Immigrants make up about 13% of the US population, about 42 million out of a total population of 318.9 million citizens in 2017. First and second generation immigrant children have become the fastest-growing segment of the United States population. Compared to the native-born population, young adults aged 15–34 are significantly over-represented in new immigrants. Children and immigrants ages 35–44 are in similar proportion to native-born Americans, but older people are under-represented in new immigrants.
Towards the end of the 19th century, immigration was growing tremendously within the United States. Despite this in 1891, the NEA (National Education Association) supported that children should only be instructed in English, despite some school's allowing core classes in foreign languages.Zervas, T. G. (2017). Finding a balance in education: Immigration, diversity, and schooling in urban America, 1880-1900. ATHENS JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, 4(1), 77–84. When the Compulsory Education Act was passed in 1895, children between the ages of eight and sixteen years were mandated to attend school. With rising immigration populations, by 1906, 17% of the public school enrollment was reported as being foreign-born by the Third Biennial School Census. And by 1911 it is reported that 57.5% of children in public schools had foreign-born parentage.Cordasco, Francesco. "The Children of Immigrants in the Schools: Historical Analogues of Educational Deprivation". The Journal of Negro Education 42, no. 1 (1973): 44–53. .
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in 1982 in Plyler v. Doe that states cannot deny students an education on account of their immigration status, allowing students to gain access to the United States' public schooling system. This case is known as being one of the first cases to establish legal "rights" for immigrant education in America. Further, the 1974 Supreme Court case Lau v. Nichols prohibited discrimination based on race or national origin and determined that school systems in the United States must provide English language instruction. By 1996, a federal piece of legislature called the Illegal Reforms and Immigration Responsibilities Act (IRIRA) was put in place to prevent the states from giving undocumented students access to benefits regarding postsecondary education.Venegas, K., Cadena, M., Galan, C., Park, E., Astudillo, S., Avilez, A. A., Ward, J. D., Lanford, M., Tierney, W. G., & University of Southern California, P. C. for H. E. (2017). Understanding DACA and the Implications for Higher Education. In Pullias Center for Higher Education. Pullias Center for Higher Education. As a result, multiple states passed laws or acts in order to base tuition off of attendance, merit or need instead of residency or nationality. Examples of this occurrence are shown in legislation like the California Assembly Bill (AB) 540, or the California DREAM Act (2001). The California DREAM Act stemmed from a separate but similarly proposed legislation– the DREAM Act– and allowed students enrolled in California universities and educational programs to apply for state financial aid.
The DREAM ( (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act was a proposed act that would have conditionally given undocumented students permanent residency and financial aid– differing from DACA – which is a renewal process that risks the undocumented individual's deportation if not fulfilled every two years. Though never passed, its supporters and immigrant students coined the term "Dreamers" to describe the potential in education despite the challenges immigration might face. The "Dream" movement began gaining momentum in 2010 and the term was coined when referring to undocumented youth in reference to the DREAM Act. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) signed by President Obama in 2015 mandates English proficiency standards that hold state programs accountable for the performance of English-language (EL) programs. The most common forms of EL instruction are English as a Second Language (ESL) programs for students identified as low-English proficiency (LEP) learners.
Overview By 2000, 23% of scientists with a PhD in the U.S. were immigrants, including 40% of those in engineering and computers. Roughly a third of the United States' college and university graduate students in STEM fields are foreign nationals—in some states, it is well over half of their graduate students.
In 2016, current school enrollment figures show that immigrants lag behind native-born populations in attending pre-school and K–12 education, but they proportionally outpace native-born populations in attending colleges or universities. +SourceTotalNative-BornForeign-BornPreschool6.0%6.4%1.5%K-844.9%46.5%23.0%9-1220.6%20.6%21.1%Higher Education28.4%26.5%54.3%
While the trend is changing with changes in demographics, immigrants tend to be less educated than their native-born counterparts. They are significantly more likely to have less than a high school education, yet they are also slightly more likely to hold an advanced degree. Given the high education enrollment rates of immigrant populations, though, this is very likely to change in the next decade. By creating special visa programs, the Immigration Act of 1990 has increased the percentage of immigrants with a college education to about 29%. However, this number is only slightly more than 10% of the overall population. Further, the US Department of Education estimates that "over 4.7 million foreign-born individuals enrolled in pre-kindergarten to postsecondary education, representing 6% of the total student population. Another 20 million students are the children of foreign-born parents."
