Whole Family Solutions

Enhancing the wellness and success of children of immigrants requires two-generation (or whole-family) strategies that recognize the intersection of several systems: early education and care, adult education, immigration policies, and health and social services. As explained, trauma results from structural and political circumstances that impacts the entire family. Social service staff, early education educators and caregivers, and home visiting case workers need trauma-informed training to recognize early signs of trauma and appropriately intervene across cultures to help young children and their families, which will yield life-long benefits. Since all refugees pass through resettlement programs, these agencies can improve and standardize mental health screening processes for adults and their young children and guide them to the relevant services.

All solutions need meaningful community outreach and make a real commitment to language access that includes investments in translation of informational materials and bilingual staff and interpreters. Because the stresses, work conditions, and overall wellbeing of caregivers profoundly impact young children's cognitive and emotional development, comprehensive support services for families will promote the best growing conditions for young children. The report highlights five additional ways to help immigrant families:

• Home Visiting Programs: Although they underserve immigrant families, like other social programs, home visiting services can particularly provide long-term and far-reaching impact, acting as a stepping stone for critical programs, such as counseling, early education, and job training.
• Pathway to citizenship: A pathway towards permanent residency and citizenship reduces the chronic stress on the entire family, which have been shown to harm children’s social and cognitive development.
• Social Services: All public services are futile if they cannot reach the most vulnerable population, and therefore, need to be accessible to children of immigrants.
• Work Authorization: Work authorization and labor protection prevent exploitations of undocumented and documented immigrants, allowing them to earn more wages and more time with their children.
• Upskilling Opportunities: Immigrants can fill many underemployed positions, mutually benefiting the U.S. economy, meet people’s needs, and help immigrant families if upskilling opportunities are financially and linguistically accessible.

Home visitings, family-focused social service programs that visit expectant mothers and caretakers alongside their young children at home, are a uniquely promising intervention for reaching children of immigrants through a whole-family approach. Home visitings have been shown to benefit the whole family, strengthening children’s linguistic and cognitive development and their school readiness, increasing parents income, employment rates, and school enrollment. In addition to the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program, a federal home visiting funding initiative, states and counties have expanded investments in local family visiting programs.

Despite its shown benefits, home visiting services–like other public programs–have underserved dual language learners and children in immigrant families. These families may face barriers to participating in home visiting programs due to language barriers, lack of culturally and linguistically trained program staff, and hesitation to access social services (e.g., early childhood education, health, nutrition) due to fear of immigration consequences.

Home visiting programs can partner with local-based organizations already serving these immigrant families to recruit, engage, and retain these families by informing them about the existence, eligibility, and benefits of home visiting programs. Home visitings—if they adapt cultural and language strategies to reach immigrant families—would likely see tremendous results with immigrant families since they are disproportionately likely to face risk factors, such as poverty and low parental education. Home-visiting can build trust and remove several access barriers, such as transportation and reduce anxiety of encountering federal agents. Staff can better see the family’s needs since members are more comfortable at home and target their specific needs through providing information, training, screenings, and connections and referrals to services for parents expecting or caring for young children.

Because these visits happen in individual families, they can be an opportunity to address trauma in a way that does not feel foreign or stigmatizing for immigrant families. For example, RefugeeOne Wellness Program, a mental health program in Illinois, integrates a home visiting program for trauma-exposed pregnant mothers and families with children under age 3 of refugee/immigrant status. The program sends a team of clinicians, psychiatrists, and interpreters in immigrant homes, regarding the parent as an expert through a partnership to support both child and parent goals. In addition to strengthening the parent-child relationship and promoting child development, staff can introduce immigrants to programs and guide them in cultural navigation that have been restrictive for immigrants.

Many children of undocumented parents have poorly developed cognitive skills, visible in children as young as twenty-four months, because their parents avoid accessing valuable resources, live isolated from social networks, and work in exploitative conditions. Hirokazu Yoshikawa presents quantitative data to show that having an undocumented parent harm children’s development, especially their early cognitive skills. The parent’s citizenship status does not inherently impact the child’s well-being—the policies tied to citizenship status do.

An opportunity towards citizenship advances children’s cognitive skills, development, and overall health. A path to citizenship and end of public charge rule would increase the use of public programs and childcare subsidies and enrollment in programs to improve parents' job skills and education, such as GED classes or job training. Immigrants need clear and honest announcements whether those who receive parole status can access social services, many of which are essential to give children’s food security, health insurance, and early education and childcare. States can intervene to help immigrant families acquire necessary resources. Colorado, as an example, has passed a law that eliminates lawful presence in the United States as a possible factor in determinations of eligibility for any state or local public benefits in 2021.

