Helping Young Refugees And Immigrants Succeed

In a unique effort, this book brings together, for the first time, scholarly analyses by eminent researchers of the historical, social, legal, and cultural influences on the young newcomers' lives as well as reports by practitioners in major aid organizations about the concrete work that their organizations have been carrying out.

A child who seems disinterested may actually be depressed, living with parents who themselves are disengaged and depressed as they struggle to adjust. A student with violent outbursts, who might just appear undisciplined, can be reliving the emotion of a turbulent event in a war-torn country, experiencing a heightened "flight or fight" response. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) recognized the need for mental health care for this critical population and launched a new program in March 2007. Under the Caring Across Communities (CAC) Initiative, RWJF awarded grants totaling $4.5 million to 15 projects aimed at reducing emotional and behavioral health problems among students in low-income immigrant and refugee families. The Caring Across Communities project directors share information with national program leaders at the Center for Health and Health Care in School at The George Washington University, as well as with each other at collaborative meetings. A number of successful strategies have emerged for engaging immigrant and refugee families in support of their children's mental health. This paper discusses these strategies.

In this book, internationally migrant families invite us to listen to the storylines of their mostly muted voices as they navigate the local schools in their new cultural context. They call us to hear them as they grapple with issues they encounter. They implore us to feel like an outsider and see the school as a foreign culture with language and communication barriers. The book is organized to enhance this carework. Each chapter begins with a vignette that includes the voices of one or more members of international migrating families, while introducing the context of the chapter. At the end of each chapter readers will find specific implications to consider. These are constructed with preservice teachers, practicing teachers, and educational administrators in mind. As you read each chapter, there is the call for school transformation. The families in this book entreat school personnel to engage with international migrant families and to embrace a risk and resilience model as we strive together for success. These storylines challenge us to examine our personal storylines for biases and deficit understandings and call us all to purposefully rewrite these in the spirit of possibilities as the families in this book have embodied for us.

As the immigrant population grows in countries such as the United States, so does the number of newcomer immigrant students in middle and high schools. Many scholars have noted that the education immigrant adolescents receive has a great bearing on the future of the nation. Understanding Adolescent Immigrants: Moving toward an Extraordinary Discourse for Extraordinary Youth highlights the voices of these young people by sharing the stories of seven newcomer youths aged 13 to 20 years in U.S. high schools. By learning their histories, present situations, and dreams for the future, we can understand both these students’ unique contribution to their new country and their schools’ roles in helping them achieve success.

The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. Over the years the composition of immigrants has significantly changed. From receiving immigrants from primarily Europe, the United States is now home to people from countries around the globe. One of the common challenges encountered by immigrant and refugee families and youth is to successfully resettle and integrate into the host country that is culturally different from their country of origin. Depending on the context of migration, families and youth oftentimes face additional challenges ranging from potential trauma prior to immigration, language, employment, education, healthcare accessibility, integration, discrimination, etc. This book focuses on different issues experienced by immigrant and refugee families and youth as well as programs implemented to serve these populations. These issues pertain to the individual at a personal level (attachment, trauma, bi-cultural self-efficacy, behavioral problems, and mental health), family (parenting, work-family conflict, problems such as domestic violence), community (risk factors such as racial discrimination and protective factors such as social capital) and policy (immigration policy and enforcement). Part I of the book focuses on immigrant and refugee families and Part II focuses on immigrant and refugee youth. By increasing our awareness of issues pertinent to immigrant and refugee families and youth, we can better provide culturally respectful and sensitive services and policy to this population at a time when they are navigating between their host culture and home culture in addition to dealing with challenges encountered in resettlement. The book is a significant new contribution to migration studies and social justice, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of social work, public policy, law and sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Ethic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work.

A National Bestseller! What does an undocumented immigrant look like? What kind of family must she come from? How could she get into this country? What is the true price she must pay to remain in the United States? JULISSA ARCE knows firsthand that the most common, preconceived answers to those questions are sometimes far too simple-and often just plain wrong. On the surface, Arce's story reads like a how-to manual for achieving the American dream: growing up in an apartment on the outskirts of San Antonio, she worked tirelessly, achieved academic excellence, and landed a coveted job on Wall Street, complete with a six-figure salary. The level of professional and financial success that she achieved was the very definition of the American dream. But in this brave new memoir, Arce digs deep to reveal the physical, financial, and emotional costs of the stunning secret that she, like many other high-achieving, successful individuals in the United States, had been forced to keep not only from her bosses, but even from her closest friends. From the time she was brought to this country by her hardworking parents as a child, Arce-the scholarship winner, the honors college graduate, the young woman who climbed the ladder to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs-had secretly lived as an undocumented immigrant. In this surprising, at times heart-wrenching, but always inspirational personal story of struggle, grief, and ultimate redemption, Arce takes readers deep into the little-understood world of a generation of undocumented immigrants in the United States today- people who live next door, sit in your classrooms, work in the same office, and may very well be your boss. By opening up about the story of her successes, her heartbreaks, and her long-fought journey to emerge from the shadows and become an American citizen, Arce shows us the true cost of achieving the American dream-from the perspective of a woman who had to scale unseen and unimaginable walls to get there.

Drawing on data from the PISA 2003 survey, this report examines the performance of students with immigrant backgrounds and compares it to that of their native counterparts.

This book provides a framework to guide mental health providers who work with refugees and immigrants. Nearly 70 million people today are refugees or forcibly-displaced migrants. More than half of them are children suffering from the effects of dislocation and violence. The authors describe the unique needs and challenges of serving these populations, and offer concrete steps for providing evidence-based, culturally-responsive care. Using the socioecological model, the authors conceptualize the developing child as living within concentric circles that include family, school, neighborhood, and society, embedded within a cultural context. Mental health providers identify and provide targeted support to combat disruptions within any or all of these ecological layers. Chapters examine the complex ways in which culture impacts the refugee experience, barriers to engagement in mental health practice and strategies for overcoming them, assessment, collaborative and integrated mental health interventions, and efforts to increase resilience in children, families, and communities. The book is an essential guide for mental health providers, and all who seek to help children in need.

Immigrant children and youth are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and so their prospects bear heavily on the well-being of the country. Children of Immigrants represents some of the very best and most extensive research efforts to date on the circumstances, health, and development of children in immigrant families and the delivery of health and social services to these children and their families. This book presents new, detailed analyses of more than a dozen existing datasets that constitute a large share of the national system for monitoring the health and well-being of the U.S. population. Prior to these new analyses, few of these datasets had been used to assess the circumstances of children in immigrant families. The analyses enormously expand the available knowledge about the physical and mental health status and risk behaviors, educational experiences and outcomes, and socioeconomic and demographic circumstances of first- and second-generation immigrant children, compared with children with U.S.-born parents.

Social Work Practice with Refugee and Immigrant Youth in the United States addresses an ever increasing population group whose sitution presents current and future Social Work practioners with a tremendous amount of opportunities and challenges. In the last decade, the US has experienced Social-cultural developments that have borne witness to the emergence of two distinct and yet potentially beneficial trends: the increased presence of immigrant and refugee youth and the popularity of youth development as a paradigm and field of practice. This text contextualizes the newcomer experience and provides a guide for social workers developing interventions using a youth development paradigm. Cases and examples in every chapter provide examples of successful programs while identifying the rewards and challenges associated with working with youth development and newcomer youth.