Children of immigrants often are viewed as posing challenges to the American health and education systems because of various circumstances that disadvantage them, such as lack of fluency in English. But first-and secondgeneration children in many immigrant groups are, in fact, doing about as well as or better than their peers in native-born families along many dimensions, a phenomenon which has been referred to as the immigrant paradox because it is contrary to the broadly held view just described. In this context, the purpose of this chapter is threefold.In this chapter, we first present new results for children in immigrant families from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) for 2005-2007 to describe important family and socioeconomic circumstances separately for children whose parents differ in their English fluency. These circumstances reflect resources, constraints, and opportunities available in families and communities that shape the developmental progress of children and that are influenced by public policies. (See http://www.albany.edu/csda/ children for more detailed results from the ACS.) Insofar as the aim is to portray important features of the demographic circumstances of children in immigrant families as a backdrop for this and subsequent chapters in this volume,
Affluent countries around the world are experiencing an unprecedented demographic shift that involves rapid change in the ethnic composition of the population, due to large scale immigration from low and middle income countries, combined with the rapid aging of the non-immigrant population. Because these immigrants and their children often differ from the non-immigrant population in physical appearance, language, religion, and culture, increasing attention is focusing on the integration and inclusion of these groups. To provide a framework for interpreting the new indicators presented in this article, we draw on ideas recently set forth by the European Union. These efforts provide a broad and comprehensive framework for discussing indicators in this article pertaining to the demographic circumstances of children in immigrant families, and to various aspects of their integration, including language, civic participation, education, employment, and housing. While indicators presented here do not directly measure integration and inclusion, they do portray the lives of children in immigrant families compared with the lives of children in native-born families along civic, social, and economic dimensions that are relevant to the assessment of integration and inclusion, shedding light on the extent to which children in immigrant families in the eight settlement countries covered in this study have access to the resources necessary to participate fully in the societies of their adopted homelands. The eight Child Ind Res (2010) 3:413-437
Background/Context By the year 2030, when the baby boom generation born between 1946 and 1964 will be in the retirement ages, 72% of the elderly will be non-Hispanic Whites, compared with 56% for working-age adults, and 50% for children. As the predominantly White baby boomers reach retirement, they will increasingly depend for economic support on the productive activities and civic participation of working-age adults who are members of racial and ethnic minorities and, in many cases, children of immigrants. To prepare these young people for lives as productive workers and engaged citizens, we need to pay more attention to creating conditions that will foster their educational success. The profound shift taking place in the composition of the school-age population has implications for schools. Purpose/Objective/Research Questions/Focus of Study This article presents a demographic overview of school-age children in immigrant families and compares them with their peers in native-born families. After tracing the shift in the national origins of children of immigrants that has taken place over the past century, we consider the new challenges and opportunities presented to the education system by the socioeconomic, cultural, and religious diversity of this new and growing population of students and by their presence in a growing number of suburban and rural, as well as urban, communities. Population/Participants/Subjects This research uses data from Census 2000 to study children in immigrant families who have at least one foreign-born parent compared with children in native-born families who were born in the United States to U.S.-born parents. Research Design This research is a secondary analysis of data from Census 2000. Conclusions/Recommendations Immigration is transforming the demography of America. In less than three decades, a majority of children are likely to belong to race-ethnic minorities who are Hispanic, Black, Asian, or another non-White race, mainly because of immigration and births to immigrants and their descendants. The educational success achieved by immigrant groups, and their subsequent economic productivity, is important not only to the groups themselves but also to the broad American population because these groups will compose an increasingly important segment of the U.S. labor force during the next few decades; this labor force will be supporting the predominantly White baby boom generation throughout their retirement years. As we increasingly become a nation of minorities, with no single race-ethnic group in the majority, the educational success of all children, especially the rapidly growing population of children in immigrant families, merits increasing attention from teachers, school administrators, and public officials.
Few would deny that reducing child poverty is a worthy goal for this nation, or any nation. Far less agreement exists about the best way to measure poverty. Increasingly, though, informed voices have raised questions about the adequacy of the official U.S. poverty measure. This Research Brief, the second in our series on immigrant children, draws on new results from Census 2000 data to examine differences in the poverty rates between children in immigrant families and children in native-born families. The brief reports results for the official poverty measure, but also for two alternatives to the official measure. Most notably, the official poverty measure does not explicitly take into account what families need to spend for housing, food, and other necessities; transportation for work; child care/early education; income and payroll taxes; and differences in the cost of living across geographic areas of the country. We calculated a new "baseline basic budget poverty" measure that takes into account the costs of housing, food, other necessities, transportation for work, and federal income/payroll taxes. We calculated a second new measure-which might be termed "baseline basic budget poverty plus"-that also takes into account the costs for formal child care and early education. Our calculations show that when the new Baseline Basic Budget Poverty measure for children is used, the rate of poverty is much higher than that suggested by the official measure. Moreover, children in immigrant families tend to live in states showing large gaps in the two measures and these gaps widen further when the costs for child care and early education are taken into account. These results also suggest that policies and programs to combat childhood poverty, to be truly effective, should consider the full range of costs that strain family budgets. Taking this approach could especially benefit immigrant children, who are more likely to experience poverty than are their native-born peers.
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