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Just Like in Their Home Country? A Multinational Perspective on Living Arrangements of Older Immigrants in the United States

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Demography

Abstract

Older immigrants are more likely to share residence with their adult children and other family members than are U.S.-born older adults. Because socioeconomic factors only partially explain these differences and direct measures of cultural preferences are seldom available, the persistently high rates of intergenerational coresidence among the older foreign-born are often interpreted as driven by cultural preferences and/or a lack of assimilation. To challenge this interpretation, this study investigates the extent to which older immigrants’ living arrangements deviate from those of older adults in their home countries. The analysis combines data on immigrants from the 2008–2012 American Community Survey (ACS) with census data from three major immigrant-sending countries: Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam. Despite persistent differences from U.S.-born whites, coresidence in later life is significantly less common than in the sending countries among the older foreign-born who migrated as young adults, and especially among those who migrated as children. The older foreign-born who migrated after age 50, however, are more likely to coreside and less likely to live independently than the older adults in their home countries. The similarity of these patterns across the three immigrant subgroups suggests that the unusually high coresidence among late-life immigrants is driven by U.S. family reunification policy and not simply by cultural influences.

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Notes

  1. For accurate comparison, the data sources have to be roughly similar. Unfortunately, we did not have access to census data collected around 2010 for other large, older immigrant subgroups.

  2. This is approximately 12 % of the total foreign-born population obtaining lawful permanent resident (LPR) status; the number is comparable to the number of refugees obtaining LPR status each year and only slightly less than the number of employment-based immigrants.

  3. We chose age 25 as a cutoff point to better capture the old age coresidence rather than the coresidence due to adult children’s delayed home-leaving. Alternative cutoff points (e.g., age 18) resulted in slightly different estimates of the overall coresidence rates, but the patterns by nativity and age at migration were similar.

  4. The data coding was consistent across the data sets with a few exceptions. “Child” includes adopted children, stepchildren, and foster children as well as biological children in the U.S. and Mexico data; adopted children are not included in the Dominican data; and only biological children are included in the Vietnamese census data. Children-in-law could not be identified in the Vietnamese census.

  5. This category includes households of different types. Partnered older adults in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, as well as U.S. whites in this category, predominantly live with children under age 25. Among unpartnered older adults, the percentage of those who live with other relatives and nonrelatives of the householder is almost as high as the percentage living with younger children. The patterns are fairly similar across the three subgroups.

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Acknowledgments

This research was partially supported by a seed grant from the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis (CSDA) at the University at Albany, SUNY, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24-HD044943). We thank Judy Treas, Sonya Grover, the editors, and the three anonymous reviewers of Demography for their insightful comments. An earlier version of this research was presented as a poster at the 2016 Population Association of America meeting in Washington, DC.

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  1. Department of Sociology, 351 Arts & Sciences Building, University at Albany, SUNY, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY, 12222, USA

    Zoya Gubernskaya & Zequn Tang

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  1. Zoya Gubernskaya
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Correspondence to Zoya Gubernskaya.

Appendix

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Table 5 Descriptive statistics: Adults aged 60 or older, 2008–2012 American Community Survey, 2010 Mexico census, 2010 Dominican Republic census, and 2009 Vietnam census
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Gubernskaya, Z., Tang, Z. Just Like in Their Home Country? A Multinational Perspective on Living Arrangements of Older Immigrants in the United States. Demography 54, 1973–1998 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-017-0604-0

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