Randy Capps, a senior research associate at Urban Institute's Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population, is a demographer specializing in immigrant populations. He is an author of the 2005 report, The Health and Well-Being of Young Children of Immigrants. Dr. Capps is working on a study of the No Child Left Behind Act and its implications for children of immigrants and limited English speakers in public schools.
1. How many young children of immigrants live in this country, and what challenges does this number raise? As of 2001, there were about 5 million children under 6 in the United States with at least one immigrant parent—which is how we define children of immigrants. These kids are about a fifth of all young children in this country, and an even higher share (about 28 percent) of children in families with incomes less than twice the poverty level. Even though this is a new and fast-growing population due to heavy recent immigration, comparatively little is known about them.
The share of children of immigrants has been rising quickly. That's true not only in those traditional places where there have been a lot of immigrants—like New York, Florida, and California—but also increasingly in other parts of the country, in smaller cities, and in smaller towns.
So the challenge here is that there are more and more young children of immigrants in communities that don't have a lot of experience working with immigrant families. They just don't have the social services and school systems set up and designed to work with this population.
2. Compared with children of natives, how are children of immigrants faring?
The children in these families are more likely to be poor and to experience the whole range of hardships connected with that. Immigrants are about one in five low-wage workers. Over a quarter (27 percent) of young children of immigrants are poor compared to about one fifth (19 percent) of young children of natives. In a lot of these families you have two parents, but one of the parents doesn't work.
These children are more likely to live in crowded housing. They're more likely to be in families that have trouble paying the mortgage or the rent and difficulty affording food. Jobs that immigrant parents do, by and large, are less likely to carry health insurance and this reduces their children's access to health care services.
These children are slightly more likely to be reported in only fair or poor health by their parents. But, again, that is likely due to the poverty or the crowded living conditions. There hasn't been much evidence of a causal link between lack of health insurance and children being in fair and poor health.
Now, if you look at the public health insurance programs—that's mainly Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)—there has actually been a fair amount of success in reaching more low-income children. We've seen that coverage expansions have been taken advantage of by a lot of children in immigrant families as well.
The good news is that the health insurance programs are being extended to more and more children in immigrant families. The bad news is that children in immigrant families are still twice as likely as children in native families to be uninsured.
3. How does legal status affect well being and access to benefits and services for immigrants, especially those who are noncitizens and undocumented?
If you look at immigrants overall, a quarter to a third are undocumented—a population
estimated at 10 million in the United States. If you look at young children with immigrant parents, over a quarter of their parents are undocumented. An important point, though, is that most children in these immigrant families are born in the United States. Even among families with an undocumented parent, two-thirds of their children are born in the U.S.
Here's the rub: even though the children are born in the U.S and so have all the same rights and privileges of any children born in the U.S. — the parents do not.
Other factors affecting the parents also affect the children indirectly. Undocumented parents are more likely than immigrants overall to be working in low-wage jobs and jobs that don't carry health benefits. These jobs may not be stable; they may be seasonal. Undocumented parents naturally fear interacting with government agencies. They may fear deportation. They are less likely, for instance, to apply for food stamp benefits, even though their children may be eligible. Or they may be afraid to go into a government agency to apply for their children's health care benefits.
Even though the children in these families experience greater need, they are less likely to use public benefits. At least they are less likely to use TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] and food stamps, even though they are eligible.
4. What are the most common child-care arrangements for young children of immigrants?
Young children of immigrants are much more likely to be cared for in the home with a parent than is the case for native families. That may be because labor force participation among immigrant women, especially non-citizen women, is lower relatively.
Or they may lack access to child care facilities. For instance, there might not be child care in the language and culture that the immigrant parent feels comfortable with, or the child care may not be located near home or work. Immigrants are more likely to work shift jobs with irregular hours, and child care may not be available. Or, they may not have money to afford a child care arrangement. In some cases, if they are undocumented, they may not be eligible for child care subsidies. For all of these reasons, the rate of center-based care is much lower for children of immigrants than for native children.
Shying away from these centers can be a problem because it is very important for these children to
attend early education programs, which can help narrow the achievement gaps between different ethnic and racial groups and between richer and poorer families. A large body of research bears this out now.
We may worry that children of immigrants are less likely to be in early education programs. For children two and under, staying at home with their parents is probably a good thing. But at what point does that become a disadvantage? Children do need to enter U.S. society and prepare academically for school.
By age three or four, they may be at a disadvantage in terms of their preparation for school. One important factor is that a relatively high percentage of immigrant parents have less than a high school education themselves and may not be in a position to prepare the children well for school.
5. Considering these trends, what are the policy implications?
As children in immigrant families become a growing share of the population, anti-poverty policies and social welfare designed for native-born families may need to be adjusted. For instance, since immigrant families are more likely to have two parents, marriage promotion will help but will go only so far.
Immigrants are less likely to have access to TANF and other benefits, so addressing poverty through the welfare system is not going to affect them nearly as much as with some native-born populations. Most of these low-income immigrant families are working families. For them, such support programs as food stamps, Earned Income Tax Credit, child care for working families, and public health care matter the most.
To my mind, expanding Medicaid and SCHIP has been a big success, and that expansion should continue even if budgets get tighter. Another recent policy success was the restoration of food stamps to legal immigrants during 2003. It's too early to see how many people benefited from that change, but anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of children in immigrant families have.
Of course, continuing to reach more families through such support programs as Medicaid and food stamps does require outreach to immigrant families. They need to know that their children are eligible and that there won't be any immigration consequences.
Finally, it's very important to examine the whole range of child care options and to decide what's most important. Is it access to pre-kindergarten programs in the public school system? Expanding Head Start or other child care centers? Or even working to improve the quality of child care that immigrant parents provide themselves so the kids can get a better jump on academics in the home.
Any number of strategies can help to improve early education for these children, but I think one of the most important things now that people are realizing—especially in the context of the No Child Left Behind Act—is that immigrants and their children are very important customers of the public schools. The scores of Limited English Proficient students count toward school performance. And schools are starting to realize that language education for the younger children matters for their scores later on.
Meanwhile, the schools are being held accountable for serving children in immigrant families. No one prescription works best to serve these children, and different states and different school systems do use different programs—some use a bilingual system, some use a two-way language program, some immerse children immediately into English when they enter the school. The challenge is finding enough resources to serve these children.
