An immigrant family in Waterloo, Iowa, reflects on multigenerational living
An immigrant family in Waterloo, Iowa, reflects on multigenerational living
The trend toward multiple generations living together is growing fast. A major factor behind the shift in living arrangement are immigrants making a home for themselves in the U.S.
The Marshall Islands are located between Hawaii and Australia in the Pacific Ocean. Karen Karben and one of her six children left the Marshall Islands for the U.S. in 2007; she briefly stayed with her brother and his newborn daughter in North Carolina, then moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where she took the newborn daughter to help her brother out. Her husband and five other children arrived in Waterloo about a year and a half later.
The Iowa town is known for its John Deere factories and Tyson Fresh Meats pork processing facilities.
“We are here for education for kids, health for us, jobs for a good life. So even though we might not get enough, but we’re still hanging. But we came for purpose, you know,” she said, “for our kids to have a better life.”
There were about 20 Marshallese families in Waterloo when Karben got there, she said, and the community has grown since then. Her first job was at a pork plant — one of the few options available to her with her limited language skills at the time.
She became an interpreter for 11 years for the local school system. She now sews for a tuxedo rental company, and her husband is part of a cleaning crew. Several generations of the family live in the house they rent.
“We feel that there is someone to help, even though we don’t really have much resources. So we know that there’s someone there, if something comes up — like an issue for like we have some problems with our bills,” she said. “You know, to take care of my grandkids, I will be here while they go to work. And so these are the things that that we value to, you know, be together and live together, because we support each other.”
In the Marshall Islands, it’s commonplace for extended families to live together. Karben said it’s important to her that they maintain that cultural tradition. Combining resources is financially sensible, of course, but it’s striking how powerful the emotional bonds from being together are.
“The respect, the love that we share — it can, you know, for me, from my own experience, even though we’re gonna be in some seasons hardship … we can be through everything together, you know. Laughter, sadness, be satisfied, everything.”
Life is hard on many immigrants. They come for work and to improve the prospects of their children. They’re also adapting to a different culture and ways of doing business, learning a new language and typically living on lower incomes.
The support of extended family is critical for navigating their new home, said Karben. “You know, being together helps makes me be even more brave and confident that my family’s with me.”
Keeping cultural traditions alive is one of the many advantages of extended families living under one roof. Togetherness leans against loneliness and social isolation. Immigrants have long found the economics of extended families living together attractive, according to Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis.
“They are willing to use less housing space than Americans, meaning families. Bigger families live in smaller apartments, townhouse houses, so one way in which the immigrant absorbed the cost of this is by essentially demanding much less space per capita,” he said. “And they squeeze in a house with the idea that they can support themselves, and their kids are going to be better off than they were.”
In the decades following World War II, the U.S. was something of an outlier in its emphasis on segregating the population by age, including the home. For a variety of reasons, including lessons learned from the immigrant experience, the high cost of housing, and the demands of caregiving of the young and old, Americans are relearning the benefits that come from keeping close intergenerational ties at home and in the community.
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