Migration and Family Conflict1

Abstract: The stages of the process of migration are described, with the implications of each for family conflict and appropriate therapeutic intervention. 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 custom 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. There is a unique drama that characterizes migration in each case. In fact, this drama often becomes a part of the treasured heritage of each family. The concrete anecdote covers the widest spectrum. It may consist of the sheltered move from coast to coast of an executive's family for reasons of promotion in his work or the precarious move of the family of a political refugee who is given asylum in another country as an option to continued jail and torture. It may be the hopeful move of a family to a medical center where an offspring may receive continuous treatment for a chronic disease or the doomed move of a Puerto Rican from a low-paying job in San Juan to a low-paying job in the Bronx. I