More than 5 million kids live with unauthorized [immigrant] parents, according to the Urban Institute. Many of these children are citizens. This issue brief offers more details.

Immigration is a hot-button issue right now. In Congress, the House has passed legislation to impose new controls and tougher penalties for illegal immigrants, and the Senate is wrestling with the issue. Meanwhile 14 western-state governors have endorsed President Bush’s plan for guest-worker visas. Often lost in the discussion: the question of whether and how to integrate the children of long-term illegal immigrants fully into U.S. society – for many of them, the only society they have ever known. Connect for Kids offers some resources to put this issue into perspective.

Federal policies exclude many legal immigrants from public benefits like food stamps or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) assistance. Many states have stepped in, using their own funds to fill in the gaps—which means the services and supports available to immigrant families depends largely on where they live. This new brief from the National Center for Children in Poverty looks at what’s happening and where children in low-income immigrant families do and do not have supports available to native-born families.

In 2004, one of every seven workers in the United States was foreign-born; a decade earlier, that number was one in ten. As the baby-boom generation reaches retirement age, immigrants are likely to hold an even greater share of jobs in the future. This report from the Congressional Budget Office looks at the role of immigrants in the labor market—the skills they bring; the types of jobs they hold; their compensation; and their impact on the native-born workforce.

New research from the Urban Institute finds that limited English proficient (LEP) students are highly concentrated in a small share of America’s public schools. In fact, 70 percent of LEP students in kindergarten through fifth grade are enrolled in only 10 percent of the country’s public elementary schools. Among the findings: most LEP students were born in the U.S. And the share of students in kindergarten through 12th grade with a foreign-born parent tripled from 6 percent in 1970 to 19 percent in 2000.

New research from the Urban Institute finds that limited English proficient (LEP) students are highly concentrated in a small share of America’s public schools. In fact, 70 percent of LEP students in kindergarten through fifth grade are enrolled in only 10 percent of the country’s public elementary schools. Among the findings: most LEP students were born in the U.S. And the share of students in kindergarten through 12th grade with a foreign-born parent tripled from 6 percent in 1970 to 19 percent in 2000.

Researcher Michael Fix has called NCLB “one of the most important pieces of immigrant integration legislation in the past decade” because it forces schools to pay attention to LEP students by requiring schools to report these students’ test scores and holds schools accountable for the results.

CFK reports from: Forum, Maximizing Civic and Academic Outcomes: Understanding What Works in Service- Learning
Organized by: The American Youth Policy Forum
Where/When: Washington DC, Friday, November 4th

Researchers, teachers and students discussed how service-learning is being implemented in various schools nationwide. They described positive results such as increasing student test scores and graduation rates in high schools across the country.

While nearly 4 million immigrant families in the United States are low income, virtually all of them have working parents, and 72 percent have a parent who works full-time, year round. A new National Center for Children in Poverty series shows these children have scant access to important government supports. When these families do have the same access to benefits as their non-foreign-born counterparts, they are more likely to be stable and secure.

Thanks to the Writers in the Schools program of Houston, Texas, writer Patrick Freeman, a native of Ghana, worked with refugee children from several African nations in a special series of Saturday workshops geared towards personal histories. Freeman found himself in awe of his young collaborators. This story originally appeared in the WITS newsletter.

CFK reports from: The Urban Institute
Event: panel discussion on bilingual education
Organized by: Urban
Where/When: Washington, D.C., December 7, 2004

At this panel discussion, a group of researchers and policymakers discussed the implications for English Language Learners (ELLs) and the schools they attend under the rules of the 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.