What Is “The Immigrant Paradox”?

Recently, I wrote about the smoldering embers of the bilingual education debate. For decades, conservatives and progressives have been arguing about the best way to educate immigrant children.

The debate means little, however, to those Americans who are convinced that all those tiny Juans and Marias have dragged down public education. Immigrant kids, many people claim, are perpetual underachievers and a drain on the system.

However, researchers at Brown University have messed with this nugget of conventional wisdom. The researchers have presented data that shows “immigrant children are outperforming the more acculturated second- and third-generation children academically and behaviorally.” The study’s authors dub this finding “the immigrant paradox” and add that these kids have better attitudes about school and “demonstrated lower levels of delinquency and involvement in risk behaviors.”

Clearly, these findings don’t line up with the viewpoint of many nativists. In fact, according to the study, many groups of immigrant children also have better tests scores and higher grade-point averages than American-born kids. The researchers identify a decline in these measurements for children born in the U.S.A., and they “attribute this drop-off in performance of later generations to Americanization.”

In other words, immigrant kids are less likely to spend all their time texting at the mall or watching TMZ. They’re probably too busy doing their homework.

Now, it’s natural to ask how come immigrant children are doing better than their American-born peers, at least in some ways. Well, the researchers believe that immigrant kids have stronger ties to cultures that value education and that they "maintain connections with family, which serves as a buffer to influences of American culture."

Yes, American culture is a bit of a boogeyman in this study. But the criticism is hardly without merit.

In any case, the point is that immigrant children are apparently not the blight on public education that we have been led to believe. That’s good news, because it appears that we may need them to tutor all those native-born kids who are goofing off in class.

Photo Credit: Dan Thompson