Many immigrant families made the decision to separate from their children and migrate to the United States (US) hoping to reunite when able. Contrary to what is envisioned, the ultimate reunification ...can be a challenging transition. Reestablishing the parent-child relationship can be hindered by the anger, distress, vulnerability, and abuse the child may have experienced during the separation leading to behavioral concerns and depressive symptoms.
The culmination of trauma and adverse childhood events prior to and following reunification is associated with an increased risk of anxiety, depression, behavioral disorders, and toxic stress. Unaddressed, these issues can lead to poor adult psychiatric health and limit a child's educational success and potential lifetime earnings.
Trauma-informed programming has been an effective tool in addressing the mental health needs of refugee and immigrant children and may benefit this particular group of reunified families when held in a community setting alongside peer support. Familias Reunidas and Family Reunification and Resiliency Training (FUERTE) are 2 community-based programs that successfully guided recently reunified families through the process of reconnecting.
Review of these programs suggests there is significance in the collaboration of health care providers, education specialists, and community liaisons in program creation, cultivation of a supportive group environment, incorporation of trauma-informed principles, and partnership with a community establishment. These components can lead to a reunification program that provides access to mental health services in order to work toward eliminating the health disparities affecting these families.
Brief Summary: Family reunification can be a challenging transition for recently immigrated children whose parent(s) immigrated to the US years before them. Community programming could provide access to trauma-informed care to overcome the emotional distress reunification can cause within families.
Purpose: While many studies address immigrant integration, few focus on the adjustment process for unaccompanied immigrant children in foster care in the United States- and even fewer look at ...community level prevention and intervention strategies for positive youth adjustment. This study uses a human rights framework to examine community level facilitators- both prevention and interventions- that aid the adjustment for unaccompanied immigrant children in foster care as they navigate life in the US. Method: Seventy-nine service providers that work with unaccompanied immigrant children participated in 22 focus groups/interviews. Open coding was used to create a codebook, and then data were qualitatively analyzed using deductive and axial coding. Results: The major prevention strategies for community adjustment include welcoming communities and inter-agency collaborations. The major intervention strategies for systems level adjustment include community relationships, access to healthcare, and the church as an institution. Discussion: Implications include advocating for funding and programming to support mentors for every child, advocating for welcoming policies, and engaging unaccompanied immigrant children in research using participatory approaches.
While teachers value cultural and linguistic diversity, they see the benefits of speaking different languages in the future tense, feeling it hard to specify how language differences positively ...impact students' learning in the present. This study explores teachers' temporal perceptions of language differences, specifically focusing on how teacher perceptions of language differences as "future assets" are intertwined with native speakerism in the present. It draws on multi-year interviews that unveil how teachers prioritise monolingualism as the norm of classroom discourse and juxtaposes teachers' accounts with an immigrant child's navigation of cultural-linguistic assets to speak Korean and English in non-school contexts. Through this, we argue that, whereas teachers see the potential benefits of speaking different languages that seek to pluralise the educational futures, they continue to hold the normative view on language differences by not being offered the epistemic tools to question whose future and whose language are imagined as the desired endpoints of language education. Approaching teachers' statements as the outcome of the limited epistemic principles of normative futurity, this study calls for disrupting the continuity of native speakerism to support culturally and linguistically diverse students through the non-linear, reparative, and multiple relations to the futures in language education.
There exists a significant yet unique level and magnitude of problems that immigrants of African descent have to grapple with in their efforts to settle down into their new American lives. This fact ...makes the continuity of the natal culture very difficult. However, in spite of their many problems, African immigrants never lose touch with their African homes altogether. As it stands, many African immigrants see education as the key toward achieving their American dream. Thus, in raising their children and in surviving the cultural shocks, they still manage to succeed. In this article, the authors discuss how and why they survive the sociocultural tide and what counselors and service providers can do to help them.
