kalman, & Wu, 2012). Patterns of residence and geographic mobility among Puerto Ricans in the United States contrast with those of other Latino groups, such as Mexicans and Cubans (Denton & Massey, 1989; Massey & Bitterman, 1985; South, Crowder, & Chavez, 2005); Puerto Ricans tend to be segregated from non-Latino Whites at higher rates, and Puerto Ricans fare more poorly on a variety of health outcomes (diabetes during pregnancy, asthma prevalence among children) compared with other Latino groups (Hajat, Lucas, & Kingston, 2000; Kieffer, Martin, & Herman, 1999; Lara, Akinbami, Flores, & Morgenstern, 2006; Zsembik & Fennell, 2005). Likewise, Asian Americans constitute heterogeneous groups of peoples in the United States who trace their ancestry to many Asian countries (Barringer, Gardner, & Levin, 1993; Lowe, 1991).

Early adolescents emigrating from China, Central America, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico and migrating to the United States all separated from one or both parents for extended periods and were all likely to report depressive symptoms (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001). However, these groups differed in how separations were managed. Chinese families frequently migrated as a unit, whereas Haitians nearly always incurred a family disruption. Chinese children reported the fewest, and Haitian children reported the most, depressive symptoms. A meta-analysis of 83 studies revealed an overall positive association between biculturalism and adjustment (Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2013). However, associations varied across immigrant groups and across countries of origin: Latin, Asian, and European immigrants had positive biculturalism-adjustment associations, whereas African immigrants had negligible or negative associations. A study from Germany investigated whether ethnic differences in parenting reflect different investment strategies in the future welfare of offspring as indicated by parents’ expectations about the instrumentality (perceived costs and benefits) of schooling. Comparing German mother–child dyads, Vietnamese dyads, and Turkish dyads, Nauck and Lotter (2015) found differences in parenting styles, reflecting more active control in collectivist cultures (Vietnam) and a strong emphasis on children’s individual needs in individualist cultures (Germany) with an intermediate position of Turkey.

Calling on data from the New Immigrant Survey, Bradley, Pennar, and Glick (2014) described the home environments of children (birth to age 3 years) whose parents legally immigrated to the United States. Results revealed stark variation in 32 indicators of home conditions by both country (Mexico, El Salvador, India, Philippines) and region (East Asia, Europe, Caribbean, Africa). Similarly, when Xu, Farver, and Krieg (in press) compared the home environments of Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Vietnamese Americans, they uncovered group differences in parents’ English reading skills and involvement in literacy activities in English and in their native language as well as in the numbers of children’s picture books in the home. Hernandez and Napierala (2012) reported that more than 60% of children whose parents immigrated from Western Europe, India, and Africa to the United States attended prekindergarten, whereas fewer than 50% of parents who migrated from other regions enrolled their children in pre-kindergarten. In Europe, the Dutch Generation R Study, a population-based birth cohort study from Rotterdam, revealed large differences in family structure across various ethnic minority groups. Only 5% of Dutch toddlers and their peers from Moroccan- or Turkish-origin families were reared by a single parent, but 40% of the children from Antillean, Cape Verdian, and Surinamese Creole children lived in single-parent families (Flink et al., 2012). Generally, immigrants from non-Western countries tend to have stronger feelings of filial obligation than immigrants from Western countries (e.g., Dykstra & Fokkema, 2012; Liefbroer & Mulder, 2006). Emigrants from some countries tend to quickly adopt their new culture, whereas emigrants from other countries tend to maintain their ancestral culture (van de Vijver, in press).

A second reading of place is the culture of destination. Here, the compositions of local and larger cultures are meaningful moderators of acculturation. Many immigrants reside among smaller or larger groups of co-nationals after migration. For example, contemporary Jamaican immigrants have established ethnic enclaves around the United States, including New York City and South Florida (Foner, 2006). Locally, coethnic communities may, on the one hand, assist immigrant acculturation through increased access to ethnic goods, social capital, informational resources, community services, and employment opportunities, that is, the availability of instrumental or financial support, even protecting newcomers from experiences of discrimination. These “enclave communities” can provide important resources for immigrants and may have their own (ethnic) shops, places of worship, mass media, and festivities related to the ethnic culture and education in the ethnic language (van de Vijver, in press). A network of coethnics can serve as a satisfying well spring of shared experiences that positively affects individual immigrant adjustment (Kosic, Kruglanski, Pierro, & Manneti, 2008). On the other hand, being embedded in a heritage-culture community of coethnics may obstruct immigrants’ exposure to or adopting facets of the culture of destination (N. Rodriguez, Myers, Mira, Flores, & Garcia-Hernandez, 2002; Schwartz, Pantin, Sullivan, Prado, & Szapocznik, 2006), and ethnic enclaves may harbor concentrated poverty thereby circumscribing immigrants to resource-poor settings (Chiswick & Miller, 2005; Fernandez-Kelly & Schauffler, 1996; Galster, Metzger, & Waite, 1999; Osypuk, Galea, McArdle, & Acevedo-Garcia, 2009; Portes & Landolt, 1996). For example, island-born Puerto Ricans living in ethnically dense, low-socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods report worse health than comparable island-born Puerto Ricans living in nonethnic neighborhoods (Roy, Hughes, & Yoshikawa, 2013).

In communities where culture-of-origin values are heavily endorsed, culture-of-origin practices might endure despite passing years spent in the culture of destination, or they may even continue between foreign-born immigrants and those born in the culture of destination. In enclaves, immigrants may “remain isolated [from the culture of destination] into the third or even later generations” (Phinney & Flores, 2002, p. 322). As a result, although some culture-of-destination influences (e.g., media) encourage exposure to and adoption of culture-of-destination practices (Stilling, 1997), enclave living may counter the effects of the culture of destination on loss of culture-of-origin values and practices. In the end, the nature of the ethnic enclave facilitates or inhibits acculturation of successive generations of immigrants, and acculturation studies conducted in ethnic enclaves where the culture of origin prevails may yield different findings from studies conducted with otherwise comparable immigrants in immigrant settings where the culture of destination dominates (Kelly & Schauffler, 1996; Portes & Bach, 1985; Portes & Stepick, 1993; Wilson & Portes, 1980). Acculturation is moderated by ethnic enclaves of different sorts. It also varies with the general diversity and orientation of the larger culture of destination.

Some cultures of destination are pluralistic and accepting; others are less so. Key influences on immigrant adjustment and adaptation are the tenor, structure, and resources of the community of reception (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). Receiving cultures constrain and direct migrants’ acculturation options. For example, members of receiving cultures may hold different attitudes toward migrants from different ethnic groups, migrants from different socioeconomic strata, and migrants who emigrate for different reasons. Even shared beliefs foster or discourage cooperation between peoples depending on how they are valued (Purzycki et al., 2016). A nation-wide public opinion poll conducted in the United States in the early 2000s indicated that native-born Americans viewed European and Canadian migrants more favorably and Latin American migrants less favorably (Cornelius, 2002). Further to this point, some majority groups or members might prefer immigrants who adopt culture-of-destination beliefs and behaviors, whereas others favor immigrants who remain separate (Maisonneuve & Teste, 2007; Nigbur et al., 2008; Van Acker & Vanbeselaere, 2012; Van Oudenhoven, Prins, & Buunk, 1998). The countries with the highest rates of immigration are wealthy ones with relatively open nationality or migration laws, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and the Persian Gulf States. However, countries vary widely in their official policies toward immigrants (Helbling, 2013; Huddleston, Niessen, Chaoimh, & White, 2011). Those with immigration laws that are more liberal and grant more rights to immigrants are known to foster feelings of inclusiveness, promote learning of the host country language and culture, and support well-being in immigrants (van de Vijver, in press). (These considerations of the culture of destination have social policy implications discussed below.)

Two-dimensional typological acculturation models tend to conceptualize migrant-sending and -receiving societies (such as Australia, Canada, or the United States) as homogeneous entities as opposed to their multicultural realities, and therefore inadequately capture acculturation experiences. England is today a destination country for migrants from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia but also a source country for emigration to other nations. By contrast, place in specificity acknowledges that many receiving countries are themselves multicultural as are many sending countries and multicultural receiving and sending settings render acculturation multiplicatively multidimensional. Work in identity formation in Caribbean and Russian immigrants to the United States supports this conclusion. For example, Portes and Zhou’s (1993) research with Black and non-Black Caribbean immigrant youth in Florida demonstrated that Black immigrants were vulnerable to unique acculturation pressures because of their appearance as African Americans and shared African heritage; they were likely to live near inner-city African American communities due to limited resources typical of newcomers (Iceland & Scopilliti, 2008); and they experienced similar treatment as African Americans including discrimination (Foner, 2006). Many contemporary Jamaican immigrants to the United States follow a tridimensional model of identification with their heritage (Jamaican) culture, with the dominant destination (European American) culture, and with the relevant destination (African American) subculture (Ferguson et al., 2012). Birman, Persky, and Chan (2010) presented the parallel case of ethnically bicultural Jewish Russians emigrating to the United States. Jewish Russian immigrant youth were much less likely than non-Jewish Russian youth to self-identify as “Russian” and much more likely to self-identify as bicultural “Russian Jewish” or tricultural “Russian Jewish American.” Kim and Wong (2002) found that Chinese parents who immigrated to the United States professed more “Westernized” beliefs pertaining to parental control than did Chinese parents who immigrated to Taiwan (Krogstad & Lopez, 2015).

Language is a bellweather of acculturation to the culture of destination. Subtractive forms of bilingual education are normally designed to assimilate students to the language of the majority culture and do not support the minority language. By contrast, additive bilingual education programs are designed to foster bilingualism. Additive programs are also associated with benefits to academic performance, social development, and possibly cognitive benefits for both minority- and majority-language speakers (Esposito, Sirkin, & Bauer, in press). Different countries emphasize additive versus subtractive approaches to bilingualism, and additive versus subtractive biculturalism may moderate acculturation. More generally, within the European Union languages and cultures of immigrant groups are often poorly protected relative to those of majorities or even indigenous (national) minorities.

A third reading of place is the relation between cultures of origin and destination; contacts may be objective in terms of language and law or subjective in terms of perceptions of similarity or difference (Ward & Kennedy, 1993). Bartlett (1923/1970) hypothesized that resemblance between heritage culture and receiving culture helps to determine the course of acculturation; Searle and Ward (1990) opined that the “fit” between personal characteristics and norms of the culture of destination predicts immigrants’ acculturation; and Rudmin (2003) predicted that the degree of acculturation needed to bridge cultural differences would be high to the extent that background and foreground cultures are experienced as different. Thus, Asian American immigrants, children and adults, who live in Hawai’i, where a traditional Asian value system prevails, could be expected to experience less conflict between cultures of home and school or work than Asian American immigrants living in Arkansas. Returning to the central role of language in acculturation, when ethnicity is held constant migrants hailing from English-speaking countries, or who are otherwise proficient in English, likely encounter less stress and resistance in the United States than non-English-speaking migrants. Among all Caribbean immigrants to the United States, other things being equal, English-speaking Jamaicans experience less discrimination and acculturative stress than French-speaking Haitians. Cultural distance (just as cultural conflict) moderates acculturation (Benet-Martínez & Haritatos, 2005).

Immigrants are often more traditional peoples with historical ties to their religions and religious communities (e.g., Latinos to the Catholic Church, Turks to Islam) that sometimes do not mesh well in the country of destination (King & Boyatzis, 2015). Much of our knowledge of processes of acculturation is based on studies of immigration from the “old world” to the “new world.” As described by Portes and Rumbaut (2001), over the course of two or three generations immigrants in the United States or Canada are likely to become either part of the majority society or part of a minority group but no longer consider themselves to be immigrants. Inter-European migration appears to follow a different pattern. Rather than becoming an integral part of the host society and striving to acquire citizenship, inter-European immigrants reportedly prefer to become integral to both their country of destination and their country of origin (Leyendecker, 2011). Inexpensive flights across Europe, 4–6 week vacations per year, as well as modern communications facilitate staying connected with the country and the culture of origin, including its political and societal institutions.

