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Downward Path Illustrates Concern About Immigrants’ Children
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by ShanikaGunaratna | April 18, 2009 at 12:35 pm
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While poor immigrant families have found economic success in the past, many analysts say today’s generation faces steeper hurdles, especially because good jobs now require more education. The children of those with the least education — most notably Mexicans and Central Americans — are considered especially at risk.
Citing high dropout and incarceration rates, some scholars warn that a sizeable minority of these groups could join the domestic poor in a burgeoning underclass.
For so many immigrants, the point of uprooting their lives and moving to the US is to create a better life for their children. This is why, in my mind, immigrant parents seem so brave: that they are more concerned with the happiness of their children, and their children's children, than in their own comfort.
This article condenses many of the recent studies on the success of immigrant children from multiple backgrounds: Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Mexican, Korean, Nigerian, Russian, Central American, and so on. It highlights the vast chasms that exist between different groups of immigrants and illuminates a major concern: the slow progress of Mexican American and Central American immigrant children.
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ShanikaGunaratna
Evanston, Illinois, United States
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at 14:35 on April 18th, 2009
A much better way to look at immigration than to assume discrimination. Some groups are highly successful. The closer your native culture, your sense of the value of literacy, school, are to what is needed to make it here, the higher the chance of success.
For example, Mexican immigrants who are poor have poor vocabularies in Spanish. The lack of language skill in Spanish translates over to a lack of language skill in English. I saw it when I was an ESL teacher in Italy.
The better the Italian spoke Italian (and I could judge that at a certain point), the better they learned to speak English.