Policy and Place: Immigration,Schooling,and the Local Context

Abstract

Scholars have long sought to understand the mechanisms that promote and impede successful integration for immigrant children. Contemporary scholarship on immigration and education has made important inroads for understanding the role of immigration policy and place of residence in the incorporation experience of immigrant students. This AERA Open special topic collection adds to the growing body of knowledge in these burgeoning areas by examining how these contexts shape the experience of immigrant students and by focusing on the interplay between policy and place in the lives of immigrant students. The authors in this special topic collection make up a diverse range array of disciplinary perspectives in education and employ a range of methodological approaches.

Scholars have long sought to understand the mechanisms that promote and impede successful integration for immigrant children (Zhou & Gonzales, 2019). More recently, this research has noted that in the contemporary period, newcomers are following different incorporation pathways than those of European immigrants of the 20th century (Alba & Nee, 2003; Kasinitz et al., 2009; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Rumbaut & Komaie, 2010; Telles & Ortiz, 2008; Zhou, 1997). In fact, immigration policy has become increasingly consequential for shaping how immigrant youth adapt, come of age, and experience life in the United States (Gonzales & Ruszczyk, 2021). While policies like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and tuition equity bills have opened up new forms of access and belonging to undocumented immigrant youth, a climate of heavy immigration enforcement and restrictive immigration policies has also exacerbated vulnerability for young immigrants and their families (Abrego, 2018; Gonzales et al., 2020, 2014; Patler & Pirtle, 2018). In addition, where immigrants live matters more so than ever before in questions of immigrant integration. Local policies and institutional responses—whether integrative or exclusionary—can dramatically shape experiences of exclusion or belonging (Bruhn & Gonzales, 2023; Golash-Boza & Valdez, 2018). And as mediators of national and local policies, educators, along with their schools and districts shape a range of those experiences.

Contemporary scholarship on immigration and education has made important inroads for understanding the role of immigration policy and place of residence in the incorporation experience of immigrant students. This AERA Open special topic collection adds to the growing body of knowledge in these burgeoning areas by examining how these contexts shape the experience of immigrant students and by focusing on the interplay between policy and geography in the lives of immigrant students. The authors in this special topic collection make up a diverse array of disciplinary perspectives in education and employ a range of methodological approaches. This impressive set of 14 articles is divided into four areas of inquiry. The first set of articles explores the significance of the places where immigrant students reside and the role of the local context of reception. The second seeks to understand the relationship between national and local immigration policies and a range of school experiences. The third examines educators’ responses to immigration issues in their districts, schools, and classrooms. And the fourth centers student experiences in matters of immigration policy and the places where they live.

First, the contexts where immigrant students grow up, receive an education, and attempt to navigate are examined.

The Local Context

Most Americans agree—albeit from different political vantage points—that the U.S. immigration system is outdated and in need of repair. But due to political gridlock, Congress has been unable to pass a comprehensive immigration bill that would address persistent problems for immigrant students and their families. In the absence of a federal reform, states, counties, and municipalities have manufactured their own responses to immigration issues (Gonzales & Burciaga, 2018; Gonzales & Ruszczyk, 2021; Olivas, 2008; Varsanyi, 2010). While some localities have opened up access to broader inclusion, others have adopted a more restrictive stance. As a result, where immigrants live and raise their children plays a significant role in their experience with schools and local institutions (Lara-García, 2022). Whether locales offer a welcoming community or hostility to newcomers can have an important impact on students’ educational experiences.

According to Portes and Rumbaut (2001), immigrants’ incorporation experiences are structured by varying “contexts of reception.” These contexts—including government policies, the society’s response to newcomers, and the characteristics of one’s own ethnic community—shape immigrants’ varied experiences (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001, pp. 313–314). Building on these ideas, Golash-Boza and Valdez (2018) suggest that immigrants operate within various nested contexts of reception, including federal immigration laws, state policy, and institutional contexts. Recognizing the importance of the local context in the incorporation experiences of immigrant children goes a long way in our understanding of contemporary immigration. However, scholars using the context of reception framework have yet to explicitly include K–12 schools and districts in their models as vital institutional mechanisms in the lives of immigrant children.

The two articles in this section broaden the context of reception framework to include schools as critical sites of inquiry. In their article “‘It’s Created by a Community:’ Local Context Mediating Districts’ Approaches to Serving Immigrant and Refugee Newcomers,” Hopkins et al. (2021) extend the context of reception framework to include school districts as an important community institution. Drawing on interviews with 57 stakeholders across three districts, they examine how district policies and practices for immigrant students are enabled or constrained by the local context. They find that the presence of community-based support networks along with inclusive local policies can bolster districts’ work.