One study series that evaluated contrasts in cultural “fit” undertook two parallel accultural comparisons (Bornstein & Cote, 2001; Cote & Bornstein, 2001). In the first, mothers in Japan, Japanese immigrant mothers living in the United States, and European American mothers in the United States were compared on a set of variables. In the second, mothers in South America, South American immigrant mothers in the United States, and European American mothers in the United States were compared on the same variables. Theoretically, it is interesting to contrast Japanese American and South American immigrants to the United States because the two immigrant groups come from geographically different but similarly collectivist parts of the globe and are arriving on the same highly individualist U.S. shores. More generally, contrasting two groups from different cultures of origin allows assessing the generality versus specificity of acculturation by fit. South Americans and European Americans share cultural histories, religious traditions, and the like, more than do Japanese and European Americans. One important domain where the dynamics of acculturation play out is in everyday parent–child relationships. In this study series, different patterns in the two cultural contrasts emerged with respect, for example, to self-perceptions of competence in parenting: Japanese and European Americans did not self-evaluate the same, and Japanese immigrants fell between the two; South Americans and European Americans also did not self-evaluate the same, but South American immigrants responded like European Americans. A study from Italy focusing on families with infants compared Italian families with first-generation immigrants from Romania as well as Romanian families in Romania (Moscardino, Bertelli, & Altoè, 2011). Investigating mother–infant interaction and child-rearing patterns, the authors found that immigrant mothers resemble more closely Italian mothers in the importance attributed to stimulating children’s cognitive competence, autonomy, and self-fulfillment, whereas Romanian mothers emphasized values and behaviors related to interdependence/sociocentrism.

Even the perception that cultures of origin and destination differ may capture unique (e.g., affective vs. cognitive) aspects of the accultural experience. Perceived cultural similarity increases liking, for example (Byrne, 1971), and, as years of exposure to U.S. culture increase, perceptions of cultural distance decrease (Benet-Martínez & Haritatos, 2005).

Setting condition: Experience and status

Still other setting conditions moderate acculturation; they include, notably, variations in acculturation immersion experience and immigrant legal status. Experience in, exposure to, and change on account of a new culture all vary and all reshape immigrant beliefs and behaviors. These are largely within-group effects. Parents of Mexican descent report using more harsh discipline than European American parents residing in the same neighborhoods in a U.S. city (Hill, Bush, & Roosa, 2003). However, “less acculturated” Mexican Americans report greater use of harsh discipline than “more acculturated” Mexican Americans. Harsh discipline is also associated with fewer conduct problems and with higher levels of warmth among less acculturated Mexican American adolescents, a relation that is not present among more acculturated Mexican Americans and is negative among European Americans. Harsh discipline therefore appears to be distributed and to function differently among less versus more acculturated Mexican American families. Among immigrant Chinese parents in the United States, greater English media consumption (a marker of acculturation) is associated with more European American normative authoritative parenting (e.g., high warmth, reasoning, responsiveness, and encouragement of children’s democratic participation), which in turn is associated with higher social and behavioral competence among children (S. H. Chen et al., 2014). Similarly, Korean immigrant mothers who are more acculturated to U.S. American culture use warmth more and encourage autonomy more toward their children than mothers who are less acculturated (Shin, Bayram-Ozdemir, Lee, & Cheah, 2010), just as Chinese immigrant mothers who are more acculturated to U.S. American culture use praise more to boost self-confidence in their children than mothers who are less acculturated (Cheah, Leung, & Zhou, 2013).

Degree of acculturation affects adults (parents) and their children both. Less acculturated Asian Americans experience more challenges in their occupational careers even if they are well educated (Saad, Sue, Zane, & Cho, 2012; Zane & Song, 2007), and paternal income is protective of psychological well-being in highly acculturated, not in less acculturated, Mexican American families (Crouter, Davis, Updegraff, Delgado, & Fortner, 2006). Reciprocally, more acculturated parents are likely more accustomed to the mainstream educational system, which may benefit their children; separate from paternal education and family income, more acculturated Chinese American fathers have adolescents who get better grades (Kim, Wang, Chen, Shen, & Hou, 2015). Educational attitudes are more closely tied to educational achievement among more acculturated Asian American mothers (Shen, Kim, & Wang, 2016). More acculturated Latina American mothers read more (Raikes et al., 2006), provide a more cognitively stimulating home environment (M. F. Schmitz, 2005), and engage in more structuring and verbal inquiry during parent–child interactions than less acculturated Latina American mothers (Howes & Obregon, 2009; Teichman & Contreras-Grau, 2006). Likewise, more acculturated Latino fathers spend more time in literacy-related activities with their infants than do less acculturated Latino fathers (Cabrera, Shannon, West, & Brooks-Gunn, 2006). A study of Indian immigrant fathers in the United States revealed that those who were more acculturated (e.g., use English more, eat non-Indian food, yearn less for their homeland) were more engaged with their toddlers than Indian immigrant fathers who were less acculturated, controlling for family characteristics (e.g., parents’ age, family size; Jain & Belsky, 1997). Mexican American and Chinese American fathers who are more acculturated (i.e., longer residency, U.S. citizenship, greater English proficiency) engage in more cognitively stimulating activities, than their less acculturated counterparts (i.e., shorter residency, preference for country-of-destination language use; Capps, Bronte-Tinkew, & Horowitz, 2010).

Adolescents who are more oriented to their heritage culture are more likely to feel they matter to their parents and are more likely to experience feelings of efficacy related to language brokering (translating and interpreting for parents), whereas adolescents who are less oriented to the heritage culture are more likely to feel alienated from their parents and to experience feelings of burden related to language brokering (Wu & Kim, 2009). Not unexpectedly, degree of acculturative immersion has methodological implications: Marin, Gamba, and Marin (1992) learned that the tendency for Latin Americans to both agree and use more extreme response sets diminished as they acculturated more into mainstream European American society.

Once, the status of an immigrant in the New World had thoroughgoing legal, economic, and cultural ramifications. The “casta system” distinguished fine gradations of lineage as, for example, peninsulares (Spanish born in Spain) versus criollos (pure Spanish descent but born in the Americas) versus mestizos (one Spanish and one Amerindian parent) versus castizos (one Spanish and one mestizo parent) versus cholos (one mestizo and one Amerindian parent) versus zambos (one Amerindian and one African parent), and on and on through chino, lobo, mulatto, pardo, and so forth. Sociocultural privileges as well as restrictions accompanied these differential statuses.

Some nation states (Japan) deem citizenship by blood, jus sanguinis, others (the United States) by location of birth, jus soli. The statuses of foreign born—particularly their access to citizenship—differ globally. So-called “nationality laws” vary tremendously. Within the European Union, people could choose their country of residence freely, and an emerging trend for migrants is to acquire and to maintain dual citizenship. An E.U. law established at the end of 2014 allows children to maintain dual citizenship for as long as they choose. In the Gulf States, independent of their length of residence, foreign-born guest workers have no right to citizenship; in Germany and Japan, it is trying (but not impossible) for a foreign-born person to gain citizenship; in Canada and the United States, the foreign born regularly become citizens. Japan issues 27 types of visa, each with different requirements and authorized activities. The criteria for naturalization are provided in Article 5 of the Japanese Nationality Act and include continuous residence in Japan for 5 years or more; at least 20 years of age and otherwise legal competence; a history of good behavior generally, and no past history of seditious behavior; sufficient capital or skills, either personally or within family, to establish support for oneself; and renunciation of foreign citizenship. By contrast, ready naturalization has long been recognized as a crucial step toward full integration of immigrants into U.S. society. According to Warren and Kerwin (2015), 8.6 million U.S. residents were eligible to naturalize in 2013. Mexican nationals constitute the largest naturalization-eligible population at 2.7 million, followed by Indian (337,000), Chinese (320,000), Cuban (316,000), and Canadian (313,000) nationals. Fifty countries have 25,000 or more naturalization-eligible persons. Because Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, their patterns of migration and settlement in the United States differ from other immigrant Caribbean peoples to the United States (Baer, 1992; Massey, 1981; Santiago, 1992; South et al., 2005).

Today, documented versus undocumented legal status constitutes a setting condition that has parallel critical thoroughgoing consequences for acculturates in terms of residence, school enrollment, availability of medical services, and standing before the law (Menjivar, 2006; Yoshikawa & Kalil, 2011). Referring to human beings as “illegal” may be offensive and dehumanizing as well as legally inaccurate: Under Title 8 immigration law, foreigners are only considered “immigrants” if granted an immigrant visa by a U.S. consul. Foreign nationals who are citizens of other countries are misnomered “immigrants.” Legal immigrants differ from the undocumented in level of education and occupational status as well as the psychological and personological turmoil the undocumented routinely face (Gonzales & Chavez, 2012; M. Hall & Greenman, 2015). In the United States, undocumented immigrants, even unaccompanied minors (a “humanitarian crisis” at more than 10,500 in just one month of 2015 in the words of the sitting U.S. President), are not entitled to a public defender in court (Nazario, 2013). One third are children, and 5% to 10% of children are unaccompanied minors (Berthold, 2014). The undocumented immigrant population in the United States hovers around 11 million, and that is likely an underestimate given the difficulty in accurately tracking unauthorized immigrants (Pew Hispanic Center, 2013).

In brief, setting conditions—including reason for migrating, places of emigration and immigration and their mutual fit, variation in acculturation immersion and experience, and immigrant status before the law—shape the ways people acculturate. Acculturation is moderated by setting conditions.

Person: Gender

Females and males may each account for about 50% of global migrants (Boehm, 2012; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2016), but gender differences pervade life (Bornstein, 2013), and therefore acculturation is gendered in that girls and boys, women and men, acculturate differently (Chuang & Tamis-LeMonda, 2013). Transnational migration impacts females and males in contrasting ways, and it modifies relationships between them. Women tend to be more distressed by interpersonal adversities that are common after migration, whereas men tend to be more distressed by migration-associated work-related troubles, financial problems, and discrimination (Farmer & McGuffin, 2003). Immigrant girls who are separated from their parents are more likely to report depressive symptoms than immigrant boys (Suárez-Orozco, Todorova, & Louie, 2002), and immigrant boys score higher on emotional instability, aggression, and behavioral problems and lower on prosociality than immigrant girls (Derluyn, Broekaert, & Schuyten, 2008; Dimitrova & Chasiotis, 2012; Samm et al., 2008). Turkish immigrant mothers and fathers in Germany disagree with respect to conservative gender role values, and Turkish daughters are more egalitarian than their mothers and their male peers, whereas Turkish sons more resemble their fathers in conservatism (Idema & Phalet, 2007). Second-generation Turkish immigrant adolescent girls in Belgium perceive less discrimination and adapt better than boys: They are more open to intercultural contact, have greater aspirations for achievement, and possess less conservative gender role attitudes (Güngör & Bornstein, 2009, 2013). Latina adolescents in the United States perform better academically than Latino adolescents (Henry, Merten, Plunkett, & Sands, 2008).

Acculturation also follows gendered pathways that reflect different affordances and constraints on bicultural development (Suárez-Orozco & Qin, 2006), and girls and boys are often exposed to contradictory norms and demands of cultures of origin and destination. Immigrant children from more traditionally gendered societies may encounter modern mainstream cultures that are organized around ideals of gender equality, a circumstance that has different consequences for girls and boys (Donato, Gabaccia, Holdaway, Manalansan, & Pessar, 2006; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001; Y. Zhou, 2000). Turkish immigrant parents in the Netherlands and Germany place enhanced achievement aspirations for, and greater conformity pressures on, sons than daughters as sons are considered future caregivers of their aged parents in traditional Turkish families (Phalet & Schönpflug, 2001). Among Vietnamese Australians (Rosenthal, Ranieri, & Klimidis, 1996) and Chinese university students in Canada (Tang & Dion, 1999), boys tend to be more similar than girls to their parents in terms of normative collectivism and traditionalism. Among Mexican American adolescents in the United States, perceptions of warmth from both mothers and fathers in early adolescence are related to later intimacy in friendships in girls, whereas only warmth from fathers is related in boys (S. A. Rodríguez, Perez-Brena, Updegraff, & Umaña-Taylor, 2014). Cultural messages may be delivered differently or interpreted differently based on gender. Together these findings point to gender as an important moderator of acculturation among immigrants.

Gender likewise moderates culture-of-destination responses to immigrants. For example, Dutch adolescents tend to evaluate female immigrants more positively than male immigrants (Poppe & Verkuyten, 2012), and Dutch girls tend to be less concerned with ethnic group differences (Verkuyten & Thijs, 2001), and are more likely to consider their Turkish and Chinese peers in Holland as being Dutch, than Dutch boys (Verkuyten, Thijs, & Sierksma, 2013).