Most governments know that educators require training specific to the needs of refugee and immigrant students, but trainings are typically one-off, and poor in quality while much of the scholarly research has emphasized what has not worked, rather than highlighting proven strategies. According to McBrien the first priority is to create a safe space for the students, in which they can see themselves, are connected to their cultural heritage and able to accustom themselves to the culture of the host country. The second priority is language.
Education in the United States
Historical context The United States has a long history of discriminating against immigrants and refugees, beginning in 1790 with the Naturalization Act. This law offered citizenship only to "free white person[s]" and excluded it from all others, although various laws banned suspected anarchists, prostitutes, polygamists, or convicted of crimes “of moral turpitude,” and those likely to become a “public charge,” and most new Chinese immigrants, and requiring that all immigrants over age 16 prove they could read and write. Still, the vast majority of Europeans who reached the United States were granted entry; the U.S. Immigration Service excluded only 1 percent of the 25 million Europeans who arrived between 1880 and World War I. After that, laws reliably favored immigrants from northern and western Europe, restricting or preventing entirely immigration from southern and eastern Europe as well as Asia and Africa. The situation changed slightly in 1943 when it was decided that a respectively small number of Chinese immigrants be allowed in. The fight to keep non-European immigration low continued, despite race being taken down as a deciding factor in immigration cases in 1952.
But the system had already begun falling apart. A major shift came in 1953 with the Refugee Relief Act, allowing over 200,000 refugees to become citizens. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 placed a ceiling on immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere, followed by several laws which opened doors for refugees from Vietnam, Nicaragua, China and Haiti. More laws followed, and consequently, legal immigration from the Latin American region grew to make up 44 percent of immigration to the United States by the 1990s, compared with 29 percent for Asia, 14 percent for Europe, 6 percent for Africa, and 7 percent for the rest of the world.
While laws have since been enacted to grant refugees and immigrants protected status, including President Obama's 2012 implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the history out of which the current political climate has been carved is such that xenophobic reactions and harassment continue to be experienced by refugees and immigrants to the US. DACA was put in place to protect those who were undocumented and came to America as children, offering protection from deportation through education or a work permit that lasts about 2 years.
New wave of immigrants often generate nativist movements. Most refugees arriving to the US after 1990 were forced to flee without making preliminary plans for resettlement. This makes it difficult for them to find a support network in their host country.
Current challenges Many immigrants in the United States suffer from structural poverty reinforced by the education system. They often settle in segregated, impoverished communities where the schools are too under-resourced to accommodate for English language learners, proven to be a significant risk factor for the educational outcomes of migrant populations. These communities oftentimes reflect redlining patterns found throughout the Jim Crow Era within the United States. Cultural differences in learning styles or thinking patterns lead to students being mislabeled as "learning disabled" or "slow", resulting their stratification among peers such as grade repetition or exclusion from necessary college preparation. Further, the dominant use of high-stakes testing in United States to make educational decisions puts English language learners at a disadvantage. Furthermore, those who do not support immigration often state that immigrants in public schools have a negative effect on native born children in the system.Published: Jennifer Hunt, 2017. "The Impact of Immigration on the Educational Attainment of Natives," Journal of Human Resources, vol 52(4), pages 1060-1118. This conclusion has been disproved by a study by Jennifer Hunt that shows that a minimal increase (1%) of natives in public schools increases the likelihood that native born children finish 12 years of school by .03%. Education also plays a major role in the healing immigrant children need, both socially and emotionally. Policy implications affecting immigrant students in education include the lacking emphasis on bilingual and multicultural education coupled with the movement of non-immigrants to private schools, increasing the lack of public school funding to support English language learning populations.
Age at immigration and educational achievement
Children who immigrate at a relatively late age are at an educational disadvantage compared to children who immigrate at an early age. Compared to immigrants who immigrated at the age of 0–4, the educational attainment of children who immigrated at the age of 10–14 is approximately one year behind. In the case of male immigrants, children who immigrated at the age of 10–14 have 12 months less educational achievement than children who immigrated at the age of 0–4. In the case of female immigrants, children who immigrated at the age of 10–14 had 13 months (1.09 years) less educational achievement than children who immigrated at the age of 0–4. On average, children who immigrate under the age of five have about 28% higher educational achievement than children who immigrate to school-age children.
Bilingualism