How Immigrants Fare in U.S. Education

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In California, immigrants now dominate low-skill employment. As the gap between low- and high-skill wages has grown in the last 20 years — a gap aggravated by low-skill immigration — a substantial share of California's immigrant labor force is earning less than native- born workers. Low-skill immigrants also are finding it more difficult to be assimilated into California's labor markets because of job competition from other immigrants.

This outcome points to a troubling stratification among wage earners in California — and ultimately other immigrant-impacted regions — by such determinants as language, nationality, recency of arrival or whether schooled in the United States or abroad, as well as by race and class. The Mixed Economic Progress of Immigrants concludes that immigrants in general are not assimilating any faster.

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They have not shortened the time it takes them to catch-up with the wages of natives. For most Asian and European immigrants, who close their wage gap with natives quickly, this is no problem. For Mexicans and Central Americans it means that the persistent wage gap they have experienced historically will not close in the foreseeable future. Data biases in the study may make even this grim picture unduly bright.

Rand's study is based on immigrant men only, so the typically lower wages of women immigrants stemming from discrimination, weaker education and experience, and family obligations do not have their customary weight in these findings. While Rand's study of economic progress does not go into why the assimilation machinery of U.

Education, point up the educational travails that account, in part, for the poor labor market performance of Hispanics in the first study. How Immigrants Fare finds that those newcomers who get in and remain in the U.

Those immigrants are more likely than natives to take college preparatory courses, just as likely or more likely to graduate from high school within four years from their sophomore year, and more likely than their native counterparts to attend college and remain there continuously for four years. And they are likely to have parents with higher expectations of college attendance for their children than do native-born Americans.

As in the labor market competition, Asian and white immigrants, in that order, are the best performers in school, while Hispanics, mainly Mexicans, lag seriously.

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In , one of every four immigrants from Mexico of high school age was not in school, a rate markedly higher than that of other immigrants and Mexican-Americans. The study attributes the low Mexican high school participation rate not to dropping out, but to "not dropping in in the first place" — not enrolling at all because of the inability to catch up or the need to support themselves and their families.

Rand's scholars find reason for concern in the large educational gap between Hispanics and other ethnic groups. A quarter-century of high immigration is making Hispanics the nation's largest minority, with one out of three high school students in California now of Hispanic origin.

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The authors correctly warn that the educational success of Hispanics in the future will determine the quality of the labor force and the demand for public services in key states of the country. But the remedies the authors seem to have in mind would involve expensive financial assistance and special education programs to native and foreign-born Hispanics, with no suggestion of slowing the immigration inflow. The data used for the study, a longitudinal survey of high school students between and raises questions about the timeliness and current relevance of the findings.

Information about the educational experience of the decade of foreign born students passing through U.

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A quick glance at the crisis-ridden New York City public schools shows them to be significantly more crowded now by immigration and high birthrates among the city's foreign born than a decade ago. The perspective of Rand's third study, Immigration and Higher Education, is not the performance or needs of the immigrants themselves, but how the nation's colleges and universities are coping in the s with rising enrollments of immigrants and the special policy issues their presence raises. The report consists of case studies of 14 two- and four-year institutions with large enrollments of immigrants.

The institutions were hardly representative: Immigrants were defined as those foreign-born who are permanent residents or on the track to permanent residence, such as refugees. Although now numbering more than , nationally, foreign students on temporary "nonimmigrant" visas were excluded from the study though a third or more of them will ultimately settle in the United States , since their support systems supposedly differ from those of regular immigrants.

The researchers found that the large and diverse immigrant population of students highlighted what they called "pivotal, unresolved tensions facing the higher education sector. Displacement may occur either within or between ethnic groups. An example of the former is the possibility On some campuses special admissions programs intended to provide access for a small number of promising students whose grades or test scores fall below official criteria are increasingly servicing Asian immigrants with low verbal but high quantitative scores rather than the intended native-born students p. Respondents to Rand's survey feared that special support programs for immigrants, whose problems they considered no more serious than many other students, would worsen campus fragmentation.

More specifically, it has little negative impact for African American workers in the aggregate, although immigrants may reduce opportunities of low-skilled workers in certain geographical areas. They are not eligible for benefits from most public programs, however.

The Immigrants' View of Education

However, the percentage of native-born elderly, who collect Social Security rather than contribute to it, is increasing. Despite eligibility for free hospital care, many pay for it themselves or have private health insurance, and thus use services less than the general population. More than three-quarters of them have no other source of income because they are ineligible for Social Security.


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The source of the general information about immigrants presented here is a compilation of Fact Sheets published by the National Immigration Forum The sheets themselves cite data from a variety of sources, such as the U. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and analyses by a range of immigration research organizations.


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Census of Population and Housing data and several smaller studies of the educational performance of immigrants and other minorities. It should be noted that the applicability of findings based on HSB data, which comprise information about students who attended high school more than 15 years ago, to the current educational experiences of immigrants is limited for several reasons: However, newer data on the education of immigrants of equal validity and scope is not yet available for analysis.

A guide to immigration facts and figures. How immigrants fare in U. Please note that this site is privately owned and is in no way related to any Federal agency or ERIC unit. Further, this site is using a privately owned and located server. This is NOT a government sponsored or government sanctioned site. Immigrants and Their Educational Attainment: