New MPI Report on Nefarious Effects of Children Being Undocumented

From a MPI e-mail: "the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and colleague Jenya Kholoptseva, examine the emerging research and discuss policies and programs that reduce or mitigate the developmental risks for children with parents who are unauthorized.

As Yoshikawa and Kholoptseva explain, research suggests that having an unauthorized immigrant parent is associated with lower cognitive skills in early childhood, lower levels of general positive development in middle childhood, higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms during adolescence, and fewer years of schooling.

Among the factors proposed to explain how parents’ unauthorized status might lower children’s learning and subsequent schooling outcomes: Parental detention and removal, lower access to public programs that benefit children’s development, economic hardship, and psychological distress.

The report suggests a number of policies and programs to address these factors, including public prekindergarten programs, which have been shown to narrow gaps in child development and academic readiness between children with unauthorized parents and other children. Other steps to improve the well-being of these children, Yoshikawa and Kholoptseva argue, would be to create a pathway to citizenship for their parents." See the full report here.

Others, including University at Albany Professor Joanna Dreby and Arizona State University Professor Cecilia Menjivar, have examined the direct and indirect effects of various legal statuses on children.