Risks Seen for Children of Illegal Immigrants

On September 21, the New York Times covered a paper co-authored by Academic Dean Hiro Yoshikawa. The paper, entitled "Growing Up in the Shadows: The Developmental Implications of Unauthorized Status," appears in the Fall 2011 issue of the Harvard Educational Review.

In the paper, the authors--Yoshikawa, NYU Professors Carola Suárez-Orozco and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and NYU Associate Professor Robert Teranishi--focus on the estimated 5.5 million children and adolescents in the United States who are growing up with unauthorized parents and are experiencing multiple and yet unrecognized developmental consequences as a result of their family’s existence in the shadow of the law. The authors develop a conceptual framework to systematically examine the ways in which unauthorized status affects these children, adolescents, and emerging adults caught in its wake.

From the New York Times:

Children whose parents are illegal immigrants or who lack legal status themselves face “uniformly negative” effects on their social development from early childhood until they become adults, according to a study by four researchers published Wednesday in the Harvard Educational Review.

The study concluded that more than five million children in the United States are “at risk of lower educational performance, economic stagnation, blocked mobility and ambiguous belonging” because they are growing up in immigrant families affected by illegal status.

The study is the first to pull together field research by social scientists nationwide to track the effects of a family’s illegal immigration status on children from birth until they graduate from college and start to navigate the job market. It covers immigrants from a variety of origins, including Latinos and Asians.

Read the rest of the article at nytimes.com.