Turning from children to adults, prevailing gendered parenting in Dutch majority families distinguishes fathers and mothers in terms of authoritarian (paternal) parenting and permissive (maternal) stances, whereas relatively harsh parenting prevails among minority fathers and mothers alike in Antillean, Cape Verdian, Maroccon, Surinamese, and Turkish-origin Dutch families (Flink et al., 2012). Mothers with stronger Mexican-heritage values engage in more cultural socialization, which is related to their adolescents’ higher ethnic identity and stronger endorsement of Mexican values over time, whereas fathers’ cultural socialization efforts show no similar links (Knight et al., 2011). Parental cultural values among immigrant Chinese Canadians show similar effects (Su & Costigan, 2009): Greater maternal (not paternal) endorsement of family obligation values is associated with higher ethnic identity achievement among adolescents as mediated through adolescents’ perceptions of their mothers’ family obligation values. Adolescents need to perceive their mothers’ family values accurately to influence ethnic identity; cultural socialization efforts of mothers are more closely linked than are fathers’ to the formation of ethnic identity among adolescents. When mothers and adolescents both speak the same language (Chinese), mothers can be more involved in their children’s education, so that adolescents experience greater support (Costigan & Dokis, 2006).

Person: Personality

Other broad individual-difference person characteristics appear to affect the meaning and course of acculturation (C. Chiu, Morris, Hong, & Menon, 2000). Personality is consensually believed to be constituted of five factors (openness, neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness), each of which has been reported to have unique implications for acculturation (Kosic, 2006; Ryder, Alden, & Paulhus, 2000; Ward, Leong, & Low, 2004). Thus, constellations of personality dimensions will predispose people to acculturate differently (P. G. Schmitz, 1994). For example, greater openness may facilitate acculturation because individuals higher in this disposition can be expected to have less rigid views, make greater efforts to learn about a new culture, or modify their own behavior to accord with culture-of-destination norms (Mendenhall & Oddou, 1985). Reciprocally, less open immigrants may perceive cultures of origin and destination more rigidly as they do the boundaries between them (Yzerbyt, Corneille, & Estrada, 2001), and they can be expected to be more refractory to culture-of-destination norms. In this way, openness may lead to the embrace or the denial that one’s two cultural identities, values, and lifestyles can articulate or need to remain separate (Benet-Martínez & Haritatos, 2005). Other personality facets play roles as well. Conscientiousness predicts immigrant effectiveness (Ones & Viswesvaran, 1999); extraversion and agreeableness relate negatively to immigrants’ desire to return to their culture of origin (Caligiuri, 2000); lower neuroticism and higher conscientiousness are associated with culture-of-destination maintenance, and lower neuroticism and higher extraversion and openness are associated with culture-of-destination adjustment (Ryder et al., 2000).

Not only does personality affect acculturation but it is also affected by acculturation. Normative personality profiles on the Big Five contrast in Japanese and European Americans (Bornstein et al., 2007). An examination of personality concordance in Japanese American immigrants with mainstream groups in Japan and the United States revealed that greater involvement in the mainstream European American culture changed personality in Japanese immigrants (Güngör et al., 2013).

Optimism, a positive expectation for the future, is a vital psychological resource for those experiencing negative or stressful life circumstances (Carver, Scheier, & Segerstrom, 2010). Being optimistic may be particularly important for immigrants. For example, many immigrants move to new cultures of destination in hopes of improving their living conditions as well as those of their children. The “immigrant optimism hypothesis” posits that immigrants have faith in the future despite the many barriers (e.g., language, poverty) they encounter to social and economic mobility. Immigrants higher in optimism have better outcomes than those without such faith in the future (Kao & Tienda, 1995; Taylor, Larsen-Rife, Conger, & Widaman, 2012).

Some adults enter a new culture of destination with a strong desire to fully assimilate into a way of life, whereas others come with a desire to maintain values and ways of doing things from their culture of origin (M. Zhou, 1997). Thus, individual motivation plays multivocal parts in migration and acculturation. Motivation is involved in determining steps along the immigration path from first to last, from the decision to emigrate from the culture of origin to how hard to work to learn the language and mazeways of the culture of destination. Individuals who choose to emigrate have been hypothesized to possess a specific set of motivational needs (higher achievement and power motivation, lower affiliation motivation) that differentiates them from those who do not intend to emigrate (Boneva & Hanson Frieze, 2001). Emigrants high in achievement motivation may migrate in search of better opportunities, to seek greater challenges, and to avoid the routine; those high in power motivation may be more willing to take risks to reach their goals and to impress others. Tartakovsky and Schwartz (2001) conceptualized multiple motivations to emigrate—presentation (physical, social, and psychological security), self-development (personal growth in abilities, knowledge, and skills), and materialism (financial wealth)—and they confirmed the relative importance of these motivations in predicting group identification, subjective well-being, and the eventual economic situations of immigrants.

Person: Individual-difference characteristics

A host of other individual-difference factors has also been implicated in acculturation. Some prominent ones are personological, social, and cognitive. Briefly, in terms of personological characteristics, anxiety can be detrimental to task performance when attention and deliberate effort are required, as is the case for immigrants’ learning a new language (Roccas & Brewer, 2002). So, lower social anxiety is associated with better adjustment to the culture of destination (Ryder et al., 2000). Likewise, high levels of aggravation undermine the immigrant experience (Yu & Singh, 2012), and aversion to ambiguity in immigrants is associated with greater stress, expressed emotional disorder, and psychosomatic symptoms (Kosic, 2002; Kurglanski & Webster, 1996). Self-esteem predicts immigrant adaptation (Valentine, 2001): Among Chileans, Turks, and Vietnamese in Norway and Sweden, higher self-esteem relates to possessing bicultural attitudes (Sam & Virta, 2003). Internal locus of control facilitates immigrants’ cultural adjustment, whereas external locus is associated with symptoms of psychological distress (Ward, Chang, & Lopez-Nerney, 1999; Ward & Kennedy, 1992). Immigrants higher in self-monitoring display greater adjustment (Montagliani & Giacalone, 1998). As Hamilton and Hamilton (2009) argued in regard to adolescents transitioning to adulthood, immigrants fare better as they possess transparency (i.e., can “see through” challenges of their present circumstances to plan courses of action that will move them to their future goals) and permeability (i.e., will marshal the effort to put those plans into effect).

Immigrants vary in their national and ethnic identities (Schwartz et al., 2010), as do members of the native population. Immigrants are likely to have more than one identity and to feel differently “at home” in the cultures of origin and destination. Biculturalism refers to one’s comfort interacting in both ethnic and mainstream contexts, ease of switching between the two contexts, and perceptions of advantages in being able to move between the two contexts (Basilio et al., 2014). So, cultural identity moderates acculturation. For example, positive associations obtain between degree of Jewish identity and psychological adjustment among immigrants from the FSU to Israel (Epstein & Levin, 1996). Turkish identity is a positive predictor, and mainstream identity a negative predictor, of language value and preference in Turkish immigrants to various countries (Yagmur & van de Vijver, 2011). Higher compared with lower national identification in Dutch children predicts more positive attitudes toward Turkish and Chinese peers who assimilated to Dutch culture than toward peers who preferred separation (Verkuyten et al., 2013): Higher identifying children are more concerned about identity threats (Nesdale, Maass, Durkin, & Griffiths, 2005; Pfeifer et al., 2007), and therefore higher identifiers are more positive about emigrants who prefer separation from Turkish culture and integration and assimilation with Dutch culture.

Individual differences in cognitive and verbal abilities also influence acculturation, such as the ability to code switch (Carhill, Suárez-Orozco, & Páez, 2008), and commanding more intellectual skills likely facilitates learning a new language and culture (van de Vijver, in press). For example, in the United States, Mexican-origin fathers who speak only Spanish are less likely than other comparable Mexican-origin fathers who also speak English to become engaged in their children’s schools, even though both groups value education (Lopez, 2007). Asian American children are sometimes characterized as a “model minority” (Gewertz, 2004); however, they—as all other groups—display wide variation in academic performance (Han & Huang, 2010; Qin, Way, & Mukherjee, 2008; Sy & Schulenberg, 2005).

Finally, person informs acculturation methodology. The same acculturation construct may be moderated by the reporter assessing and quantifying it. According to Moroccan parents and children, problem behaviors in Moroccan children in the Netherlands are as frequent as those found in indigenous Dutch children; but, according to Dutch teachers, Moroccan children display higher rates of problem behaviors than their indigenous Dutch peers (Stevens et al., 2003). Albanian and Serbian immigrant children in Italy, their country of settlement, feel positively about their social relationships; however, these behavioral patterns go largely undetected by teachers (Dimitrova & Chasiotis, 2012). Teachers judge Asian boys as hyperactive; however, observational measures show they are not rated as hyperactive (Sonuga-Barke, Monocha, Taylor, & Sandberg, 1993).

In brief, person factors shape acculturation. Just as people distribute themselves along a continuum of vulnerability to resilience to specific experiences, and some are affected more, whereas others less, by the same experience on account of individual differences, the two genders and individuals with different personalities, motivations, or other dispositional characteristics acculturate differently—a massive experience. Most typological theories of acculturation elide over such individual-difference factors that centrally facilitate or impede acculturation, but acculturation is moderated by person.

Time: Age

One temporal consideration is the age (or developmental status) of the person acculturating. Wishing to keep Greek culture pure, Plato contended that people younger than 40 should not travel outside the country. Migrating children acquire beliefs and behaviors associated with the culture of destination more easily and readily than migrating adolescents or adults (Knight, Tein, Shell, & Roosa, 1992; Szapocznik & Kurtines, 1993), and adolescent children acculturate faster than their parents (Schwartz, Montgomery, & Briones, 2006). Thus, immigrant youth are more often bicultural and bilingual, and immigrant adults less so (Carhill et al., 2008; Jia & Aaronson, 2003). From 2006 to 2013, the number of children of immigrants (children with at least one foreign-born parent) in the United States grew 12%, from 15.7 million to 17.6 million; in the United States, 24% of children have at least one immigrant parent (Urban Institute, 2016). Bilingual children exposed to high-quality input in two languages prior to the age of 3 perform better in phonological awareness, reading, and language competence than those first exposed to one of those languages after age 3 (Kovelman, Baker, & Petitto, 2008). Individuals who migrate as adolescents or adults have had the longest and most direct contact with their cultures of origin and so retain more heritage mazeways (Shuval, 1982); these factors likely shape how they approach interactions with their culture-of-destination and culture-of-origin compatriots, but the same is less likely the case for child migrants (Portes & Rumbaut, 2006). Immigrants who move at a very early age to the country of settlement and attend school in the new context (sometimes called the 1.5 generation) differ from the first generation that is foreign born and sometimes even the second generation that is born in the culture of destination (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). In the 1.5 generation the adoption of the new culture can be complete or combined with a culture-of-origin orientation.

German 3- to 6-year-olds with a migration background showed more behavioral problems than peers without such a background, and the migration–nonmigration difference was larger in this age range than 7- to 17-year-olds (Hölling, Erhart, Ravens-Sieberer, & Schlack, 2007). A study of Turkish adolescents in Belgium compared 14- to 17-year-olds with 18- to 20-year-olds (Güngör & Bornstein, 2009); even among adolescents, age made a difference, and older adolescents attached greater importance to their culture of origin than did younger adolescents. Older adolescents assign more weight to maintaining their culture of origin in private life, but to adopting the culture of destination in public life, than do younger adolescents. For immigrant adolescents, acculturation is also entwined with normative developmental tasks associated with identity formation (Jensen, Arnett, & McKenzie, 2011; Motti-Stefanidi, Asendorpf, & Masten, 2012).

Individuals who migrate as adults—and especially those who immigrate as older adults—appear to experience the most difficulties with the attitudes and practices of the culture of destination (Schwartz, Montgomery, & Briones, 2006). For adults, acculturation essentially constitutes a kind of resocialization with its attendant challenges. Recognizable foreign accents and frequent inability to speak or read the culture-of-destination language readily identify older migrants, inviting different receptions (including discrimination) from younger migrants and native-born individuals (Yoo, Gee, & Takeuchi, 2009). Thus, reciprocally, in the culture of destination, divergent perceived general obligations and responsibilities to adopt the culture of destination might underlie native children’s, adolescents’, and adults’ evaluations of child, adolescent, or adult immigrants (Gieling et al., 2011). More generically, with age a more complex understanding of groups and group relations develops (Killen & Rutland, 2011). Adolescents and adults consider group-specific norms, and the preservation of those norms, more important than do children (Killen, Rutland, Abrams, Mulvey, & Hitti, 2012). Sample demographic factors might even be expected to play a role in this connection. Latin Americans, with a median age of 29 years, are younger than most other immigrant groups in the United States, and therefore one might predict their easier and more rapid acculturation.

