Immigrant Parents, Citizen Children: How Parental Immigration Status Affects Rhode Island Latino Children In School

While Latino students as a whole perform lower on key academic indicators, they are not a homogenous group, and many Latino students perform at or above grade level. However, we know little about what factors distinguish low-and high-achieving Latino students. Understanding key differences within the Latino student population will help to identify both the reasons for the achievement gap and opportunities for closing it. This study examines one key difference among Latino students – the immigration status of their parents – to understand how this variable influences academic performance.^(a) The study explored the experiences of 178 urban Latino immigrant families in Rhode Island with 7 to 10-year-old, U.S.-born children.⁴ We investigated how families differ depending on the legal status of the parents and evaluated how these differences affect outcomes for the children.

THE VULNERABILITY OF THE MIXED-STATUS FAMILY

There are approximately 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S., and about one-third of them are raising a child who is a U.S. citizen.⁵ In 2010, about 4.5 million U.S. citizen children lived in “mixed-status families” comprised of at least one unauthorized parent, sometimes an unauthorized sibling, and a U.S.-born citizen child.⁶ Rhode Island is home to approximately 32,000 unauthorized immigrants, about 8,000 of whom are adults living with at least one U.S.-born child in a mixed-status family.⁵

Over twenty years of legislation have contributed to an increasingly challenging environment and vulnerable existence for unauthorized immigrants and their families in the U.S. The result is that children living in mixed-status families, although U.S. citizens, live under the threat of their parents’ deportation and within the constraints that their parents’ legal status creates.⁷ Between July 2010 and September 2012, nearly one-quarter of all people who were deported from the U.S. reported having at least one U.S.-born citizen child.⁸

In Rhode Island, the debate over immigration has shifted over the past decade toward a gentler approach to unauthorized immigrants. Unauthorized immigrant students in the state can now receive in-state college tuition, for example. Despite this trend, unauthorized immigrants in Rhode Island still face a number of challenges. They are ineligible for many social services and continue to live in fear of discovery and deportation.^(b)

THE LINKS AMONG ETHNICITY, IMMIGRATION, AND EDUCATION

The achievement gap between Latino and White students in Rhode Island is of growing concern, and research at the national level has identified several factors that may help explain this gap. First, there is the parents’ language barrier. When parents don’t speak English or when they have had little schooling themselves, they have a limited ability to help their children with English language homework. Parental engagement in schools, which positively impacts student achievement, is also challenging for parents who face language barriers or who are fearful about their legal status.⁹

Language can also be a major issue for the children. Students for whom English is a second (or even third) language are less likely to be proficient in math and reading, be enrolled in pre-kindergarten programs, or graduate from high school, when compared with English-only learners.¹⁰

Then, there are socio-economic barriers. When parents are working long hours in order to make ends meet, which is often the case for low-income Latino and immigrant families, they have less time to cognitively stimulate their children at home and to supervise homework time.¹¹ Low-income Latino children living in poor neighborhoods also have reduced access to community resources, such as museums and libraries, which might help them develop cognitively and academically. Latino children are also disproportionately represented in low-performing schools, which have fewer resources and less experienced, qualified teachers.¹²

Finally, there’s the issue of discrimination. Research has found that Latino children are often the victims of discrimination and stereotyping, even by well-meaning teachers who may underestimate their academic potential based on language, immigrant status, and skin color.¹³ These negative predictions can lead to lowered academic expectations, which can be internalized by the students. Moreover, these experiences can contribute to low levels of school engagement and a poor sense of school belonging among Latino students, both of which can affect academic performance.¹⁴

There is an additional factor that may account for academic challenges faced by some Latino students: parental legal status. A cloud of social exclusion surrounds unauthorized immigrants, keeping them from accessing social services, education, social activities, political participation, and a wide variety of jobs. This exclusion impacts U.S.-born children living in mixed-status families as well, creating not only a sense of stress and fear in the home, but also restricting children and their families from services that might benefit them.¹⁵

FIG. 3 THE CHALLENGES FACED BY STUDENTS WITH UNAUTHORIZED PARENTS

Unauthorized immigrant parents may be reluctant to access services for which their U.S. citizen children qualify because of a combination of fear, mistrust, and misinformation.¹⁶ For example, children of unauthorized parents may miss out on the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides essential access to medical care, or Head Start, which can make a difference in the child’s school readiness, social emotional skills, and cognitive development. All of these factors – poverty, language barriers, social exclusion, and lack of access to social services – may affect children’s educational experiences. Research indicates that parents’ legal status can have an impact on their children’s academic achievement. Parents’ unauthorized status has been correlated to delays in children’s cognitive development as toddlers¹⁷ and school readiness as preschoolers.¹⁸

However, to date there has been no research examining the relationship between a parent’s legal status and academic outcomes for older children enrolled in school. Yet the elementary school years – the developmental stage of “middle childhood” – are a critical phase in child development.¹⁹ If immigrant children lag behind in academic achievement during middle childhood, it can have significant implications for their future.²⁰

Research Methods

RESEARCH ON MIXED-STATUS FAMILIES IN RHODE ISLAND

For this study, 178 parent-child pairs were recruited from the three largest immigrant groups in Rhode Island: Dominican Republic, Central America, and Mexico. Among the participating families, 90 (51%) had a parent with some type of authorization, and 88 (49%) had an unauthorized parent respondent (due to ethical considerations, only the legal status of the participating parent was collected). All children in the study were native- born U.S. citizens.

Although low-income families living in poor and working-class urban neighborhoods tend to share certain struggles regardless of their immigration status, in our study distinct patterns emerged in families with an unauthorized parent. Unauthorized parents were statistically significantly younger and less educated than authorized parents.^(c) They were more likely to speak Spanish in their homes and to prefer Spanish to English (although the children in the study overwhelming preferred to speak English or had no language preference, regardless of their parent’s legal status).

