The purpose of this paper was to examine the effect of immigration on marital tension. Our expectations regarding the: findings were mixed because of two contradictory arguments. The first argument reasons that because immigration can be considered a stressful situation, taxing the family's adaptive resources and efforts (as suggested in Richmond and Goldlust, 1977), it increases the amount of tension between marital partners. Faced with situations in which previously learned forms of behavior and interaction were inappropriate, the couple would disagree over appropriate ways of adapting. Following this reasoning, immigrant couples were expected to express greater marital tension than native-born couples who have not experienced the same stressful pressures.

According to the opposing argument, immigration to a new culture should increase family solidarity and interdependence, so that immigrant couples would exhibit less marital tension than native-born couples. This argument reasoned that just as strangers in a strange land are drawn together if they are from the same country of origin, so would family mem hers tend to support each other when faced with the strangeness of the host environment. The very difficulties involved in immigration would give the couple a common goal of resolving these problems, and as they most likely would be left to themselves to resolve the problems, they would become a more solidifed couple in doing so. According to this argument, then, immigrant couples would express less marital discord than native-born couples.