Social services must center immigrants rather than treat the immigrant population as a niche population. The enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 reflects a shift in U.S. social policy to increasingly stratified immigrants—not only to undocumented immigrants but also to lawful permanent residents and U.S. citizens in immigrant families. As a result, children in immigrant families have not been able to fully realize the benefits from social safety-net programs—including the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act stimulus payments.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which presented a unique opportunity to lessen the harmful effects of stratification by legal status, provided a model and opportunity to reexamine immigrant exclusions, restrictions, and administrative burdens in public programs. Under the American Rescue Plan Act, an estimated 27 million children became newly eligible for the fully refundable portion of the child tax credit; this recognition should be made permanent. A more inclusive social policy needs to modify eligibility to depend on the health and developmental needs of the child, especially regarding nutrition and medical services, not the immigration status of the household. The utility of public charge has consistently harmed immigrant parents and children, and thus, must be removed in order to restore trust in health services and other life-saving programs for our children.

Additionally, social programs require real language accessibility, including translations in multiple languages, multilingual staff, and collaboration with community organizations. School district–based providers reported drawing on federal funding streams for outreach activities. For example, Title I grants can be used on immigrant outreach and parent engagement. Grants from Title III funds, allocated for education agencies for serving students with limited English proficiency, can support immigrant/refugee services.

As the Build Back Better Act appears to be permanently halted since its passage in the House, it’s worth noting how close legislators were to helping immigrant families in three main ways: long-term work permits for immigrants to support their families, health care coverage expansion to immigrants and their children, and necessary funding and priority to fix the childcare crisis.

The immigration provisions in Build Back Better offer up to 10 years of work authorization for undocumented people living in the United States. The parole provisions provide temporary status. It also allows visa recapture, preserving some 222,000 unused family-based visas and roughly 157,000 employment-based visas that would otherwise lapse. The labor shortage provides an opportunity for the state to partner with employers to offer training for immigrants.

Work authorization must go hand-in-hand with labor protection for all immigrants. Many undocumented immigrants do not have work protection, such as the right to be paid at least the minimum wage, the right to be paid for overtime hours, the right to take meal breaks, access to workers’ compensation when injured, and the right to advocate for better working condition. Unionization provides a structure within which undocumented workers could be assured basic legal work conditions through a collective bargaining. Contrary to assumptions that immigrants are unorganizable, evidence supports the reverse: immigrants tend to be more inclined towards unions than the native born. The success of the Justice for Janitors campaign of the Service Employees International Union and the mobilization of drywall hangers in residential construction indicates the importance of engaging Latinx immigrants.

The Build Back Better Act would have increased the maximum award amount for Pell Grants, subsidies created in 1965 for undergraduates of low-income families, who are actively attending universities and or other secondary institution, which are critical for first generation students, low-income students, and students of color to help build their futures, and would have ensured DREAMers—young undocumented immigrants who would’ve benefited from the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act—could access Pell Grants. Over half a million children in the United States have a parent who is a Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient. Allowing DREAMers to access Pell Grants place the whole family on a more promising path to earn more money, job satisfaction, and overall health. The creation and scaling up of opportunities for parents to develop knowledge, skills, and social capital can lift their families’ intergenerational trajectories because the social and material resources that higher level of education confers are passed down across generations.

While offering Pell Grants to DREAMers will make a significant impact, professionalization opportunities should be offered at all levels. After Washington, D.C. passed regulations that sought to increase the education and credentials of the early educator workforce in 2016, the University of the District of Columbia Community College designed and implemented a Spanish-English bilingual associate degree program. This program aimed to address academic, bureaucratic, linguistic, and other barriers to obtaining degrees by providing early childhood educators with the opportunity to take courses in Spanish at close to no cost to participants. Pamoja Early Childhood Education Workforce Program offers free college-accredited courses in four languages, Swahili, Arabic, Farsi, and Karen, and connects them with mentors to help with homework and technology skills—all of which ensures each woman completes her certificate and become a lead teacher. To reduce financial burdens, Pamoja also offers compensation for missed work time to attend class and provides payment to friends or family members who care for their children during class or practicum time.

Briya Public Charter School in Washington D.C., as another example, provides a whole-family approach through free high-quality early education to children and tuition-free high school diploma, Medical Assistant Program, and Child Development Associate Program to immigrant parents. The Child Development Associate Program is taught in English and Spanish, opening opportunities for more multilingual child educators. Founded in 1975 in response to the influx of refugees after the Vietnam War, Briya has touched tens of thousands of families. As the parents learn and grow their own skills, their young children enroll in the early education and care program at the same location. Additionally, three of the four locations also offer health services through the Mary’s Center, a community health center. Recognizing the trauma experienced by many immigrants and refugees, Briya uniquely provides mental health and behavioral health counselors within their schools. Counseling can be a foreign concept to Briya’s students, so participants might begin by staying after lunch or classes to talk about safe parenting before they start individual counseling sessions.

Corrected at 7:15 am on May 20, 2022: This report has been changed to correct the description of Pamoja Early Childhood Education Workforce Program. The program does not pay students in the workforce program to enroll. It does provide compensation for missed work time to attend class and provide payment to friends or family who care for their children during class or practicum time. Pamoja does pay participants in its home visiting program, in which candidates are trained to do home visits and to go into their communities to teach in the home with parents and caregivers.