Unauthorized immigrants faced more challenges than their authorized counterparts before, during, and after immigration. Unauthorized parents experienced higher rates of poverty before they immigrated and were more likely to have experienced a traumatic event during their migration to the U.S. Upon entering the country, they reported having less support from family. Unlike in other studies of unauthorized adults, the unauthorized participants in this study were less likely to be employed than the authorized participants.

Although average monthly income did not differ between authorized and unauthorized adults in our study, parents with higher levels of legal vulnerability were more likely to experience job-related stress. That stress could result from working more jobs, under more stressful conditions, for less pay, or from fear of losing their jobs because of their legal status. Compared to authorized parents, unauthorized parents also experienced statistically significantly higher levels of stress related to ethnicity-based discrimination, English language learning, and legal status.

Overall, unauthorized parents were very unlikely to access social services for themselves. They were more willing and able to access services, such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program, for their children, but at lower rates than authorized parents. Unauthorized parents were also less likely than authorized parents to enroll their children in early childhood or preschool programs (e.g., Head Start), an important distinction given the well-established relationship between preschool participation and school readiness and success.²¹

Although one might assume that families under the kinds of stress created by legal vulnerability might also report higher levels of strain related to marital relationships, parenting, and the family, this research does not support that hypothesis. Families headed by unauthorized parents generally reported intact partnerships, parent-child relationships, and family processes. However, consistent with some previous findings,¹⁷ unauthorized parents did report having less practical support than authorized parents from their familial and social networks when it came to help with childcare, finding a job, or finances.

Over 90% of children in our study hold high expectations and high aspirations for their educational futures. At least one-third are fully bilingual, a major asset for cognitive development. Yet despite these promising findings, the children, particularly those from mixed-status families, still face a number of obstacles to academic success.

To examine the influence of parental immigration status on children’s educational outcomes, we statistically controlled for other variables that could account for differences in academic performance, including parent education, parent and child language preference, parent marital status, family income, and whether the child had been diagnosed with a learning disability.^(d) After controlling for these variables, we analyzed children’s performance on a standardized academic assessment.

The children of unauthorized parents scored lower in math, word reading, sentence comprehension, and spelling than children of authorized parents. While over three-quarters of children of authorized parents are at or above grade level in word reading, less than half of children with an unauthorized parent are at that level. For sentence comprehension, the difference is even greater: over two-thirds of children of authorized parents, but only one-third of children with an unauthorized parent, scored at or above grade level. In both spelling and math, over 80% of children of authorized parents, but only 50% of children with an unauthorized parent, scored at or above grade level.

There are several factors that might explain the relationship between a parent’s legal status and their child’s academic outcomes. For example, when parents have to work longer hours or are more stressed from work, they may be less available at home to help with homework. If they have trouble learning English, parents may not be able to read school notices or participate in their children’s nightly assignments.

RESEARCH ON MIXED-STATUS FAMILIES IN RHODE ISLAND

In our study, higher rates of food scarcity among mixed-status families were found to “mediate” – that is, explain the relationship between – parent legal status and certain academic outcomes (sentence comprehension and spelling). This means that a parent’s unauthorized status makes a family less likely to have stable access to food, and it is this food scarcity (not simply the unauthorized status itself) that leads to the children having trouble with sentence comprehension and spelling.^(e) Additionally, fearing deportation, experiencing discrimination, and encountering challenges to learning English were also mediators of the relationship between a parent’s legal status and their child’s academic performance.

This means that in mixed-status families with greater access to social services, children’s academic performance was less likely to suffer due to their parents’ unauthorized status. This finding suggests that social service use might act as a protective buffer, lessening the negative impact of parents’ unauthorized status on children’s academic achievement.

This finding suggests that policies or services that improve families’ access to food, lower the threat of discrimination and deportation, or remove barriers to learning English in mixed-status families might keep children from these families from falling behind their peers academically.

A potentially equally important finding is that access to social services is a “moderator” that can limit the negative effect of a parent’s unauthorized status on a child’s performance in at least two academic areas: spelling and word reading.

CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 

At 14% percent of Rhode Island’s population, Latinos are a growing demographic, but not a homogenous one. Great variability exists within this population in terms of national origin and immigration status. Talking about the achievement gap between Latino and White students means little unless we can discern which specific factors enhance and impede success for Latino students, and which groups of Latino students are most affected. Because Latinos are a diverse group, a diverse set of responses must be developed and implemented to address their academic and social needs.

This study found that elementary school students with an unauthorized immigrant parent perform lower on standardized assessments of reading, math, and spelling than similar children of authorized immigrants. These findings call attention to the ways in which policies and practices aimed at unauthorized immigrants, and the pattern of social exclusion they create, have a negative impact on these immigrants’ U.S. citizen children. The findings are particularly troubling given the importance of early academic skills for children’s later success in school and career.

Specifically, our study provides evidence that the social marginalization that immigrant parents experience as a result of their unauthorized status – in the form of food scarcity, fear of deportation, discrimination, and English-language challenges – impacts their U.S.-born children’s academic performance. Importantly, social service use was found to moderate this relationship. This finding suggests that one potential way to close the achievement gap among Latino students may be to connect children of unauthorized immigrant parents with relevant social services.

Armed with an understanding of both the factors that connect parental immigration status with academic performance and those that might protect U.S.-born children from some of the negative impacts of a parent’s legal status, policymakers and schools can take steps to support these children. Finding ways to reduce the stigma of unauthorized status and enable access to social services is likely to deliver better academic outcomes for students of unauthorized immigrant parents.^(f)