Immigration, Cultural Identity, and Mental Health

Immigration, Cultural Identity, and Mental Health is a unique book because it explains culture and identity from a developmental perspective, exploring the psychological, social, and biological aspects of the immigrant and refugee experience in the United States and how they help to shape the person’s cultural identity. It also covers the sociological, anthropological, political, and economic aspects of the immigrant experience and how these variables impact mental health, thus presenting the experience of migration and acculturation from a very broad and humanistic perspective, illustrated with multiple real-life case examples. The book explains how a broader access to travel and new communication technologies are responsible for the rapid global dissemination of cultural norms, values, and beliefs across national borders, facilitating a process of inter-culturation, in which both the new arrivals and members of the host culture are influenced and transformed by their interactions with one another and how American children, adolescents and young adults are at the forefront of such new multicultural identity formation. It describes the emergence of transnational identities, the meaning of pilgrimages, the experiences of return migrations and the importance of the American narrative, which is at its core, an immigrant narrative. This is a book about the American identity and how immigrants have been absorbed into American society and how they continue to enlarge and transform America and the cultural identities of its inhabitants.