Taking a long view of the effects of schools as an important contextual mechanism, in “Nested Contexts of Reception and K–12 Schools: Addressing Immigration Status,” Murillo et al. (2021) examine the work of one urban K–12 school in California over the course of 10 years. Centering the school as an important mediator of immigration policy, they explore the ways in which school educators addressed immigration issues salient to their students. In particular, they detail three ways in which the school provided supports for its undocumented students, including addressing student overall needs, providing access to legal services, and bolstering college-going supports. Growing numbers of immigrant students are impact by national immigration policies. The study has important implications for how K–12 schools can mediate these policies in intentional, ethical, and supportive ways.

The Role of Immigration Policy

Over the last three decades, communities across the United States have seen a continuation of the scaled-up immigration enforcement that has extended its jurisdiction from the U.S.-Mexico border to the country’s interior, making neighborhoods, roadways, and public spaces enforceable sites of removal (Gonzales & Raphael, 2017). As a result, immigration enforcement at the local level has sown fear and anxiety in immigrant communities (Menjivar & Abrego, 2012). Families in diverse settings have grown increasingly anxious with worry about the safety of their children and loved ones, prompting them to avoid institutions, including schools. Students are also falling behind in school due to increased responsibilities at home as a result of the deportation of loved ones.

This section is composed of four articles that examine the role of immigration enforcement on a range of student experiences and outcomes. As enforcement levels have increased, this trend has had a profound chilling effect in immigrant communities, particularly for children in mixed-status families who have experienced the separation of a parent or loved one due to deportation. But immigration enforcement also impacts communities and families by creating a climate of fear and anxiety that disrupts everyday routines and interactions (Ee & Gándara, 2020). These actions tend to be disproportionally felt in communities where larger numbers of Latin American origin immigrants reside (Golash-Boza & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013). Driven by these phenomena, the authors in this section explore how this chilling effect impacts children’s school performance.

In their article, “Out of the Class and Into the Shadows: Immigration and Education Among U.S.-Citizens and Foreign-Born Students,” Bucheli et al. (2022) use data on the number of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests at the Metropolitan Statistical Area level to examine the impact of immigration enforcement on Hispanic students. They find that increases in arrest rates are accompanied by significant declines in enrollment among Hispanic students, providing evidence of the implications of this chilling effect. What is telling about these findings is that these effects are seen across the board, among U.S.-born children, foreign-born, and students in mixed-status families. But while these effects are strong among Latino students, the authors do not find evidence of this relationship among other racial and ethnic groups, supporting the notion that the impact of heavy of heavy immigration enforcement is disproportionately felt among Latino students.

Moving the analysis to the state level, in “Immigration Arrests and Educational Impacts: Linking of (ICE) Arrests to Declines in Achievement, Attendance, and School Climate and Safety in California,” Kirksey and Sattin-Bajaj (2021) examine the association between county-level immigration arrests and academic achievement, absenteeism, and measures of school climate and safety for students in the California CORE districts (a collaboration of state school districts working together to improve student achievement). Using ordinary least squares regression analyses with year, grade, school, and student fixed effects, they find that immigration arrests corresponded to declines in academic achievement, attendance, and various measures of school climate and safety for Latin American origin English learner students and Latinx students more generally. They also find small declines in measures of school climate and safety for students receiving special education services via an Individualized Education Program. Notably, associations were strongest for arrests that occurred during the Trump presidency compared with those occurring during the second term of the Obama presidency.

Since 1996, immigration enforcement has been greatly streamlined (Gonzales & Raphael, 2017). Enforcement actions have increasingly resulted from information gathered in the process of local criminal justice enforcement. These actions were greatly enhanced with the creation of 287(g) agreements between ICE and local law enforcement agencies that delegate authority to local law enforcement to enforce immigration law within their jurisdiction (Coleman, 2012). In “The Effect of Immigration Enforcement on School Engagement: Evidence From 287(g) Programs in North Carolina,” Bellows (2021) examines the impacts of such agreements on school engagement within North Carolina among counties where agreements were approved and those where they were not approved. Using a triple difference strategy in which the author compares educational outcomes for different groups of students in these two sets of counties before and after activation of 287(g) programs, she finds that 287(g) programs decrease school engagement by decreasing attendance. Importantly, this effect appears to be driven by increases in chronic absenteeism.

