Book Notes: Immigrants Raising Citizens

Despite our contentious national debate over immigration, there’s surprisingly little research on the children of undocumented immigrants.  There are an estimated 4 million of these children in the United States today, but we don’t know much about the homes where these children study, their parents’ working hours and wages, or whether the myths surrounding undocumented families—like undocumented parents not signing up their children for preschool because they are scared to provide their information on enrollment forms—are true.

A new book called Immigrants Raising Citizens, by Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Hiro Yoshikawa, tracked 400 children and their mothers in New York City in order to determine the differences between the lives of children with an undocumented parent and other, similar children from low-income citizen families. The book is in many ways the first of its kind: It attempts to isolate what day-to-day life is like for a child with an undocumented parent, and then figure out how that specific experience may affect a child’s cognitive development.

The book is populated with fascinating anecdotes on the undocumented subculture in New York, and the lifestyle differences between different ethnic groups, neighborhoods, and places of employment. Yoshikawa found that undocumented Mexican families, who only recently began immigrating to New York in large numbers, tended to be spread across the city and were very isolated both from each other, and from the social service organizations that try to help them. And while Dominicans often overstayed work visas in the United States and Mexicans paid to be smuggled across the U.S. Mexico border, Chinese immigrants in New York often had paid tens of thousands of dollars to be smuggled into the country—money that often left Chinese families in debt to friends and relatives for years.

I reviewed Immigrants Raising Citizens for the September/October issue of The Washington Monthly. Read my discussion of the book here.