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Abstract:
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the national debate on immigration by providing in depth understandings of the potential and context of immigrant children and their families. Our focus is on students. We describe the experiences of legal, refugee, and undocumented young people as well as children of immigrant parents. The lives of these young people are intimately tied in negotiating their place in society.
Keywords: immigration; social mobility; school success
Numerous immigrant students graduate from U.S. high schools every year. They along with family members may have migrated to this country from Vietnam, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, Nepal, or Kenya with the hope of a better life. Many immigrant youth have sacrificed much from leaving grandparents in native countries to long waits for their families to be reunited in the United States. Though students have taken different paths to and within the United States, they share a common belief in the American dream, the belief in opportunities living in a country where people have important freedoms.
We feel the intelligent, bi-lingual, hardworking students in our classrooms contribute greatly to the economic and political health of our country. We believe there are compelling reasons for citizens and lawmakers to craft and pass a DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) to support their education and provide a federal pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrant students. We also believe in the unification of families and that parents of native-born children need a pathway to naturalization.
Examples of hard working immigrant students and their families can be found in every state in the union. The United States is a country of over 300 million people, and by the year 2000 approximately 1 1 percent were immigrants (Haskins, Greenberg, & Fremstad ,2004). At the beginning of the 2 1 st century, California had the greatest percentage of foreign-born residents at almost 3 1 percent (Camarot, 2001). Roughly one million people immigrate to the United States annually, while as many as 500,000 additional people enter the country illegally (Capps, Fix, Murray, Otts, Passell, & Herwantoro, 2005; Haskins, 2007). Immigrant children and their families come to the United States from around the world for a variety of reasons including: genocide in Somalia; suppression...