Time: Penetration and adjustment

Time in a new culture (or generation) is a second temporal moderator of acculturation (Scott & Scott, 1989; Scott & Stumpf, 1984). Time and immersion experience (a setting condition) might covary, but are conceptually independent: A migrant might live a lifetime in a cultural enclave (a Chinatown, Japantown, or other) eating the foods, speaking the language, and reading the newspapers of the culture of origin. Nonetheless, family members with the same heritage may differ depending on their length of time in the culture of destination (Mendoza et al., 2007). Immigrant parents who reside in the United States for longer periods increasingly adopt American English language and U.S. customs and likewise change in their parenting (Cabrera et al., 2006; Tamis-LeMonda, Sze, Ng, Kahana-Kalman, & Yoshikawa, 2013; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2008). More time in the United States is a strong predictor of oral academic English-language proficiency as well as gains in social and economic resources among adolescent immigrants (Carhill et al., 2008). Time since arrival in the new country is also positively associated with identity and values, and therefore years spent in a culture of destination typically relate to adopting that culture’s beliefs and behaviors (Kwak & Berry, 2001).

Thus, in families with at least one first-generation parent, the culture and language of origin are more likely kept alive than in families with two second-generation parents (Spiegler, Leyendecker, & Kohl, 2015). For offspring, speaking their parents’ heritage language is important to communicate with the first-generation parent (Leyendecker et al., 2014). Youth with migration backgrounds attribute increased importance to family members compared with their nonmigrant peers (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat für Familienfragen, 2002). Parents and siblings are particularly important for adolescents with both parents born abroad, whereas those who have only one foreign-born parent indicate somewhat lesser importance of primary family members but still exceed their nonimmigrant peers. Only in the third generation of immigrants, whose grandparents were born abroad, does the effect of enhanced family bonds fade.

Thus, family ties remain relatively strong among first- and second-generation immigrants but transition to those of the culture of destination in later generations. Navigating two sets of cultural norms and values simultaneously has implications for family relationships as well as individual development. In immigrant families, discrepancies often exist in parents’ and children’s language skills, social contacts, identifications, and values (Kwak, 2003). These parent–child differences may present significant impediments to positive adjustment among adolescents and their families (Unger, Ritt-Olson, Soto, & Baezconde-Garbanati, 2009; Wang, Kim, Anderson, Chen, & Yan, 2012). For example, acculturation gaps in language abilities can inhibit effective communication, rendering it more difficult to discuss sensitive emotional issues.

Despite the socioeconomic challenges they face, immigrant youth show positive performance in academics and behavioral adjustment compared with their nonimmigrant peers. This situation also changes with time in the culture of destination. For example, Asian and Latino immigrant youth in the United States report fewer behavior problems than their U.S. peers (Coll & Marks, 2009; Fuligni & Witkow, 2004), a difference also noted among Caribbean, African, and Eastern European immigrant youth in the Netherlands (van Geel & Vedder, 2010) and immigrant youth across the 13-country International Comparative Study of Ethno-Cultural Youth (Berry, Phinney, Sam, & Vedder, 2006; but see Albanian immigrants in Greece: Motti-Stefanidi et al., 2012). However, for many immigrant youth length of time in the culture of destination is associated with erosion of academic performance, familial bonds, and physical health (Hill & Torres, 2010; Perreira, Fuligni, & Potochnick, 2010; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001), a regular phenomenon now referred to as the “immigrant paradox” (Coll & Marks, 2009). Thus, for example, people of non-Dutch descent who grow up in the Netherlands acquire a cultural orientation that is similar to those of Dutch descent (Dykstra et al., 2013). The immigrant generation is mostly or exclusively fluent in their first language, their children are also fluent in that language to some degree (depending on which language their parents speak with them), but the third generation—immigrants’ grandchildren—speak the language of destination exclusively (Fishman, 1966; Verdon, McLeod, & Winsler, 2014). Nativity is an important predictor of physical health (Acevedo-Garcia, Bates, Osypuk, & McArdle, 2010), chronic disease (Huh, Prause, & Dooley, 2008), and mortality (Borrell & Crawford, 2009; Palloni & Arias, 2004), and better health outcomes often obtain in the first compared with later generations (Franzini & Fernandez-Esquer, 2004). It is also possible that the health paradox reflects person-specific selectivity—the migration of people with better health profiles than those remaining in culture of origin (Martinez, Aguayo-Tellez, & Rangel-Gonzalez, 2014).

Time: History

Historical time is a third temporal consideration in acculturation. Different cohorts of migrants (even from the same cultures of origin) migrate for different reasons, face different acculturation issues (even in a common culture of destination), and thus likely follow different accultural trajectories. Consider, first, historical changes in cultures of origin that inflect acculturation. Chinese immigrants to the United States in the 19th century worked as laborers on the first Transcontinental Railroad and emigrated due to overpopulation and poverty experienced in Canton Province; in the mid-20th century, refugees from Southeast Asia fled to the United States on account of wars in their homelands. Once, undocumented immigrants in the United States were predominately young men who crossed the U.S. southern border in search of work; contemporary demographic data reveal that the typical undocumented immigrant is 35 or older and has lived in the United States for a decade or more. In the early 21st century, the migrant flow from the roiling Middle East and Africa to Europe followed a path from Libya across the central Mediterranean to Italy; as that trek was long and increasingly dangerous, a shorter and safer route from Turkey to Greece across the eastern Mediterranean (Aegean) became preferable; but with the closure of Greece’s northern borders to migrants by neighboring countries, the Libyan–Italian route has partially reopened. Short-term sociopolitical changes in sending countries can have long-term immigration implications in receiving ones. January 1, 2016, marked the end of China’s 40-year one-child policy. Chinese immigrants to Australia’s Gold Coast born before and after that date will have experienced very different childhoods.

So, historically changing circumstances in cultures of origin may be determinative in acculturation as are changes in cultures of destination. For example, contexts of migrant reception change over time. Italian and Jewish are today mainstream influences in New York City, but during the late 19th and early 20th centuries many Italian and Jewish immigrants in New York City were segregated (Sterba, 2003). Puerto Ricans migrating to New York in the 1950s and 1960s met with discrimination, but New York in the 2000s and 2010s is more hospitable toward Latin American immigrants (Block, 2009). Conversely, Middle Eastern migrants in Europe and the United States may be experiencing more suspicion and discrimination since September 11, 2001, than they had experienced previously (Brüß, 2008; Critelli, 2008). In the Netherlands today, Moroccan and Turkish Muslim immigrants are evaluated similarly and negatively (Hagendoorn, 1995; Verkuyten & Kinket, 2000) as Dutch reportedly perceive high levels of threat from Muslim immigrants (Velasco Gonzalez, Verkuyten, Weesie, & Poppe, 2008), especially those who maintain their identity and culture (Velasco Gonzalez et al., 2008). Iraqis and Syrians who had the fortune to land on the beaches of Lesbos, Greece before March 19, 2016, may petition for asylum in Europe; Iraqis and Syrians who had the misfortune to wash ashore after March 20, 2016, are being returned to Dikili, Turkey, and only every other one may petition for asylum. The time difference of a day may alienate immigrant families forever.

Many European nations once perceived themselves as countries of emigration rather than preferred countries of immigration. This perception changed from the 20th to the 21st centuries as now many of the same European countries are targets for immigration. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data from 2010 indicate that Germany has higher immigration rates than the United States. In 2013, for example, 7 million people living in Germany were foreign nationals, and another 8.6 million were immigrants with a German passport. As a result, 20% of the German population is either foreign born or has at least one foreign-born parent, and every third child age 5 or younger in Germany grows up in an immigrant family. However, Germany’s long-standing open-arms policy toward arriving migrants is now changing. Germany decided in 2015 to tighten its border controls and take in far fewer asylum seekers. Similarly, Sweden first offered permanent residency to all Syrian refugees but in 2015 backed away from that commitment and now offers only temporary sanctuary as the norm. More generally, the principle of passport-free travel enshrined in Europe’s Schengen Agreement is coming under scrutiny. Sweden, Denmark, and Austria have abandoned passport-free border crossings as the number of immigrants arriving at their borders surged to the highest levels since World War II. Forty-thousand–plus refugees are stranded in Greece, and Turkey has agreed to become a regional refugee camp in return for Euros and E.U. considerations (visa-free European travel for Turks, etc.). Reciprocally, the number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Latin America to the United States, which more than tripled to 12.2 million between 1990 and 2007, dropped by about 1 million in 2015 on account of the U.S. economic downturn (Krogstad, 2016).

Changing technology is playing a role in acculturation as well. The flood of emigrants from Eastern Europe to the United States at the turn of the 20th century could not realistically expect to stay in contact with their cultures of origin, and the finality of their emigration doubtless engendered wholly embracing new prospects. Emigrants today phone, Skype, and text back home at will, fostering a starkly contrasting set of contingencies. So, Jamaican immigrants in the United States maintain close ties with relatives on that Caribbean island through diverse forms of communication and remittances (Ferguson et al., 2012), and Hmong immigrants in the United States Skype to maintain connections to Shaman practices back in Southeast Asia (see The next wave: Hmong shamans unite at https://www.facebook.com/HmongShamans). Once, historically, immigration was essentially permanent and unidirectional; today, immigrant families often return to their native countries (reverse migration) temporarily (as tourists) or permanently (as repatriates). Such kaleidoscopically waxing forces of the new “Columbian exchange” (globalization) will likely continue to alter the complexion of acculturation. Even the shift in language use by generation (described earlier) may be changing in rate and taking place more rapidly (Hurtado & Vega, 2004). Young children in the United States who are from immigrant, multilingual families often become English-dominant during their preschool years and decelerate their mastery of their parents’ native language due to increases in exposure to English inside and outside their home (Bridges & Hoff, 2014).

In brief, time is a factor in acculturation. Acculturation is not static but is dynamic on multiple planes. Yet, prevailing typological models of acculturation rest heavily on temporally frozen views of individuals and intergroup relations and so are of limited value. Acculturation is moderated by time.

Process: Socialization

Socialization is generally understood as a “process by which individuals acquire social skills or other characteristics necessary to function effectively in society or in a particular group” (American Psychological Association, 2013). In traditional conceptions of socialization, socializers’ primary roles are to communicate standards of behavior to socializees, help them understand and accept an appropriate identity, and guide them toward socially prescribed norms (Bandura, 1977; Davey, 1983; Devine, 1989). Often socialization is implicit, informal, and nondidactic. For these reasons, this process is an unspecified catchall and frankly mysterious, hardly ever operationalized except by appellation—internalization, introjection, identification, and the like. In the family, culture-of-origin socialization normatively reflects means by which parents transmit to their children the history, values, and customs of their culture of origin (Hughes et al., 2006; Peck, Brodish, Malanchuk, Banerjee, & Eccles, 2014). For adults, for whom acculturation necessitates that resocialization referred to earlier, the culture of destination must be the effective agent, and they must (somehow) pick up more culture-of-destination messages. Who socializes children into their new culture of destination is less clear and feasibly distributed. Parents, maybe, but less probably; unlikely because of disjunctions that distinguish traditional and worn parent culture-of-origin beliefs and behaviors from new and exciting child culture-of-destination beliefs and behaviors. For immigrant children, parents’ cultural culture-of-origin values may be at odds with those of the culture of destination. Peers are likely effective agents (Bornstein, Jager, & Steinberg, 2012). The acculturating child’s compelling dilemma is whom to follow and what beliefs and behaviors to adopt when the cultures of parent and peer, of family and society, differ. For example, Japanese parents avoid confrontations and often retreat when children resist their requests, whereas U.S. American parents tend to exercise more direct control of children and may double down when children resist their requests. Japanese parents threaten to banish their disobedient children outside the home; U.S. American parents threaten to ground theirs inside the home. Chinese mothers opt for explicit verbal instruction when socializing control of negative emotions in their young children, whereas European American mothers favor modeling. Migrant children attempting to acculturate in Japanese American or Chinese American households in the United States would be exposed to warring accultural contingencies.

