Page 433 - Cultures and Organizations

398 IMPLICATIONS

family, a severe blow to the father’s self-respect. She meets other men, and
her husband may suspect her of unfaithfulness. The marriage sometimes
breaks up. Yet there is no way back. As noted earlier, migrants who have

returned home often find that they do not fit anymore and remigrate.
The second generation, children born in or brought early to the new

country, acquires conflicting mental programs from the family side and

from the local school and community side. Their values reflect partly their
parents’ culture, partly their new country’s, with wide variations among
individuals, groups, and host countries. The sons suffer most from their
16

marginality. Some succeed miraculously well, and benefiting from the
better educational opportunities, they enter skilled and professional occu-
pations. Others, escaping parental authority at home, drop out of school
and find collectivist protection in street gangs; they risk becoming a new

underclass in the host society. The daughters often adapt better, although
their parents worry more about them. At school they are exposed to an
equality between the genders unknown in the society from which they
have come. Sometimes parents hurry them into the safety of an arranged
marriage with a compatriot. 17
On the upside, however, many of these problems are transitional; third-
generation migrants are mostly absorbed into the population of the host
country, exhibiting concomitant values, and are distinguishable only by a
foreign family name and maybe by specific religious and family traditions.

This three- generation adaptation process has also operated in past genera-
tions; an increasing share of the population of modern societies descends
partly from foreign migrants.
Whether migrant groups are thus integrated or fail to adapt and turn
into permanent minorities depends as much on the majority as on the
migrants themselves. Agents of the host society who interact frequently

with minorities, migrants, and refugees can do a lot to facilitate their
integration. They are the police, social workers, doctors, nurses, person-

nel officers, counter clerks in government offices, and teachers. Migrants

coming from large-power-distance, collectivist cultures may distrust such
authorities more than locals do, for cultural reasons. In contrast, teachers,
for example, can benefit from the respect their status earns them from

the parents of their migrant students. They will have to invite those par-
ents (especially fathers) for discussion; the social distance perceived by
the migrant parents is much larger than most teachers are accustomed
to. Unfortunately, in any host society a share of the locals (politicians,
police, journalists, teachers, neighbors) fall victim to ethnocentric and rac-