May 26, 2011
At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan, visitors can view meticulously recreated moments in the lives of the immigrant families who lived there, like the Moores of Ireland. Their dark, stifling apartment sits ready for the wake of a baby girl, dead of malnutrition. This was in the 1870s, when America’s newcomers struggled mightily against poverty and isolation.
They still do. New immigrants crowd into derelict apartments. Parents toil, children suffer. But while most of the last centuries’ newcomers were Americans in the making, many today have no way to naturalize. They live in the shadows, so their American-born children do, too.
“Immigrants Raising Citizens,” a study by a Harvard education professor, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, followed nearly 400 of these young children in New York City. It found that while mothers and fathers showed great effort and ingenuity in trying to provide for their children, the children have paid a steep price for their parents’ precarious lives.
Depression, anxiety and crushing work schedules, plus the stress and discomfort of crowded apartments, make it hard for parents to provide adequate nurturing. Fear of deportation and lack of information keep parents from enrolling children in government programs that offer help with nutrition, child care and early education. From the start, the children’s development suffers. Their reading and language skills lag. These early results bode poorly for their future academic and job success.
If conditions are this bad in New York City, with its array of social services and nonprofit organizations, what would he have found in Arizona or Texas or other places where immigrants are pushed ever farther into the shadows? Professor Yoshikawa estimates that four million preschool-age children of immigrants are American citizens. Their hindered development will haunt this country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/opinion/27fri3.html
At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan, visitors can view meticulously recreated moments in the lives of the immigrant families who lived there, like the Moores of Ireland. Their dark, stifling apartment sits ready for the wake of a baby girl, dead of malnutrition. This was in the 1870s, when America’s newcomers struggled mightily against poverty and isolation.
They still do. New immigrants crowd into derelict apartments. Parents toil, children suffer. But while most of the last centuries’ newcomers were Americans in the making, many today have no way to naturalize. They live in the shadows, so their American-born children do, too.
“Immigrants Raising Citizens,” a study by a Harvard education professor, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, followed nearly 400 of these young children in New York City. It found that while mothers and fathers showed great effort and ingenuity in trying to provide for their children, the children have paid a steep price for their parents’ precarious lives.
Depression, anxiety and crushing work schedules, plus the stress and discomfort of crowded apartments, make it hard for parents to provide adequate nurturing. Fear of deportation and lack of information keep parents from enrolling children in government programs that offer help with nutrition, child care and early education. From the start, the children’s development suffers. Their reading and language skills lag. These early results bode poorly for their future academic and job success.
If conditions are this bad in New York City, with its array of social services and nonprofit organizations, what would he have found in Arizona or Texas or other places where immigrants are pushed ever farther into the shadows? Professor Yoshikawa estimates that four million preschool-age children of immigrants are American citizens. Their hindered development will haunt this country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/opinion/27fri3.html
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