Process: Learning

A second more defined mechanism in acculturation is learning, addressing the cognitions migrants possess and the practices migrants pursue and their differential return. Here, as in classical operant theory, appropriate and desirable beliefs and behaviors associated with the culture of destination are incentivized and rewarded (through group acceptance, job promotion) and undesirable ones discouraged and even negatively reinforced (through peer rejection, discrimination). A popular form is social learning theory. From this perspective, individuals acquire new beliefs and behaviors through reinforcement, observation, and subsequent imitation of salient models, particularly those who are powerful. By dint of their higher status position within the society and their roles as providers of support and advice, denizens of the culture of destination may be seen as both powerful and nurturant by acculturating individuals.

Process: Instruction

A third mechanism entails outright instruction in cultural practices. Formal tuition, curricula, and other similar institutional systems might constitute forms of didactic acculturative transfer, although Evans and colleagues (2012) argued that ethnic minority parents’ efforts to teach their children about the values and practices of culture should receive greater attention as central family influences on development. In this regard, Farver, Xu, Lonigan, and Eppe (2013) observed that Latin American parents’ engagement in Spanish literacy activities is related to their children’s Spanish oral-language and print-knowledge skills, whereas parents’ involvement in English literacy activities is associated with their children’s English oral-language skills. Similarly, analyzing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort, Han (2008) learned that the academic trajectories of immigrant East Asian children related more to family factors (the home environment, parents’ educational practices, and expectations) than to school factors (resources, teaching practices, and learning environment), but the reverse was true for Caribbean and Latin American children. For adult migrants the workplace or second-language classrooms are likely locations of instruction. Indeed, an immigrant’s success at becoming a citizen of the United States entails studying for and passing a formal “Citizenship Interview and Test” (100 questions such as “What is the supreme law of the land?” and “What is one right or freedom from the first amendment?” (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, n.d.).

Process: Opportunity

A fourth common route to acculturation occurs through the types of affordances provided or encouraged in the migrant’s life. Access to particular people or activities or settings (pediatricians, work, school) presents opportunities to acquire particular cognitions and practices; denial of such access operates oppositely (Reese & Gallimore, 2000). Better resourced families tend to invest in offspring well-being through providing more opportunities for productive encounters with potentially enriching materials and events (Conger & Donnellan, 2007). To the extent that certain culture-of-destination opportunities become regular in their lives, migrants’ knowledge, expectations, preferences, and actions are likely to acculturate. Early in life, children usually hear just (or mainly) the culture-of-origin language at home and only become bilingual through later access to the culture-of-destination language. The more children are exposed to any particular language, the more capable they become in that language. Thus, increased interaction with members of the culture of destination is associated with increased culture-of-destination language proficiency (Ward & Kennedy, 1999). Subtle and not-so-subtle facets of context contribute to immigrant youth development. Hamilton and Hamilton (2009) focused on developmental processes surrounding the transition from adolescence to adulthood, emphasizing programs and institutions that support the transition. For youth in disadvantage, including immigrants to Germany, the school-to-work transition affords a singular opportunity to advance. To take advantage and effect this change, however, youth must reside in a society that allows social mobility and live during a period when upward movement is possible. In Germany, apprenticeship is a popular model that supports this transition. Relative to their German peers, however, immigrant youth’s poorer school performance, limited language skills, conflicting cultural traditions, and discrimination hamper their access to and participation in apprenticeships. It takes small business owners in Germany to look past these differences and adopt immigrant youth into advantageous mentoring relationships. Children growing up in an Early Second Language Acquisition setting (ESLA; De Houwer, 1990) differ from children who may regularly hear both minority and majority languages in the home from birth, known as Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA; Meisel, 1990). Exposure to and mere consumption of cultural products in the locale of destination (TV and foods) reinforce a cultural identity concordant with that culture (Cheryan & Monin, 2005; Guendelman, Cheryan, & Monin, 2011). On the basis of high levels of exposure to U.S. American culture in Jamaica (via U.S. media, consumer products, and tourism), some nonimmigrant island Jamaicans display “remote” acculturation toward U.S. culture, beliefs, and behaviors that in some respects resemble those of Jamaican immigrants actually living in the United States (Ferguson & Bornstein, 2012).

Process: Transaction and beyond

In practice, acculturation is not unidirectional (as the foregoing socializer–socializee processes imply), but acculturation is interactive, transactional, and bidirectional. As Lerner (2002) crisply explained, individuals actively participate in their own development. Therefore, observation and imitation are notably efficient mechanisms for acquiring cultural information. Migrants both search for and respond to cultural cues in different situations and draw implications from them that guide their future beliefs and behaviors. Thus, children think and seek to become imbued with culturally appropriate beliefs and behaviors, even ones they do not yet enact. Conformity to the culture of destination is typically seen as a disposition to copy an individual’s reference group rather than any minority displaying a different option. Conformity is especially common in contexts of ignorance or uncertainty, as characterizes the young and the acculturate. Normative conformity aligns the conformist’s behavior with local norms. In acculturation, conformity can pay off through capitalizing on established expertise of the majority in the new community (Whiten & McGuigan, in press).

Only a small variety of acculturation processes has been identified, and as suggested earlier these mechanisms are still not well understood. Some new ones are also on the horizon. For example, intergroup attitudes appear to emerge in young children in forms indistinguishable from those of adults (Dunham, Chen, & Banaji, 2013). Implicit intergroup attitudes appear not to require a protracted period of internalization or social tuning but are characterized by early enculturation and developmental invariance. In-group preference and status-based enculturation may be automatic and early-emerging mechanisms that represent rapid social orienting, in which children map membership and status onto existing social groups while simultaneously acquiring group representations. Deeper understandings of acculturation will depend on closer penetration of process mechanisms.

In brief, to effect acculturation, four broad classes of process mechanism have been identified—socialization, learning, cognition, and opportunity. Participation in a culture of destination can structure acculturates’ experiences in ways that increase the likelihood that they acquire beliefs and behaviors that more faithfully jibe with those of the mainstream society and that children develop into culturally successful members of that society. However, cultures may vary in the normative use and effectiveness of different process mechanisms and use different mechanisms for different outcomes: Socialization may be the primary mechanism for successfully acquiring social information about a new culture, but cognitive scaffolding may be more efficacious for acquiring declarative information. Add to these factors the agency of the acculturate. Each mechanism may be effective in its own way, so acculturation is likely moderated by process. The specific domain that is acculturating is a final moderating factor.

Domain: Multidimensionality

The domain term in specificity is not new. Acculturation science already broadly distinguishes among many classes of dependent variables that acculturate differently. So-called public domain activities tend to be aimed at participation in the social life of the culture of destination (interpersonal contacts), whereas so-called private domain activities tend to involve personal value-related matters of the culture of origin (family celebrations). The two realms acculturate differently. For example, Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands attribute more importance to their culture of origin in the private domains of home and family but more importance to their culture of destination in the public domains of school and work place (Phinney, 2006). From a different perspective, Ward (2001) distinguished among affective, behavioral, and cognitive areas in human life (referred to as the ‘‘ABCs of Acculturation’’). Each, she observed, acculturates uniquely. Additionally, acculturation might be biological (including, e.g., medical health status), psychological (including, e.g., well-being), or sociocultural (including, e.g., pragmatic communicative competence). Generally, domain-sensitive analyses reveal that different domains follow different trajectories of acculturation. Thus, an immigrant may seek to behave and be treated like culture-of-destination workmates, speak the languages of cultures of origin and destination, and maintain culture-of-origin relationship hierarchies or religion within the family. Acculturation is multidimensional and selective. Asian American and Muslim adolescents may or may not be proficient in or use their families’ native language but still identify strongly with their heritage or religious values (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001), and Latin American adolescents who speak little or no Spanish might still endorse a Latin ethnic identity (Schwartz, Zamboanga, & Jarvis, 2007). For some Asian American adolescents (e.g., Chinese), socioemotional well-being appears to improve with acculturation (S. H. Chen et al., 2014), but for other Asian American adolescents (e.g., Filipino) acculturation is associated with poor adjustment, academic disappointment, and substance abuse (Eng et al., 2008; Hahm, Lahiff, & Guterman, 2004).

Derluyn et al. (2008) compared migrant adolescents from 93 different countries to Belgian peers. They found more traumatic experiences, peer problems, and higher avoidance, but fewer anxiety, externalizing, and hyperactivity problems, among the immigrant adolescents than native Belgium youth. The same dependent variable can also have different effects in different contexts. For example, the status or prestige of a minority language versus a majority language has an impact on children’s success at school: Academic achievement of children whose minority language is as respected as the majority language is much closer to that of the majority than when a discrepancy in status of the two languages is considerable (Goldenberg, Rueda, & August, 2006). In college students from immigrant families, self-endorsed attitudes regarding obligations to family are positively related to academics, but behaviors initiated in response to perceived family demands are negatively related to academics (Tseng, 2004). Studies of Japanese and Latin American immigrants to the United States have suggested that transformations of parenting styles are uneven, with a tendency for behavioral adjustments in parenting practices to occur before changes in parenting cognitions (Bornstein & Cote, 2001, 2004; Cote & Bornstein, 2001).

Domain: Dynamic adaptability

So, acculturation is multidimensional and selective; it is also dynamic. Increasing involvement with a new culture is believed to instigate changes in immigrants that result in better fit with the norms of the culture of destination and reduced fit with the norms of the culture of origin. However, this dynamic depends on the domain and is not always advantageous. In some domains immigrants may maintain their culture of origin (e.g., religious practices in Foner & Alba, 2008; Ross-Sheriff, Tirmazi, & Walsh, 2007); in other domains, immigrants may be in the process of changing from culture of origin to destination (e.g., vocal interactions of parents in Gratier, 2003; knowledge of child development in Bornstein & Cote, 2007; restrictive childrearing attitudes in L. H. Chiu, 1987; Lin & Fu, 1990); in still others, immigrants may have completed a change from their culture of origin to resemble their culture of destination (e.g., personality in Güngör, Bornstein, & Phalet, 2012; mother–infant interaction in Bornstein, Cote, Haynes, Suwalsky, & Bakeman, 2012; Caudill & Frost, 1972, 1974). Caudill and Frost (1972, 1974), for example, observed Sansei (third-generation) Japanese American mothers and their Yonsei (fourth-generation) infants. In a three-culture comparison, Sansei mothers behaved more similarly to European American mothers than to mothers in Japan. To the extent that origin and destination culture norms are dissimilar, exposure to and involvement in the culture of destination may establish or strengthen ways of being that are more relevant and adaptive to the acculturation context.

When investigators focus on a single outcome domain in acculturation, or in the typological school on one general pattern, they obscure the actual and more differentiated domain-specific nature of acculturation. Furthermore, domain variability in acculturation suggests certain other conclusions. One is that some aspects of life might be more plastic and sensitive to situation-specific demands, whereas others are less so. A second is that change in one acculturation indicator does not guarantee that others will change or change in the same degree or direction or on the same timetable. Acculturation research in many domains (self-evaluations, emotions) has revealed that immigrants become increasingly concordant with the normative patterns of the culture of destination over time and through contact (De Leersnyder, Mesquita, & Kim, 2011; Heine & Lehman, 2004). Such acculturation may be positive or adaptive. As discussed in reference to the immigrant paradox, acculturation is not uniformly positive; Riosmena, Everett, Rogers, and Dennis (2015) examined how the health of foreign- and U.S.-born Latin Americans deteriorates with increasing exposure to mainstream U.S. society. Acquiring U.S. culture traits that have untoward health effects—negative acculturation—has become the primary explanation for generational Latin American health deterioration in the United States.

Startlingly, the same domain may be positive and negative. Language brokering refers to assistance that children provide their immigrant parents in translating and interpreting written or spoken, formal or informal, cultural material from the culture of destination (Chao, 2006). Language brokering might benefit children’s cognitive and emotional development (Hua & Costigan, 2012) because it is associated with greater biculturalism and academic performance (Buriel, Perez, DeMent, Chavez, & Moran, 1998), higher ethnic identity and cultural value endorsement (Weisskirch et al., 2011), enhanced perspective taking and greater empathic concern (Guan, Greenfield, & Orellana, 2014), and greater respect for mothers and fathers (Chao, 2006). However, language brokering also confers risks on children by placing too much responsibility on them or exposing them to sensitive personal information about a parent or themselves.

In brief, acculturation does not affect all domains of the psyche identically. Domain specificity predicts that different indices of acculturation can and will vary. Some indicators of acculturation may not change, and others change or change at different rates, to different degrees, in some but not other migrants, and so forth. Any uniform model of acculturation is inappropriate and misplaced. Rather, specificity appears more apt: Acculturation is moderated by domain.

Setting Condition × Time

Years spent in the culture of destination may be unrelated to adopting majority culture practices among individuals who immigrate as adults to ethnic enclaves where culture-of-origin cognitions and practices prevail. In such enclaves, those immigrants can remain separated from the culture of destination across generations (Phinney & Flores, 2002). As a result, even if enveloping media promote acquisition of culture-of-destination cognitions and practices (Stilling, 1997), enclave conditions offset the effects of the culture of destination on loss of culture-of-origin cognitions and practices. New immigrants and older immigrants born long before in the sending society may continue to resemble one another. However, spatial assimilation theory posits that, as they adapt in a society, immigrants tend to move out of enclaves and into less ethnically circumscribed areas (Alba & Logan, 1991; Massey & Mullan, 1984). Whereas first-generation immigrants may choose to live with coethnics as a strategy of adaptation, for later generations continued residence in an ethnic enclave may be a consequence of blocked opportunities and housing market segregation. Culture is treated as static and nonchanging, but culture is dynamic and is constantly changing. There is variability regarding what cultures value or find relevant at different points in time along the life span. As noted earlier, at one time Asians immigrated to the United States for economic reasons, whereas at a later time political motivations prevailed.

Person × Time

Asian American mothers are primarily responsible for socializing younger children (Inman, Howard, Beaumont, & Walker, 2007), and Asian American fathers are primarily responsible for socializing older children (Costigan & Dokis, 2006; Kim, Wang, Orozco-Lapray, Shen, & Murtuza, 2013). In the contemporary migration from the Middle East and Africa to Europe, most initial asylees were young single men, but the balance later shifted to women and children as well as unaccompanied minors, who have since accounted for the plurality of asylees; the gender gap in acculturation of values is larger in older rather than younger Turkish adolescents in Belgium (Güngör & Bornstein, 2009, 2013); years in the culture of destination are more strongly associated with adoption of culture-of-destination practices among adolescent girls than boys (Schwartz, Montgomery, & Briones, 2006); the risk for depression among Vietnamese refugees to the United States increases 2 years after their arrival but only among the older population (Hinton, Tiet, Giaouyen, & Chensney, 1997). First-generation women are sometimes depicted as carriers of their heritage culture because of their more limited connections to the wider receiving society beyond the home (Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001); as later generation women acquire greater understanding of culture-of-destination policies surrounding education, welfare, and health care, and they become skilled in the social mazeways of the culture of destination, they appear to embrace attitudes of those cultures of destination (e.g., gender role egalitarianism) more readily than do men (Hojat et al., 2000; Phinney & Flores, 2002; Valentine & Mosley, 2000).

Process × Time

Adults do not call on the same rewards to encourage behavior in infants, toddlers, children, and adolescents, even if the desired acculturation goals across development (e.g., adjustment) are the same. Mainland China had a closed-door policy to immigrants until the late 1970s, and Chinese there, unlike Chinese in Hong Kong, had few contacts with Western cultures until products from the West were introduced through commerce, media, and travel. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that Mainland China is less multicultural vis-à-vis the world at large than Hong Kong (S. X. Chen, Benet-Martínez, & Bond, 2008). Research with immigrant families often assumes that immigrant parents are threatened by their children’s increasing involvement in the mainstream society in the wake of immigration. Adolescents’ involvement, however, does not inevitably create conflict or distress in immigrant families, even when parents do not share a high orientation to the mainstream culture (Costigan & Dokis, 2006). This is likely because immigrant parents typically desire their children to be successful in the new culture, and their children’s abilities to speak the new culture’s language, to form positive relationships with new culture peers and others, and to understand nuances in how members of the new culture think and behave are all indications of successful attainment of this goal. Parents are introduced to a host of new ideas regarding child rearing after immigration, and they may modify their parenting cognitions and practices to more closely match those of the larger society to socialize their children to be successful in a new multicultural context (Yee, Huang, & Lew, 1998). Value transmission studies within families demonstrate that parents understand what is normatively important in a society and socialize their children toward those values, even when those values do not mirror parents’ own (Benish-Weisman, Levy, & Knafo, 2013). Thus, immigrant parents’ socialization goals for their children may not perfectly match their own personal values (e.g., Farver, Xu, Bhadha, Narang, & Lieber, 2007), and parents may come to actively and intentionally foster their children’s competencies in the mainstream culture regardless of their own cultural orientation.

Domain × Time

Different adaptations appear to follow different developmental courses. Researchers of acculturation studies point to decreases in ethnic behaviors, but not beliefs, from the first to the second generation (Bornstein & Cote, 2006; Nagata, 1994). Among immigrants to Israel from the FSU, more positive changes in acculturation took place 5 years after immigration as compared with 1 year (Shuval, 1982). Acculturation effects may need time to consolidate. The “immigrant paradox” suggests that physical, psychological, social, and cultural outcomes vary depending on the time since immigration (Borrell & Crawford, 2009; Coll & Marks, 2009; Palloni & Arias, 2004). Thus, cumulative attainment must be considered to fully explain health deterioration among immigrants in the United States (Riosmena et al., 2015).

The acculturation literature even evidences three-way interactions: In ethnic enclaves, years spent in the culture of destination as a marker for adopting culture-of-destination practices applies to females who immigrated at young ages, but its weight with males and with females who immigrated as adults is questionable (Schwartz, Montgomery, & Briones, 2006). The effects of acculturation on peer liking depend in part on perceived host national belonging, vary across immigrant groups, relate to intergroup contexts rather than to migration per se, and differ for high versus low national identifiers (Verkuyten et al., 2013).

In brief, as is the case in moderator analyses, the terms of the specificity principle of acculturation science interact.

Pertinence of the specificity principle to acculturation theory and research

The specificity principle has immediate implications for defining acculturation. Acculturation has traditionally included “. . . those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups . . .” (Redfield et al., 1936, pp. 149–150). However, considering a broadened definition of process, for example, reveals that remote acculturation of immigrants through education and globalization occurs even in the absence of “first-hand contact” (Ferguson & Bornstein, 2012). Clearly, the five terms of the specificity principle identified here refine, concretize, and reinvigorate the classical, limited, and essentially vague definition of acculturation.

Beyond definition, specificity has implications for theory, design, measurement, and methodology as it has for understanding the acculturation literature itself. The specificity principle advances theory and helps to make sense of disparate findings in acculturation research, enhance the design of investigations of acculturation, and identify gaps in acculturation science. No extant theory of acculturation explains how it is that individuals from the same educational, socioeconomic, generational, or familial backgrounds might still differ in their keenness and competence to acculturate. Moderators in the specificity principle offer a beginning explanation. Attending to specificity may also help to disambiguate factors that affect acculturation. For example, all families (immigrant and nonimmigrant) experience intergenerational differences to some extent, so disentangling parent–child conflict that is related to cultural differences from parent–child conflict that is developmentally normative is challenging but necessary (Phinney & Vedder, 2006). Similarly, ethnic minority and immigrant families both face challenges and risks, such as discrimination, prejudice, and low income, and these risks have deleterious effects on individuals and families, but they differ by minority versus immigrant statuses.

With the specificity principle in mind, acculturation researchers will want to reevaluate some central design features of their research. For example, specificity requires reports with more detailed information about participants and the reference group to whom their findings apply (Bornstein, Jager, & Putnick, 2013). Researchers often adopt a panethnic approach to studying certain immigrant groups, say “Latinos” or “Asians,” regardless of country of origin, but such a stance likely obscures significant and meaningful variation in some domains among peoples from different countries or cultures (Tamis-LeMonda, Baumwell, & Diaz, 2011). Most cultural subgroups diverge in language, immigration history, and cultural tradition. Mexican and Ukrainian immigrants likely did not acculturate similarly to U.S. cultural mazeways yesterday, just as Syrian and Afghan immigrants likely will not acculturate similarly to German cultural mazeways tomorrow. Analyses that combine even seemingly similar acculturating groups may mislead because levels of variables, and associations among them, often differ across groups, and results based on heterogeneous groups may obfuscate meaningful subgroup patterns (L. Song et al., 2012). Moreover, such lumping also confounds ethnicity, immigration status, and SES. In short, specificity shows how aggregating acculturating groups increases risks of unwarranted and inaccurate overgeneralization. Even the use of blanket appellations like “immigrants,” without specifying participant composition, age at immigration, time in the culture of destination, and so forth, can misinform.

Until now, acculturation has also been measured haphazardly and poorly, applying years in the culture of destination, generation, nativity, and the like—sometimes interchangeably. Attending to each of the five terms of the specificity principle should help to bring a greater degree of operationalization, precision, and quantitative rigor to the measurement of acculturation. For example, nativity (i.e., being born in the country of origin vs. being born in the country of destination; Harker, 2001; Kao, 1999) needs to be distinguished from the number of years spent in the culture of destination (Coatsworth et al., 2002; Gfroerer & Tan, 2003) as the two are not necessarily interchangeable and may have different implications and consequences. In ethnic enclaves, nativity may be a poor marker for adoption of culture-of-destination practices because results obtained using nativity may differ from results that would be obtained by directly measuring culture-of-destination practices.

Specificity speaks to other investigative concerns as well. Many studies compare minority families and children to those of the majority group (Kouider, Koglin, & Petermann, 2014; Molcho et al., 2010; Nauck & Lotter, 2015). Research in acculturation also often relies on cross-sectional designs and samples of convenience (that frequently overrepresent low-income families) to assess relations between family or parenting influences and aspects of child or youth development. There are many fewer longitudinal studies of middle-class immigrants that might tease apart the common confound of SES and acculturation and their relative effects over time. The lack of longitudinal data is also a barrier to understanding processes and directions of associations among constructs of interest in acculturation research, and it is difficult to explain negative acculturation effects because most studies are correlational, vary in how acculturation is measured, and do not often disentangle developmental from acculturation change (Phinney, Ong, & Madden, 2000). Likewise, self-report and interview are common in the field, but the inclusion of experimental and observational research methods would expand the scope of the questions that are asked. It is past time to turn to systematic comparisons of different acculturating groups in similar settings, the same acculturating group in different settings, and so forth, so as to logically tease apart specific issues. Moreover, research conclusions based on large community samples, longitudinal designs, and independent reports from parents, youth, and others (e.g., teachers) would enhance the validity and generalizability of acculturation research. For example, the specificity principle points to the need for longitudinal designs involving pre- and postmigration assessments to address the temporal term of specificity more adequately. Acculturation is valenced and may take place toward the culture of destination or away from the culture of origin or both. Thus, specificity calls for pre- and postmigration two-sided comparisons in three-culture designs that include the acculturating culture as well as cultures of origin and destination. Daglar, Melhuish, and Barnes (2011) studied families with stable residence in Turkey and residentially mobile migrants within Turkey as comparison groups to Turkish immigrants in the United Kingdom to capture more precisely effects of mobility on acculturation. Such designs are needed to expose the specific complexities of acculturation.

As elsewhere, methodology matters in acculturation science, and many methodological criteria must be met to ensure the validity of specific accultural comparisons (Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2011). For example, who conducts the acculturation study, their culture of origin, their assumptions in asking certain questions, posing certain hypotheses, whom they study, and so forth can all shape acculturation findings. In the Netherlands, compared with native Dutch children, Turkish and Moroccan immigrant children show higher levels of internalizing and externalizing problems as reported by teachers. In contrast, immigrant children themselves report fewer emotional and behavioral problems compared with native Dutch children (Stevens et al., 2003; see also Loo & Rapport, 1998). It is possible that differences in behavioral adjustment are not perceived in school settings by teachers, or it is possible that teachers share negative social stereotypes of immigrants. Contra a typological approach (which tends to reify individual styles into static entities), the specificity principle recommends that acculturation researchers reconsider both person-oriented and variable-oriented approaches in their work (Seelye & Brewer, 1970; Taft, 1957), just as segmented assimilation theory is followed in sociology (Portes & Zhou, 1993). A dominant approach to assessment in psychological science uses single variables, combinations of variables, or relations among variables as the main conceptual and analytical units. Here, a single datum for an individual derives psychological meaning from its position relative to the positions of data from other individuals. “In a variable approach, the lawfulness of structures and processes in individual functioning and development is studied in terms of statistical relations among variables . . .” (Magnusson, 1998, pp. 45–46). However, the configuration of individual variables in a system also has meaning, and information about the individual as a Gestalt is of interest as well. The person approach is based on a wholistic–interactionistic research paradigm to development and functioning, meaning that it sees the individual or dyad as an organized whole, functioning and developing as a totality (Magnusson & Allen, 1983). The totality derives its characteristic features and properties from interactions among its elements (the whole is more than the sum of the parts) rather than from the effect of isolated parts of the totality or as an integration of variables. In the person approach, the total dynamic complex process is not understood by summing the results of single aspects; rather, the whole individual or dyad is the main conceptual and analytical unit (von Eye, Bergman, & Hsieh, 2015). As Lerner et al. (2015, pp. 633–634) wrote,

Accurately capturing the oftentimes idiographic nature of development . . . requires that researchers consider the contexts in which their participants are embedded, as well as which coactions with those contexts are adaptive. This problem can be tackled through idiographic research designs and analyses . . . , or they may alternatively be represented [by] statistical interaction . . . (e.g., Theokas et al., 2005).