In the presence of immigration enforcement, some communities have taken a different approach: Rather than enhance cooperation with federal authorities, they have enacted sanctuary policies that limit the extent to which they will volunteer resources to assist in matters of local immigration enforcement. There is some debate as to whether these policies are effective or merely symbolic (Kagan, 2018). In “The Relationship Between Immigration Enforcement and Educational Attainment: The Role of Sanctuary Policies,” Corral (2021) explores the association between sanctuary policies and the high school completion and college enrollment of undocumented Hispanic youth. Using data from the American Community Survey and applying a difference-in-differences design, the analysis detected no association between sanctuary policies and high school completion or college enrollment. While their effectiveness in countering immigration enforcement remains in question, these findings suggest that they may not reduce uncertainty enough to have a significant relationship with educational outcomes.

Educators’ Responses to Immigration

Moving the unit of analysis from institutions to individuals, the next set of articles examines educators’ responses to immigration issues in their districts, schools, and classrooms. Following the 2016 presidential election, more Americans reported growing levels of stress related to national politics, with anxiety highest among Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans (American Psychological Association, 2017). And immigrant communities across the country also experienced growing anxiety due to the ever-present deportation threat (Khazan, 2017; Vives et al., 2017).

Meanwhile, the charged political environment appeared to be having a direct impact on K–12 school districts and in classrooms across the country (Costello, 2016; Dabach, 2015; Rogers et al., 2017; Will, 2017). Students in diverse settings grew increasingly anxious with worry about their parents’ safety following recent policy proposals. In addition, sharp divisions were emerging in classrooms, as students are more openly hostile to each other. Across a wide range of communities, the government policies and political discourse are increasing stress among vulnerable groups of students. Against a backdrop of increasingly hostile policies and discourse, educators face new questions about how to address a variety of student needs.

In “Beyond Receptivity: Exploring the Role of Identity in Educators’ Orientation Toward Newcomers in a New Immigrant Destination,” Penn (2021) explores how educators’ social identities influence how they perceive their role in serving immigrant students. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a high school in the South that has experienced significant demographic change due to immigration, the author examines how educators’ social identities shaped their identification with and orientation toward addressing the needs of immigrant-origin English learners. Results indicate that educators framed their orientation toward serving the school’s immigrant students as either a moral imperative, a professional responsibility, or a legal obligation. These different orientations influenced how these educators perceived their role in addressing newcomers’ needs.

In the context of a charged political environment, educators’ orientation can powerfully shape a school’s climate. In “Safety and Belonging in Immigrant-Serving Districts: Domains of Educator Practice in a Charged Political Landscape,” Lowenhaupt et al. (2021) analyze educators’ survey responses to a set of questions regarding student safety and belonging. They synthesize four domains of education practice across six school districts in geographically and politically diverse settings: signaling affirmation, building shared knowledge and capacity, finding and mobilizing resources, and creating space for conversation. The authors discuss the need for future scholarship that critically analyzes educators’ practice in relation to immigrant-origin youth, stresses the importance of contexts of development, not merely reception.

But the universe of educators is not limited to teachers. And student needs often extend beyond academics. The next two articles explore responses by school social workers to address student health and well-being. In “‘Immigration Enforcement Is a Daily Part of Our Students’ Lives’: School Social Workers’ Perceptions of Racialized Nested Contexts of Reception for Immigrant Students,” Rodriguez et al. (2022) explore the role of school social workers in their work with immigrant students. Utilizing open-ended qualitative responses from a unique national survey data, they examine school social workers’ perceptions of the various racialized contexts that immigrant students encounter in their schools and communities and analyze how school social workers’ perceptions reflect their attitudes towards students and ultimately influence their actions. The authors argue that school social workers have an important role to play in disrupting racial inequality in schools.

And in “Health Care Access Brokerage by School Employees for Immigrant Mexican and Indigenous Guatemalan Farmworking Families in a Connecticut Elementary School,” Campbell-Montalvo et al. (2022) examine the role of school employees in brokering health care access to Mexican and Indigenous Guatemalan immigrant migrant and seasonal farmworker families in Connecticut. By studying a state currently without a Migrant Education Program, the authors explore how educators in Connecticut broker health access for migrant farmworker families. Interviews with parents and elementary school employees showed that a wide array of non–Migrant Advocate school employees, largely Latina women, directly brokered physical and psychosocial health care access, often through developing close relationships. While the authors note several barriers, including language inaccessibility and transportation and related structural issues, they find that a school’s proximity to farmworkers’ homes is an important driver of successful brokerage efforts.

Student Experiences

In our final group of articles, we turn to the experiences of the students themselves. The articles in this Special Topic reinforce a general but important point: local contexts mediate the educational process. And nowhere are local policies and intuitional arrangements more felt than in the lives of students themselves. The articles in this section join a burgeoning strand of inquiry, largely on the part of qualitative researchers, that has drawn particular attention to the experiential dimension of immigrant students’ lives (Bartlett et al., 2018; Gallo & Link, 2015; Gonzales, 2016; Oliveira, 2018; Suárez-Orozco et al., 2008). More generally, this trend reflects a movement towards more fully uncovering the mechanisms that produce a sense of belonging or sustain vulnerability. Efforts to capture the experiential aspect, then, are part of a research endeavor that attempts to makes connections between mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and the real-life effects they have on immigrant students’ everyday lives.

In “Immigrant Children in a Pol(ICE) State,” Rodriguez Vega (2022) presents findings from a 2-year study of preadolescent children in South Central Los Angeles. Through interviews, class observations, artwork, and performance videos of children in a multidisciplinary theater class at a local elementary school, Rodriguez Vega explores how children come to understand policing in the context of their young lives. She finds that children reinforce concepts like “good cop/bad cop” and see local police officers and ICE agents as one and the same, but they also imagine alternatives for community safety outside of policing and police systems. These findings have important implications for understanding the link between community policing and child development and offer an opportunity to reimagine these relationships.

In “Im/migrant Children’s Education Experiences in a Global Pandemic: Trauma and Care in (At Home) Schooling,” Oliveira and Segal (2022) examine the impacts of external on children’s education and well-being. Through a unique ethnographic study of migrant families during the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors argue that while immigrant parents believed in a promise of a better life for their children through migration, the pandemic and the associated switch to remote schooling contributed to a breakdown in structures of care in the United States. That is, the stresses associated with the pandemic were difficult for families already dealing with the trauma of the detention of separation of a family member. The findings support the recommendation of considering a “multiple disruptions” framework when studying migrant children and their families.

In “Undocumented Community College Student Course-Taking After DACA and the California DREAM Act,” Ngo and Hinojosa (2022) examine the role of state equity policies in reducing constraints and uncertainty. Employing difference-in-differences comparisons with permanent residents, refugees, and U.S. citizens who were unaffected by these policies, the authors explore shifts in continuing undocumented community college students’ course taking before and after the California DREAM Act, which afforded undocumented students access to state financial aid. The authors find that after its implementation, students increased their enrollment intensity, primarily in degree-applicable and transferable courses, but decreased coursework in career and technical education. They surmise that access to state financial aid may have opened up postsecondary opportunities and made the possibility of transferring to a 4-year institution a more viable option. Yet access to state financial aid did not raise undocumented students’ credit loads to the level of their citizen peers, indicating that other limitations like strained family finances and exclusion from federal financial aid continue to constrain undocumented students’ postsecondary pursuits.

And finally, in “Writing Rights to Right Wrongs: A Critical Analysis of Young Children Composing Nationalist Narratives as Part of the Larger Body Politic,” Brownell (2022) examines nonimmigrant children’s views on immigration policies. Drawing from data collected at an urban Midwestern school, Brownell explores the responses of third grade children to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies. Through analyses of the children’s writing, the author focuses on how a class of third graders enacted justice-oriented identities as they wrote to congressional representatives about contemporary immigration policies. Their responses provide a window into the tensions and possibilities for children in writing policies for tomorrow.

Key Considerations for Policy and Practice

The articles in this AERA Open special topic provide important insights into key areas for policymakers and practitioners as they support immigration children. Based on these insights, I offer the following observations:

• Community based-support networks and services for undocumented students through schools can be important to how immigrant students are supported at the local level. However, how educators and social workers view their roles in supporting students and immigrant youth, respectively, shape their perceptions and actions.

• Immigration arrests can have a chilling effect on student enrollment, as well as negatively impact achievement, absenteeism, and school climate and safety. More broadly, immigration enforcement and the threat of arrest impacts school engagement through chronic absenteeism.

• Sanctuary policies that limit assistance with local immigration enforcement did not positively impact high school completion and college enrollment, perhaps because they do not reduce uncertainty enough given the chilling effect noted above. At the postsecondary level, state policies focused on financial aid for undocumented immigrants have the potential to improve particular college pathways and increase access to 4-year institutions; but since they did not equalize credit loads, other financial constraints must be taken into account.

• Educators play an important role in mobilizing resources, creating affirming and safe environments, and helping migrant families access health care. This is especially important since the pandemic caused additional stress and breakdown of care structures for migrant children and their families.

• Despite the challenges facing immigrant youth, students are able to imagine community safety outside of policing and police systems and enact justice-oriented identities as they advocate against anti-immigrant policies at the federal level.