Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees - GCIR

Hispanic children often encounter challenging environments in which to grow up including high poverty rates, limited access to health and social services, an education achievement gap, and hostility toward immigrant families.  Meanwhile, public policy impacts their neighborhoods, families, and schools.  This volume explores the challenges confronting Hispanic youth and the policy agenda that could improve these children's lives.

This fact sheet is the first in a series of publications on children of immigrants in the United States that updates the Urban Institute's May 2006 fact sheet that described the circumstances of these children in the early 2000s. The current fact sheet examines immigration trends and finds that children of immigrants are the fastest growing segment of the nation's children population – while the number of children of natives increased by 2.1 million between 1990 and 2007, children of immigrants grew by 8.1 million accounting for 77 percent of the growth of the U.S. children population during this time

Over the past three decades the news media have largely mischaracterized the wave of immigration that has transformed the United States, emphasizing themes of illegality, crisis, controversy, and government failure. Suro outlines the media's coverage of immigration and how they frame the issue as a sudden crisis and focuses on the actions of immigrants, law enforcement officials, and policy makers. This eclipses key contextual factors that powerfully influence both the size and content of immigration flows such as the labor market and the aging of the American work force. These tendencies in turn have created spaces for advocates who mobilize segments of the public in opposition to policy initiatives, sometimes exaggerating the narrative of immigration told by traditional news organizations.

By examining the pace of coverage and its primary focus from a variety of news organizations across periods of time, Suro suggests that the ways in which the media reports the news about immigration helps to frame the crisis in the public mindset and therefore shapes the debate. The result is widespread anxiety over illegal immigration and an exaggeration of attitudes at both ends of the political spectrum.

This report explores why more than 1 million young children under age 10 and over three-quarters of a million children under age five were missed in the 2000 Census. The inaccurate count of children is especially important because census figures are used, in whole or in part, for more than 140 programs that distribute more than $400 billion of federal funds to states and localities.

While it has always been difficult to achieve a complete count of kids in the census, report author and Casey consultant William O’Hare anticipates more difficulty in achieving an true count of children in 2010 due to the increased number of children living in unusual housing situations and the growing number of racial and ethnic minority households which have historically been more difficult to count.

Up-to-date state information on children of immigrants is essential for social policies that affect children and families. This brief, accompanying the Urban Institute's interactive Children of Immigrants Data Tool, describes the national and state characteristics of children of immigrants based on recent American Community Survey data. Since children of immigrants account for almost a quarter (24 percent) of children under age 5, their share in the school-age population will increase, with important implications for education policy. In addition, children of immigrants' poverty and low-income rates vary across states, highlighting the importance of state and local policies in promoting children's well-being.

Also visit th interactive Children of Immigrants Data Tool for comprehensive information on the characteristics of children of immigrants nationwide and for individual states and the District of Columbia.

To provide a context for the nation-wide immigration debate, this report examines the recent phenomenon of an increasing number of newcomers choosing to live in areas without a  history of immigrants. Focusing on California's declining popularity as an immigrant destination, which in the late 1990's began to decrease for the first time in decades, this report shows that many traditional destinations for immigrants are no longer as popular as they once were. This has spurred an increase in immigration-related legislation across the country. This report provides an explanation of the factors behind why immigrants are moving to these new areas, using California as an example, as immigrants are looking for more economic opportunities in other areas of the state beyond the Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas.

Focusing on California's declining popularity as an immigrant destination, which in the late 1990's began to decrease for the first time in decades, this report shows that many traditional destinations for immigrants are no longer as popular as they once were. This has spurred an increase in immigration-related legislation across the country and also means that programs to facilitate new immigrant assimilation in gateway areas are likely to continue to have a large population to serve. The report finds that social factors are having less of an impact on new immigrants’ location decisions, signaling the decline in clustering of immigrants along social lines. At the same time, economic opportunities continue to influence migration patterns. The combination of these factors may explain the fact that new immigrants are settling in areas of the state beyond the Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas or are settling in states other than California.

The Legal Arizona Workers Act makes Arizona the first state in the nation to penalize employers for knowingly hiring undocumented workers. This fact sheet examines the characteristics of Arizona's population and workforce with descriptive data and tables.

This report offers an in-depth look at the characteristics of the resident population, focusing on foreign-born persons. Included on the center's website are additional tables that break down the national data.