The specificity principle addresses and resolves inconsistencies and discrepancies in the current acculturation literature and identifies gaps that will stimulate future research. Multiple moderation explains why the sizes of acculturation effects often vary depending on the particular situations, populations, periods, mechanisms, or variables of acculturation that have been considered; for example, why research uncovers links between particular setting conditions and domains for some, but not other, acculturating groups. Absent specificity, a great deal of variation in acculturation goes unexplained (Pessar & Mahler, 2003). That said, investigators should expect that different terms of specificity will explain only portions of variance in acculturation (P. G. Schmitz, 1994).

Cultures that adapt to immigrants (via colonization, invasion, or globalization) without migrating themselves also “acculturate.” So, for example, still too little is known about indigenous children’s understanding of immigrants (Gieling et al., 2011; Malti, Killen, & Gasser, 2012; Pfeifer et al., 2007) or their evaluation of immigrants’ acculturation strategies (Nigbur et al., 2008). However, Verkuyten et al. (2013) examined how native Dutch children (8–13 years) evaluated migrant peers who followed different paths to acculturation. Some immigrants discard features of their culture-of-origin identity and adopt those of the culture of destination (Hartmann & Gerteis, 2005). These immigrants may be perceived to value the culture of destination and to become more similar to “us” and thereby “one of us.” In-group identity theory posits that inclusion in a shared category improves attitudes toward out-group members through the general tendency to esteem people who belong to the same category as oneself (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000). Not surprisingly, members of the culture of destination prefer and evaluate more positively immigrants who adopt mainstream modes to immigrants who maintain their culture of origin (Van Oudenhoven et al., 1998; Verkuyten, 2005).

Other gaps in the current acculturation literature reflect surprising “unknown unknowns.” Despite the wide range of domains that populate the contemporary research literature, developmental outcomes that are assessed are still limited in scope. For example, first, Yarumal in Colombia is well-known for an odd reason: It has the world’s largest population of people with Alzheimer’s disease; an estimated 5,000 of its denizens carry a gene mutation that causes an early-onset form of the disease. Taking acculturation into consideration (as provided by an identity-by-descent analysis), Kosik and his colleagues (2015) sequenced genomes of the town’s inhabitants and identified E280A as the mutation causing Yarumal’s form of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Kosik then traced the mutation to a common ancestor—a conquistador, soldier, and explorer of the Spanish Empire who arrived in Colombia 375 years ago. Second, Cabrera and Leyendecker (2016) have argued for a shift in focus from deficit models of immigrant youth development toward positive psychology models that consider the effects of cultures of origin and destination in conjunction with other salient ecological contexts, such as social class, gender hierarchies, and school and neighborhood environments. Positive youth development is an undeveloped area in acculturation research ripe for study. Increasingly, research is identifying strengths and protective processes that promote positive development, and future research should embrace the study of positive development among immigrant youth (Neblett, Rivas-Drake, & Umaña-Taylor, 2012; Q. Zhou et al., 2012). Is positive development defined differently in diverse acculturating communities? Beliefs and behaviors that are valued in mainstream cultures of destination may be irrelevant or devalued in certain immigrant groups, and other culture-specific developmental strengths may be overlooked.

Thus, attention to the five terms of specificity raises novel questions. For example, acculturation theories that collect individuals into types (assimilationist, etc.) essentially ignore or relegate to noise potentially meaningful individual-difference factors, such as personality, but as demonstrated above, different facets of personality moderate acculturation as the personality fits between individuals and their cultures of origin and destination play key roles in the process (Güngör et al., 2012; Kosic, 2006). Likewise, motivations condition both emigrant decision-making and immigrant adjustment. Boneva and Hanson Frieze (2001) deduced that individuals in a culture of origin who choose to emigrate possess different motivational needs from those in the same culture of origin with no intention to emigrate. Most contemporary research in acculturation focuses on peoples migrating from the developing to the developed world of usually Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic societies (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). What of acculturation in the opposite direction? When culturally disparate peoples come into contact with each other, the differences between them may become salient and can change cultural patterns in sending, acculturating, and receiving societies alike. To date, the focus of acculturation research is occupied with the acculturating group, but the effects on the cultures of origin and destination alike are of equivalent empirical interest.

As noted, acculturation science has inadequately investigated basic mechanisms of action. What are the relative efficacies of media and communication, consumer products and tourism, technology and trade as vehicles of acculturation? It is not well-known how acculturation proceeds for those embedded in homogeneous ethnic enclaves where the culture of origin predominates versus those living in other heterogeneous contexts in the same culture of destination. Existing research on country-of-origin and country-of-destination members’ evaluations of immigrants has not adequately considered setting conditions of emigrants (Gieling et al., 2011). Immigrants who adopt the mazeways of their new culture of destination may be evaluated more positively in that culture than those who do not, but such emigrants are likely to be evaluated more negatively by their culture of origin than emigrants who maintain their heritage culture. Studies that differentiate between these different status groups allow one to tease apart the influence of the minority status per se, the support provided by the government, and degrees of discrimination experienced by children and families from different groups.

Because ethnic minority children in pluralistic societies are developing in multicultural contexts, there is a need to understand what parents value of their own culture of origin and of their culture of destination to pass on to their children. The immigration context might provide a particularly fortuitous opportunity for immigrant parents to reflect on the values they transmit (or not) to their children as well as those they themselves do not possess but wish their children might.

Finally, the five terms of specificity discussed here are not exhaustive, but rather illustrative of the principle. The tenability and value of these five terms will be a matter of continuing empirical scrutiny, and other terms (or variants) in specificity might arise in the future. Consider objective versus subjective acculturation qua independent variable (Spencer, 2006). Acculturation of immigrants is often measured by objective parameters, such as years in the culture of destination, employment status, language proficiency, and social network. However, more subjective components of acculturation may be operative. The numbers of years of settlement in the United States do not predict immigrant fathers’ involvement in their children’s lives, whereas acculturated attitudes constitute a significant predictor (Jain & Belsky, 1997). Perceptions—that one’s two cultures overlap or do not, are associated or dissociated, or are close or distant from one another—condition the acculturation experience, including exposure to each culture, language proficiency and use, and identification. In this connection, cognitive appraisal processes constitute important heretofore uninvestigated intervening variables in immigrant acculturation. It follows that acculturation is to some degree in the eye of beholder: Japanese university students who return to Japan after spending some time in the United States report “feeling un-Japanese” and experiencing lasting adjustment problems. When with peers, returnees claim to feel altered with respect to physical appearance, behaviors, and interpersonal styles (Kidder, 1992; Yoshida et al., 2003, discussed peer perceptions that matched these self-reported feelings of anomie and poor fit). Japanese who had lived in Western cultures were more assertive and direct in expressing their opinions, which their Japanese homeland peers perceived as inconsiderate and crass (Minoura, 1988). These findings imply that Japanese Americans experience deep ambivalence: They may feel “Japanese” among European Americans but “American” in Japan. Reciprocally, from a European American perspective, Japanese Americans may seem rightly to retain their heritage cultural patterns, but from the deeply monocultural Japanese perspective, they may seem Americanized. In short, objective measures, such as time, as well as subjective ones, such as self-definitional markers that embrace phenomenology and attempt to capture psychological feelings of belonging to the new culture, are both meaningful, depending . . .

In brief, the specificity principle has several implications for the conduct of acculturation science. As the way of the world continues, we can clearly foresee that the specificity principle will exert increasingly significant sway over the conduct of acculturation science. It will also profitably insinuate into social policy.

Pertinence of the specificity principle to acculturation social policy

The specificity principle has implications for the design of interventions and programs in the service of acculturation, for respectful understanding of migrant cultures, and for policy in sending and receiving societies’ ideologies.

Policy makers need to become mindful of the specificity principle and how it can inform their goals and good works. As detailed, acculturation effects are conditional and not absolute (i.e., true for all people under all conditions and so forth), yet majoritarian positions traditionally shape program development and policy recommendations. In the real world, interventions are applied to specific individuals and specific groups, rather than to abstract populations, and so to be effective they must be appropriate to specific people and specific goals as well as the specific social-cultural-ecological settings those specific people inhabit. Facing the same challenges, different migrants acculturate in different ways and different people respond to migrants in different ways. Different peoples carry with them their shared histories as a cultural group and their idiosyncratic immigration experiences (hardships, discrimination, sense of ethnic pride), and so programs, which are themselves cultural systems, must engage immigrants in activities, roles, and relationships within a framework that is compatible with those beliefs, values, meanings, and expectations. That said, such frameworks are all too frequently rooted within a uniform culture of the destination society. Therefore, cultural miss-fit can create misunderstandings, breed conflicts, and impede cultural engagement. For example, perceptions of discrimination are frequently cited by Latino youth and parents in the United States to explain the poor participation of youth in school (Simpkins, Delgado, Price, Quach, & Starbuck, 2013).

Effective programs allow immigrants to build on and apply their knowledge, skills, and strengths (Cole, 2006; Villarruel, Montero-Sieburth, Dunbar, & Outley, 2005). Program designs therefore need to take into consideration specific setting conditions, people, times, processes, and domains of acculturation. Only a specificity orientation can hope to inform policies of specific means that will productively meet the specific needs of specific migrants in specific contexts at specific times. Structural characteristics of programs, such as the mode of delivery, duration, and frequency of services, and whether the program is part of a multimodal effort that includes other services, need to be accounted for to ensure program efficacy and improve program possibilities. In this connection, recall that Hamilton and Hamilton (2009) described a model German apprenticeship program for adolescents transitioning to the adult labor force; alas, national structural characteristics proved telling as 85% of native German 25- to 35-year-olds came to possess a formal occupational certificate by this route versus 43% of Turk immigrants to Germany.

Cultural backgrounds of immigrants from outside the dominant cultural group in a society are sometimes viewed from a deficit perspective. Yet each culture provides its members with funds of knowledge, tools, norms, and ways of thinking that can contribute to immigrants’ engagement in and learning from program activities (Morland, 2007; Villarruel et al., 2005). For example, the high cultural value placed on mutual trust and cooperation (confianza) in many Latino cultures is a valuable asset among some Latino youth in immigrant programs (Salusky et al., 2014). This asset might aid youth’s collaborative work on program projects and contribute to processes that help them grow in responsibility, confidence, and maturity. More research is needed to understand how other specific cultural assets (e.g., cultural precepts, ties to family, models of relationships) can optimize program effectiveness for specific groups.

Perhaps the clearest policy recommendation that has emerged from the acculturation literature is the value of supporting transmission of the culture of origin within immigrant families. One major way in which families foster positive acculturation is by exposing children to and valuing diverse frames of reference so that children become familiar with and feel comfortable interacting in multiple cultures (Mistry & Wu, 2010). Fostering culture-of-origin assets, programs that promote and support positive parenting and build family cohesion likely contribute to the positive development of immigrant youth (Corona et al., 2012; Leidy, Guerra, & Toro, 2012). A 2014 Council of Europe publication states that programs to promote adult migrants’ “linguistic integration” should “encourage them to pass [their mother tongue(s)] on to their children (at least using them within the family)” (Beacco et al., 2014). A UNICEF report covering several E.U. countries likewise stressed the importance of proficient bilingualism for young immigrant children’s well-being (Hernandez, 2012).

