Migration and Family Conflict

Abstract

Millions of people migrate each year. They do it alone or in organized aggregates, by their own decision or forced by decisions of others or by natural cataclysms, carrying with them truckloads of household items or a bundle of essentials. They travel on a luxury ocean liner or crammed in the bodega of a sampan, are received with press conferences, or sneak in under barbed-wire borders by night. They look forward with hope or backward with fear. They belong to a culture in which high geographic mobility is the rule and count on skills to deal with the process of migration, or they have been raised in a highly sedentary culture in which uprooting means near catastrophe. They are thoroughly familiar with, or completely ignorant of, their situation on arrival, the language and customs of the new place, the people, the dwelling situation, the work they are going to have. One way or another, countless numbers of people manage to break away from their basic support networks, sever ties with places and people, and transplant their home base, their nest, their life projects, their dreams, their ghosts.