New Yorkers are living with the effects of poverty in every part of New York City, but the
experience of poverty remains closely tied to place. Half of the city’s 1.4 million poor
people live in neighborhoods where the poverty rate is at least 24.8 percent (compared
to a citywide rate of 19.2 percent), and one-quarter live in neighborhoods where the rate
is at least 34.1 percent. The maps reveal that there is more to the geography of poverty in New York
City than is revealed by a glance. Poverty interacts in important ways with other factors,
such as immigration, which are distributed in a different way than poverty itself. And
the effects of poverty can be modified or mitigated by resources, such as subsidized
housing, that also have their own geographic patterns.

A June 23, 2009 New York Times editorial put a human face on the struggles of students arriving in America as children and graduating high school only to face huge barriers imposed by their undocumented status. The editorial argued that the DREAM Act could open doors for these young people and should not be held hostage to larger immigration reform dreams.

This Center for Health and Health Care in Schools webinar on Feb. 24, 2009 will address partnering with families to meet the mental health needs of immigrant and refugee children.

The SCHIP reauthorization will extend health coverage to four million more children and end the five-year waiting period for health care required of legal immigrant children and pregnant women.

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.