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Children of Immigration

by Carola and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco

 

 

Children of Immigration, written by Harvard University immigration experts Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, expands our knowledge of immigrant children’s adaptation to their new cultural setting. Children of Immigration draws on the Suárez-Orozcos’ twenty years of experience working in the field with immigrant children and centers on their codirected research project, the Harvard Immigration Project. This five-year longitudinal study follows four hundred children from five different countries and regions: China, Mexico, Haiti, Central America, and the Dominican Republic.

In their epilogue the authors stated that immigration will always be a part of American culture since it is structured by extremely powerful and global social economic and cultural factors that democratic nations cannot easily regulate with unilateral policy initiatives.  People are always looking for a way out of poverty and especially in the Caribbean and Latin American countries where poverty is rampant, migration is an option that can bring immense wealth to their families.

Immigrants want better opportunities for their children and schooling is the main opportunity for their children to succeed in life. No matter what it takes these parents are willing to pay the price for their children’s success.  These parents encourages their children to cultivated the aspects of culture in their new setting however, many of the immigrant parents strongly resist a whole array of cultural models and social practices in American youth culture that they consider highly undesirable. Immigrant parents reject and resist the American culture even though they want their children to succeed.

As an immigrant parent, I can relate to the authors study because most of the immigrants in my community and me have very strong family ties and always stresses the importance of education and hard work. As parents we are willing to work menial jobs in order to take care of our children in-order to give them a better life

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.