Children of Immigrant Parents

When the cost and time of return to home countries is low as well as if the socio-economic conditions of the immigrant in the receiving country are not favorable, the immigrants’ children tend to keep stronger ties with their relatives, culture and homeland. Mostly, they prefer not to spend time on learning the receiving country language and culture as they consider it as a waste of time as well as it becomes difficult when immigrants are moving back and forth between receiving country and their homeland. In some ethnicities, immigrants prefer to inculcate and promote their own ethnic values in their children and prefer their children receive at least early schooling in their home country (for example Turkish). Getting early schooling from homeland in majority of the cases is geared more towards emphasizing regional cultural values which keep the children intact with their culture of origin and hence the children keep stronger ties with their home country even if they immigrate later on. One more aspect of the issue is that when immigrants become part of the same ethnic network in the receiving country and immigrants from the same ethnic background grow in number, this becomes a closed social structure. Due to enforceable trust, bounded solidarity and other elements of social capital, they remain tied to their culture and values even in the receiving society and they have little exposure and opportunity to learn the new culture. This phenomenon is more common among immigrants with larger ethnic networks and lower socio-economic status.

Educational attainment differences among immigrants’ children can be attributed to several reasons. As the sources explain, one of the main reasons behind educational attainment differences is the inclination towards education among the first generation immigrants which emphasizes more investment into education of the second generation as in the case of Asian immigrants. Since they are more focused on education and spend more on educating their children, the Asian children therefore perform better than other immigrant ethnic groups. Moreover, parents’ educational attainment also has a role in the educational attainment of the children. The CPS data analysis shows clearly that the ethnic groups whose first generation showed better educational attainment, reflected better educational attainment in the second generations. Educational attainment results among both first and second generations were following almost the same trends within same ethnic groups. Moreover, the socio-economic status also showed its role in the level of educational attainment and performance. Those immigrants who have low socio-economic status usually join the bottom level of the labor market and live in areas where majority of residents are from similar socio-economic backgrounds. Hence the children of these immigrants also have a poor exposure to educational and social opportunities which impacts their educational performance. Another factor that the authors explain in the case of Moroccan immigrants is that if the immigrants immigrate with already higher levels of educational attainment, they tend to move on towards further higher education and also they perform better than those who immigrate with low levels of education. Hence educational attainment among immigrant children is dependent upon several factors like socio-economic, educational and ethnic background of the immigrants.

Better socio-economic status, better educational attainment of immigrant parents, professional or occupational level, and surrounding society where they live, are important dynamics of the household that can improve and show better educational performance among the immigrants’ children.