Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees - GCIR

This is the second in a series of reports on immigrants in Maryland. The first report focused on the immigrant workforce in the state. This report profiles the quarter million children with foreign-born parents. Children of immigrants accounted for most of the increase in the state's child population since 1990. Two-thirds of the children live in Montgomery and Prince George's counties, but other counties saw large immigration inflows. Children's economic circumstances vary across immigrant origins, and parental education and English skills. Children of immigrants also contribute to the increasing racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in public schools.

Leading up to the 2010 census, many national organizations viewed the pending head count of the nation as a civil rights issue of critical concern to the country. Past census counts have undercounted racial and ethnic minorities, people with low income, people with limited English proficiency, among others. This generates concern about the equitable distribution of federal dollars and political representation. The Leadership Conference Education Fund and its national partners collaborated to ensure a full and fair census count. The report documents challenges in the field as the census unfolded in three hard-to-count areas: Mississippi, Greater New Orleans, and Texas Rio Grande Valley Colonias.  It also presents a set of recommendations for census methods, planning, and operations for 2020.

 Minnesota has a long history of immigration with immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century contributing to the state's economic growth. With a new age of immigrants from new parts of the world, the state is beginning to ask critical questions to guide its growth in the coming years: What impact do immigrants have on the state’s economy and our public institutions? What role should immigration play in Minnesota’s future?

 This report, commissioned by The Minneapolis Foundation, seeks to answer these questions and also identifies future research topics.

Researchers analyze immigration and poverty trends in the 100 metropolitan areas with the largest immigration populations between 1980 and 2007. They find that immigrants are still heavily concentrated in the six traditional immigrant destination states (California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey), but immigrant numbers grew rapidly in many western, midwestern, and southeastern states as well. Not surprisingly, many metropolitan areas outside the traditional destination states saw high immigration growth. The number of foreign-born residents grew from 14 million in 1980 to 38 million in 2007.

The number and diversity of immigrants to affluent countries has risen greatly
during recent decades, with low and middle income countries becoming increasingly prominent in the mix of immigrant origins. Immigrants often are in the family building stage of life, bringing one or more children along to the settlement country and bearing additional children after they arrive. As a consequence, although considerable public attention, and often controversy, has focused on the rising share of adults in affluent countries who are immigrants, even larger is the share of all children who are children of immigrants. Yet not until 2009 did basic, internationally comparable indicators become available to measure the number of children in immigrant families living in a range of affluent countries, and to assess their family and socioeconomic circumstances compared to children in native-born families. The articles in this special edition of Child Indicators Research present an overview of these comparative results, as well as more in depth analyses for six countries.

Children of immigrants have nearly doubled as a share of pre-K to 3rd grade students since 1990. The share of children under age 8 with immigrant parents stood at 24 percent in 2008, up from 13 percent in 1990. Young children of immigrants account for more than 30 percent of children in seven states, with California leading the nation at 50 percent. The majority (93 percent) of children of immigrants are U.S. citizens. This fact sheet also includes state-by-state data on the number of children of immigrants and the number of children whose parents come from more than 130 countries.

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