Affluent countries around the world are experiencing an unprecedented demographic shift that involves rapid change in the ethnic composition of the population, due to large scale immigration from low ...and middle income countries, combined with the rapid aging of the non-immigrant population. Because these immigrants and their children often differ from the non-immigrant population in physical appearance, language, religion, and culture, increasing attention is focusing on the integration and inclusion of these groups. To provide a framework for interpreting the new indicators presented in this article, we draw on ideas recently set forth by the European Union. These efforts provide a broad and comprehensive framework for discussing indicators in this article pertaining to the demographic circumstances of children in immigrant families, and to various aspects of their integration, including language, civic participation, education, employment, and housing. While indicators presented here do not directly measure integration and inclusion, they do portray the lives of children in immigrant families compared with the lives of children in native-born families along civic, social, and economic dimensions that are relevant to the assessment of integration and inclusion, shedding light on the extent to which children in immigrant families in the eight settlement countries covered in this study have access to the resources necessary to participate fully in the societies of their adopted homelands. The eight countries included in this study are Australia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Resident foreign citizens in Germany, a country that cannot deny its character as a country of immigration, number around 6.7 million out of Germany's total population of 82.4 million inhabitants. ...Relative to the native population, the age structure among people with migration background is shifted considerably younger. The share of children living with parents who have a migration background is quite large: More than 1 million children under 17 years of age are foreign citizens. This paper draws a portrait of immigrant children in comparison to native children. Data being analysed for this purpose make clear that children with migration background are disadvantaged in most sectors of life: Large shares of these children grow up in households with difficult financial straits and under less than optimal housing conditions. Young children with migration background face disadvantages in preschool and many are held back due to limited German language proficiency. Children and youth in foreign-born families tend to start school later and repeat classes more often. Children with migration background are not adequately supplied with health care, mainly because they and their parents less often participate in early diagnosis and preventive care. Youth with migration background are more involved in violent crimes.
Immigrant youth comprise a sizable and integral part of contemporary societies. Their successful adaptation is a high-stakes issue for them, their families and for society. In spite of the challenges ...they face, most of them adapt well in their new countries. However, considerable diversity in their adaptation has been reported. This chapter examines the question: “Who among immigrant youth adapt well and why?” To address this question, first, we propose a definition for positive immigrant youth adaptation. Second, we present extant knowledge on group and individual differences in immigrant youth adaptation from the perspective of a resilience developmental framework, which incorporates acculturative and social psychological variables. Third, we examine whether immigrant status and related social challenges place immigrant youth adaptation at risk. Finally, we review social and personal resources that promote and/or protect positive immigrant youth adaptation. In conclusion, we argue that focusing on strengths and resilience, instead of on weaknesses and psychological symptoms, among immigrant youth has significant implications for policy and practice.
Immigration is a life changing cultural transition that involves dealing with a variety of challenges having mental health implications. Multiple preimmigration circumstances and postimmigration ...conditions affect how migration is experienced, as do unique individual, family, and cultural factors. Without considering these factors, those who work with immigrants and those who conduct research with immigrants may at best fail to understand the psychological needs of the people they are working with, and at worst pathologize their experiences, perpetuating stereotypes, and/or contribute to feelings of alienation.
Each year, more than half a million migrant children journey from countries around the globe and enter the United States with no lawful immigration status; many of them have no parent or legal ...guardian to provide care and custody. Yet little is known about their experiences in a nation that may simultaneously shelter children while initiating proceedings to deport them, nor about their safety or well-being if repatriated.Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the Stateexamines the draconian immigration policies that detain unaccompanied migrant children and draws on U.S. historical, political, legal, and institutional practices to contextualize the lives of children and youth as they move through federal detention facilities, immigration and family courts, federal foster care programs, and their communities across the United States and Central America.Through interviews with children and their families, attorneys, social workers, policy-makers, law enforcement, and diplomats, anthropologist Lauren Heidbrink foregrounds the voices of migrant children and youth who must navigate the legal and emotional terrain of U.S. immigration policy. Cast as victims by humanitarian organizations and delinquents by law enforcement, these unauthorized minors challenge Western constructions of child dependence and family structure. Heidbrink illuminates the enduring effects of immigration enforcement on its young charges, their families, and the state, ultimately questioning whose interests drive decisions about the care and custody of migrant youth.
