Immigrant Stories

While often living only miles (or blocks) away from each other, the children of Rhode Island's Cambodian, Dominican and Portuguese immigrants are living in very different worlds.
Immigrant Stories  (published this Summer, Oxford Press) takes a multileveled approach to modeling the academic pathways (and the contexts influencing these pathways) of these elementary-aged children.
They find strikingly different immigration histories, family and school situations as well as differences in how these children are relating to their parents native culture (e.g. do they watch media in their parents native language?) and how they conceptualize the role of their own ethnic identity (e.g. is being a student or being Dominican more important to who they are?).
More interestingly they find that these contexts and attitudes play out in very different ways in terms of their effect on the elementary school success of these kids.

While high levels of ethnic pride and desire to be with co-ethnic peers contributed to positive outcomes for Cambodian youth, for Dominican children wanting to be with peers outside of their ethnic group, a preference for English and lower ethnic identity centrality was associated with more positive outcomes.
These results are worthy of much future speculation; a central question being:  Why does identification and active participation in a parent's native culture prove a source of academic support for one child while proving an obstacle for another?

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Community Organization

There are substantial differences in academic outcomes among country of origin groups. These differences start very early on and (even when lessened) often persist. In a nationally representative sample of third graders Glick and Hohmann-Marriott (2007) show that while children of Chinese, Vietnamese and East Asian immigrants outperform their native White peers in math, children from Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Filipino families fall behind.

Recent research points to the role of community structure and functioning in producing these differences.  Min Zhou, who has spent her carreer studying immigrant communities from Vietnamese communities in New Orleans to Mexican and Chinese communities in California, finds consistent and powerful differences in the ways that these communities function and the knowledge bases that they hold.

While both the Pico Union and Chinatown neighborhoods of Los Angelos have a predominantly immigrant populace and a share a strong emphasis on education the families of Chinatown benefit from deep wells of community knowledge about  educational systems (what SAT scores kids need to get into college, what schools are the best in the district) as well as high numbers of ethnic-based educational organizations (afterschool tutoring programs, enrichment programs and community scholarship funds.) The Pico Union (primarily Mexican immigrants) neighborhood, on the other, does not have a single community driven enrichment program and thus lacks avenues through which new immigrant families can learn pathways toward higher education and support them in their children.

Zhou notes, ""In the past, we've tended to chalk up differences in achievement to cultural differences, but we really need to look more closely at variations in neighborhood resources and how they may contribute to academic success."

The big task

There is much debate surrounding the best way to aid young English Language Learners in transitioning  into US classrooms and keeping up with their classmates during the critical elementary grades.

A recent report from the Foundation for Child Development reports that:

"Research on the effects of early English immersion programs for ELL students...suggests that children in [English immersion only] preschool programs tend to lose their ability to communicate in their first language, start to prefer the English language, frequently develop communication problems with their extended families, and experience depressed academic achievement in English."

There are a myriad of reasons for how and why fluent bilingualism may support immigrant children; but especially compelling is the notion that bilingualism is at its core, a matter of keeping families functional and connected.

One striking piece of evidence comes from work by Mouw and Xie (1999) who find that bilingaul Asian American first and second generation adolescents have a pronounced academic advantage over their monolingual peers. But this effect was only significant when parents were not fluent in English.

Global vertigo

 Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-founder of immigration studies at NYU, says we are in an "age of global vertigo".

Immigration flows across the globe have created separations between parents and their children, and between nuclear families and extended families, often for a prolonged period of time.

In a study of recently immigrated adolescents, Suarez-Orozco, Todrova, Louie (2002)  find that 85 percent of the sample had been separated from one of both of their parents for an extended time.  This contributed to a host of difficulties including increased depression and academic decline.

With the average waiting period for relatives of permanent residents ranging from 6 to 19 years (as in the case of Mexican-born individuals), families are forced to make tough decisions regarding when each member can migrate and children are left with little choice at all.

Across the divide

Recent work has shown that the higher levels of parental monitoring and stricter rules set by immigrant parents play are a strong, positive role in helping immigrant adolescents  maintain lower levels of delinquency and higher grades.

But as immigrant adolescents rapidly acculturate into American schools, a gap between parents and their children begins to form.

A recent study found that while many adolescents from Chinese immigrant families were performing well in US schools and showing very low levels of behavior problems, as acculturation proceeded these adolescents and their parents "suffered increased emotional distance, increased conflicts, and less communication"(Qin, 2006).

In a recent NPR report on intergenerational conflict, a Chinese-American teenage girl explains that while she may see, understand and even agree with the parenting styles of her parents she wishes that her mother could better understand the American teenager--and in doing so, better understand her.

Listen to this story which recently aired on All Things Considered.

What makes a good student?

Children of Mexican immigrants face many obstacles to a successful transition into school.  Language barriers, low parental education, and high rates of poverty translate into lower test scores throughout the elementary school years.  But evidence from researcher Robert Crosnoe shows that socially and behaviorally these children are at the top of their class.

According to teacher reports of a national sample of kindergartners, Mexican immigrant children had better mental health, got along better with others and look a lot better in terms of self-regulation than their White, African-American, Asian-American and Latino-American peers whose parents were born in the US.

Crosnoe points out that while,  "People tend to think that doing well in school is all about IQ and cognitive development...there's a lot more that goes on to it than that. You have to have the capacity to sit there and learn and control yourself."

These abilities pose children of Mexican immigrants to make the most of the school experience.

"Psychological well-being doesn't begin to outweigh the burden of severe poverty", Crosnoe adds. "And Mexican immigrant families have the highest rate of poverty of any immigrant group in the US. But strong mental health at least cuts away a slice of that disadvantage."

Listen to the full story which aired on npr's "Day to day".

Support is a two-way street

Immigrant parents have extremely high expectations for their children's educational pathways and research has shown that children internalize these expectations and use them as motivation to succeed.

But family is a complicated influence. In research by Fuligni and colleagues they found that while feelings of family obligation aided children in school, family obligation behaviors (amount of time spent helping family) could have the opposite affect.

In a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center on "Latinos and Education" we again see a conflicting influence. While Latino parents were more likely to say that children should go to college after school than other parents, the most common response for why Latino young adults did not continue their education was that they needed to support their family.

It seems reasonable to believe that when families are better supported through policy we will see less of a gap between educational expectations and educational attainment.