The Future of Immigrants’ Children in a Globalized World

Abstract

The social fate of the descendants of immigrants is almost certainly a central concern of migration studies. While migration flows and the adult first migrants have been studied mainly to assess the impact of cultural difference in western societies, to evaluate social policies or to study subjective capacity to adapt, the fate of immigrants’ children has become a wider theoretical test bed. Assimilation, integration, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, ethnicity are all possible interpretations of the various pathways the descendants of immigrants might follow in coming to terms with their family origins — that frequently means different names, different phenotypes, complex family trees and children’s memories, sometimes different values and religious references. However, the principal sociological challenge seems to be represented by the necessity to reconsider what being part of a society means for people with immigrant origins. Belonging, memberships, citizenship, recognition of rights, recognition of identity claims, are all components of a feeling — and practical status — of inclusion; their extension and composition define the force and the quality of such inclusion.