Some programs, by chance or by design, provide socialization for specific cultural groups, and research suggests that those programs succeed in strengthening cultural consciousness and identity—including understanding prejudice and acquiring coping skills—that contribute to well-being (Chao & Otsuki-Clutter, 2011; Riggs, Bohnert, Guzman, & Davidson, 2010). Sharing ethnic identity with peers is believed to provide a condition for youth to engage in identity building in a safe and supportive environment. Such situations may be especially valuable for youth from ethnic groups that have experienced trauma, injustice, or marginalization (Ginwright, 2010) as they provide opportunities for overcoming a sense of isolation, learning about and analyzing experiences of discrimination, and grappling with the “vexing and contradictory forces that shape their lives” (HoSang, 2006, p. 16). Those same conditions may also provide opportunities for youth to become proactive in asserting their ethnic identity and to develop civic skills to effectively address grievances (Ginwright, 2010; Kwon, 2008). Further research is needed on the promising practices of such programs and how their moderations will best fit the needs and capitalize on the assets of specific immigrant groups.

The value of specificity becomes even clearer in the shortcomings of programs that attempt to serve diverse cultural backgrounds. The possible combinations of immigrants from different groups in such programs overwhelm, and these different combinations likely contribute to widely varying program dynamics and successes. On specificity, programs that attempt to serve diverse ethnic groups with diverse goals in mind are likely to be much less effective in meeting culture-specific needs of immigrants from any one group because of challenges to provide specific supports of same-ethnicity staff, a critical mass of ethnic peers, and so forth (Okamoto, Gast, & Feldman, 2012). Only by focusing on Latina immigrant mothers’ daily proeducational beliefs and behaviors were the negative effects of low maternal education overcome (Schaller, Rocha, & Barshinger, 2007). The difficulty of providing targeted experiences to multiple immigrant groups helps to explain the infrequent successes of one-size-fits-all program models (Fredricks & Simpkins, 2012). An important related issue therefore regards instances in which a general program model is used with youth from one immigrant group that differs from the group with whom it was originally developed. Cole (2006) described the adaptation of the fifth dimension to culturally fit children in a Latino neighborhood. Latino staff were recruited, and Spanish language and Mexican American heritage were infused into activities, games, and program relationships. The program also drew on Latino norms of multigenerational assistance as a cultural asset, cultivating parent participation and encouraging older youth to take responsibility for younger youth. Research is needed on the effectiveness of, and best practices for, adaptation of general program models to specific cultural and immigrant groups, in specific settings, and so forth.

Immigrant families present distinctive issues and opportunities for social programs. Immigrant parents and children are typically involved in an ongoing process of cultural adjustment, one in which (as suggested) children may assimilate more quickly than parents toward the culture of destination; this generational disjunction can provoke family conflict (Berry, 1997; Chao & Otsuki-Clutter, 2011). Recently arrived immigrant youth are often isolated in their schools and neighborhoods, and youth programs can play an important “bridging role” in facilitating adjustment (Gaytan, Carhill, & Suárez-Orozco, 2007). They can connect youth to peers in similar situations and to program staff and service professionals who can act as cultural guides. They can also provide opportunities to identify youth’s cultural backgrounds as assets (Morland, 2007) and help youth to develop bicultural to multicultural competencies (Larson, Jensen, Kang, Griffith, & Rompala, 2012; Schmidt, Morland, & Rose, 2006).

Migrant families are economic and legal units just as they are social and emotional entities. However, the actual process of immigration presents many challenges (especially for the undocumented, whose access to health, education, legal, and social services is typically impeded or barred; Cavazos-Rehg, Zayas, & Spitznagel, 2007; Yoshikawa & Kalil, 2011). One parent and two child examples: Immigrant parents may feel optimistic that in a new homeland they might better fulfill the role of being a parent, but they can be thwarted. Migrant families are sometimes exposed to unique legal circumstances that arise when their normative culture-of-origin practices come into conflict with culture-of-destination customs or laws. Parenting practices that may be routine and perfectly acceptable in the migrant’s origin culture may be deemed “neglectful” or “abusive” in certain destination cultures. For example, Korean Americans living in Los Angeles regard certain American laws concerning child abuse to conflict with Korean heritage cultural values and child-rearing norms (Y. I. Song, 1986). Such differences of opinion over normative parenting have been known to create cultural clashes between minority foreign-born parents and child protective services systems in the majority culture (Coleman, 2007). Belgium and the Netherlands enforce strict laws regarding child marriage, whereas religious leaders in Syria make exceptions for marriage starting at age 13. Now 13- to 15-year-old Syrian “child brides” in Belgian and Dutch asylum centers are posing similarly thorny questions to public officials.

International adoption has been called a “silent migration.” Consider the experience of the adopted Chinese or Nigerian children growing up in the United States or the United Kingdom, where there is considerable cultural heterogeneity, versus in Scandinavian countries, where there is more cultural homogeneity. Children in the first instance are likely to have many more opportunities to learn about their cultural heritage and meet others who share their cultural origins. Internationally and domestically placed adoptees fare differently (Juffer & van IJzendoorn, 2005, 2007), but the differential adjustment of these children is a function of where they come from, when they are placed, and where they wind up (Barni, Leon, Rosnati, & Palacios, 2008). Many children today are fleeing drug cartels, gang violence, sexual exploitation, and domestic abuse in the Central American triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Since 2011, more than 125,000 such unaccompanied minors have been stopped at the U.S. border (many placed in shelters funded by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement) and nearly 20,500 younger than 18 were apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in Fiscal Year 2016 alone (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2016). In a recent 2-year period (October 1, 2013 to December 31, 2015), more than 95,000 unaccompanied minors were released into U.S. communities. The Vera Institute of Justice (Byrne & Miller, 2012) reported that ~40% of unaccompanied immigrant children potentially qualify for statuses that would exempt them from deportation from the United States, including asylum (because they fear persecution in their home country) or special immigrant juvenile status (because they have been abused or abandoned by a parent). However, the differential treatment of immigrants by their developmental status is woefully unappreciated. Even children, sometimes toddlers, who are charged with violating immigration laws have no right to appointed counsel and can be compelled to appear in court alone and unrepresented, when the U.S. Government is represented by Department of Homeland Security lawyers. The U.S. Justice Department reports that 42% of the more than 20,000 unaccompanied minors involved in deportation proceedings completed between July 2014 and late December had no attorneys. One senior U.S. Justice Department official contended in 2016 that 3- and 4-year-olds can learn immigration law well enough to represent themselves in court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is hearing an appeal stemming from a Seattle federal court case regarding whether such immigrant children are entitled to taxpayer funded attorneys.

On the basis of their nationalist immigration policies, whole countries can be arrayed from more pluralistic and open climates to more restrictive and closed ones; generally, the latter show lower levels of sociocultural adjustment and higher levels of ethnic orientation (Huddleston & Niessen, 2011). Immigration from outside of the E.U. is basically limited to family unification, to (acknowledged) refugees, and to highly skilled professionals. Some acculturating groups may be evaluated positively by their culture of destination, others negatively. The common esteem of ethnic groups according to liking or social distance from the mainstream is sometimes referred to as the “ethnic hierarchy.” In the Netherlands, for example, Chinese, Surinamer, and Antillean immigrants are evaluated more positively than Turkish and Moroccan immigrants (Ben Sira, 1997; Gijsberts, Huijnk, & Vogels, 2011; Verkuyten & Thijs, 2002). In some E.U. countries, Syrian asylum seekers are acceptable, but Afghans and Iraqis are not. Less well accepted migrants often experience hostility, rejection, and discrimination, encounters that, in turn, predict poor long-term adjustment. Societies that foster cultural pluralism are less likely to enforce cultural change or exclusion of immigrants and tend to provide positive settlement contexts. Holding culture-of-origin constant (Turkey), Yagmur and van de Vijver (2011) found that immigrants to Australia (an immigration country with a pluralistic ideology) showed higher levels of identification with their new mainstream culture and lower levels than their brethren immigrants to France and Germany (where cultural ideologies are more homogenous and the differentiation of indigenous vs. immigrant peoples is more pronounced). Therefore, the receiving country’s acculturation climate helped to explain differences in the course of Turkish immigrants’ acculturation. Because of its proximity to the Balkan States, Northeast Italy has a longer history of migratory movements from Eastern Europe than do other parts of Italy; this region has stable settlements of Albanians and Serbians, greater numbers of family reunifications, mixed marriages, and local policies on education and community settings that facilitate the acculturation of newly arriving families (Marra, 2002). These factors partly explain positive social adjustment outcomes for Albanian and Serbian immigrant children in the area. By contrast, Albanian immigrant children in less-accommodating Greece experience more behavioral problems (Motti-Stefanidi et al., 2008). The social policies and ideological nature of the specific community to which immigrants acculturate thereby shapes whether and how they acquire culture-of-destination practices and accommodate those of their culture of origin (Phinney, Horenczyk, Liebkind, & Vedder, 2001; Ryder et al., 2000; Schwartz, Montgomery, & Briones, 2006).

The 2015 world refugee crisis polarized Europe and altered cultural landscapes of the Americas. In Europe, every E.U. member agreed to accept an immigrant quota based on its gross domestic product and population. Under new rules, asylum seekers cannot choose their culture of destination. Previously allowing refugees to decide their country of destination led to an imbalanced distribution of the burden, and the quota system was abandoned. Sweden absorbed the largest per capita share of refugees of any E.U. country, but having exhausted accommodations in hotels, apartment buildings, tents, abandoned army barracks, and converted prisons, Sweden eventually housed migrants in the headquarters of the Swedish Migration Agency. When Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Middle Eastern migrants, her German critics observed that she could say, “Yes we can,” but she also had to say, “What, when and how.” Ultimately, 1.1 million refugees reached Germany in 2015, whose population is ~82 million. Even Merkel’s sympathizers wondered about the country’s ability to accommodate that drove of new arrivals. Facing social disorder and political disruption, even Germany eventually tightened its border controls to admit fewer asylum seekers, and Europe decided to pay Turkey to keep asylees penned there. Other once-sympathetic European states turned away migrants who were unable to prove that they were fleeing war in Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq, and instituted stricter screenings, balancing humane treatment with security of national borders. Thus, tens of thousands of emigrants are stranded in Greece, the Balkan countries, and now Turkey. The soldiers of Odin and Finnish Resistance vigilantes fashion a case study in escalating immigrant fear and suspicion; the Danish Parliament sanctioned seizures of cash and valuables from migrants, cut refugee benefits (even advertising the cuts in Lebanese newspapers), and prosecuted Danish Samaritans who aided asylum seekers; and Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden imposed checks that placed the future of Europe’s open borders at risk as these nations sought ways to curb the flow of migrants.

In South America, a liberal discourse of universally welcoming immigrants replaced formally restrictive immigration policies. But contrary to rights publically claimed in laws and policies, in practice South American governments reject increasing “irregular migration” from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to varying degrees. A “reverse immigration policy paradox” obtains in which South America de jure welcomes but de facto obstructs migrants. Ecuador and Brazil, for example, have immigration systems in which restrictive actions clash with liberal policy. In Argentina, policy is more consistent with a welcoming, liberal immigration discourse (Arcarazo & Freier, 2015). Meanwhile in the United States, between years 2006 and 2013 children of immigrants accounted for all growth in the U.S. population of children under age 18. (The number of children of native-born parents fell 1.3 million, while the number of children with at least one immigrant parent grew 1.9 million.)

Paradoxically, on account of increasing life expectancies and decreasing birth rates in many developed countries, national economies as well as nonimmigrant senior citizens’ retirement pensions partly depend on the economic contributions of immigrants. In the 21st century, immigrants are expected to become a prominent force in the economies of these societies and contribute meaningfully to the care and support of their aging nonimmigrant populations (Hernandez, 2012). Immigrants in many countries will pay more in taxes over their lifetimes than they receive in social benefits (Dustmann, Frattini, & Preston, 2013). European reactions to this economic fact of life can be fierce: The Prime Minister of Hungary urged Europeans to have more children instead of welcoming refugees from South Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Pressures associated with globalization across multiple domains of language skills, work force, intercultural relations, refugee status, and so forth moderate national policy in cultures of destination. Within countries, immigrants may exert short-term downward pressures on wages among the lower more than middle- or upper-economic classes. Between countries, integration strategies obtain for valued immigrants and separation or assimilation strategies for less valued immigrants (Canada: Montreuil & Bourhis, 2001), where other countries show no differences in national strategies for different immigrant groups (France: Maisonneuve & Teste, 2007; the Netherlands: Van Oudenhoven et al., 1998).

In brief, the specificity principle reveals that acculturation is moderated by the sociopolitical ideologies and policies of countries of destination (Baubock, Heller, & Zolberg, 1996; Bourhis, Moise, Perreault, & Senecal, 1997; Koenig, 1999).