The Obama Administration's New Strategic Action Plan on Immigrant Integration

On April 14, the White House Task Force on New Americans released their long-awaited report, Strengthening Communities by Welcoming All Residents: A Federal Strategic Action Plan on Immigrant and Refugee Integration. It explores ways that the federal government can support immigrants' integration into American society, and offers a series of targeted recommendations along those lines.

President Obama launched the Task Force last November and charged it with reviewing current federal policies and considering ways that they might be changed to better support immigrant integration. This project has considerable implications for education, given that the linguistic, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity that immigrants bring to the country is most pronounced in the PreK-12 years. In part because of falling native-born birth rates, immigrants and their children account for all of the United States’ population growth between the ages of zero and eight years old since 1990.

We often talk about children of immigrants’ educational prospects in terms of school resources—like the language instructional models they encounter or the assessments they take—but the phrase we use to describe these kids ought to prompt us to think more carefully. That is, the success of “children of immigrants” is deeply intertwined with the success of their immigrant parents. And the success of these parents depends in part upon participating freely and fully in American society and the broader economy.

The Task Force’s report starts on this very point. It breaks the goal into three parts: “civic, economic, and linguistic integration.” Ideally, immigrants who integrate significantly along those three lines will become naturalized as American citizens. This process has big potential to support a strong American economy. Studies on the “citizenship wage premium” suggest that immigrants who become citizens significantly out-earn immigrants who do not reach that level of integration. One research model suggests that naturalizing all eligible immigrants to full citizenship would result in a $9 to $13 billion increase in total income in the United States. This would clearly be good for the United States’ economy, but the 8 to 11 percent increase in income would also make a considerable difference for families of these newly-naturalized American citizens.

The report covers a wide range of public institutions and policies that could be leveraged to support immigration integration in the United States. The authors write:

As a part of its internal assessment process, the Task Force identified 58 current immigrant integration programs administered by 10 federal agencies that are Task Force members. Of these integration programs, 33 primarily emphasize civic integration, 16 primarily focus on linguistic integration, and 9 focus on economic integration.

Nonetheless, the report notes that there is often “limited capacity and funding for immigrant and refugee integration” across American public institutions. While for many this language surely conjures up images of overburdened immigrant welcome centers or border towns struggling with increased immigration to their area, capacity and funding limitations are rife in American schools serving children of immigrants and DLLs. For instance, only a small fraction—just over 10 percent—of teachers speak a language other than English at home. In a country where nearly one-third of U.S. Head Start participants are DLLs, this means that there is a considerable shortage of multilingual teachers working in our elementary schools. If we could wave a wand tomorrow that would repeal all states’ “English-only” laws and decree multilingual education for all American students, all that magic would have a limited effect unless we also invested heavily in developing a teaching corps with the language capacities to deliver on those promises.

American schools are far from making that level of investment at the moment. While the numbers of DLLs and children of immigrants have risen significantly in the last several decades, the federal investment in No Child Left Behind’s Title III (the prime federal investment in language services for U.S. students) hasn’t kept pace in the 13 years since the bill was signed. What’s more, data accuracy issues and variation in states’ commitments to supplementing those Title III funds mean that even the limited services many of these students currently receive…are inadequately or unpredictably funded.

While the Task Force’s recommendations cannot solve those problems (given political limitations stymying more comprehensive federal action), they provide several ideas that could make a real difference for immigrant families in the United States. For instance: many immigrant families struggle to navigate the United States’ educational institutions because they are unfamiliar with the enrollment rules, institutional expectations, and social norms governing the system. This is a particularly challenging problem in the early years, when children of immigrants consistently enroll in American early education programs at lower rates than their non-immigrant peers. In response, the Task Force recommends that the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services work together to “create a parent toolkit to provide families, including new American families, with information about the importance of early learning for their children and resources on how to find high-quality early learning programs.” It also calls for them to share existing (and generally very good) resources from Head Start’s National Center on Cultural and Linguistic Responsiveness.

The Task Force also calls for the Department of Education to “highlight effective, evidence-based interventions for ELs and new Americans, for use in federal programs such as…Title III.” Better information on supporting children of immigrants and DLLs across the PreK-12 grades would begin to close information gaps for teachers—and parents—who want to help these children succeed.

There are pages of other recommendations related to the education of children of immigrants and the integration of their families into American society. For example, the report calls attention to recent efforts to enhance federal civil rights oversight of districts that are falling short of their responsibilities to language learning students enrolled in their schools.

These sorts of changes are hardly a replacement for comprehensive, humane immigration reform. And a revamped commitment to multilingualism in American schools would probably do more for U.S. children of immigrants than the sum of these initiatives. But Republicans in the House of Representatives have been unwilling to move on the Senate’s bipartisan immigration reform efforts and Congress’ rewrite of No Child Left Behind’s Title III appears unlikely to dramatically improve how American schools support these students’ multiple languages. Their inaction need not mean that the Task Force—and the Obama Administration at large—should also do nothing. In politics, the perfect is always the enemy of the good, and the Task Force’s recommendations could certainly make a difference for immigrants and their families across the country.

--Note: This post is part of New America’s Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Click here for more information on this team’s work.