Social Science Research Council

Success in integrating the children of immigrants—the second generation—is of enormous consequence for the United States and other economically advanced societies that have received millions of international migrants since the 1950s. Education systems will play a crucial role in this process. In fact, the second generation now constitutes more than half of the student body in many schools in Europe and North America, presenting them with new challenges.

Nations have different approaches toward immigrant students, such as policies on bilingual education and the role of religion in schools. But we know from international surveys such as PISA that more general national differences in the structure of education systems also affect student attainment, and there is preliminary evidence that they also shape immigrants’ economic and civic integration. For the last two years, the SSRC Working Group on Education and Migration in International Perspective has been reviewing the state of research in this area, and has found that our knowledge of the impact of national differences in institutional arrangements, practices, and policies is still very limited. Furthermore, few scholars are trained to do the kind of cross-national comparative research needed to address these questions.

Children of Immigrants in Schools is a three-year research and fellowship program designed to improve our understanding of the role of educational institutions and policy in the integration of children of immigrants and to train a cohort of young scholars to conduct international comparative research. Richard Alba of the State University of New York at Albany is the lead Principal Investigator and the project will be coordinated by the Social Science Research Council. Five teams, each consisting of one American Principal Investigator, a European partner, and three research fellows (two from the United States and one from Europe) will investigate topics including the impact of different tracking mechanisms, the organization of the transition from school to work, and the factors that foster student engagement and success among ethnic and language minority students. Each question will be examined through the comparison of two countries that highlight the effects of different policies and system arrangements. Between them, the studies cover a broad range of ethnic groups, selected because they represent populations who face similar challenges in the context of different national policies or approaches: Mexicans in the U.S. and North Africans in France; Dominicans in the U.S. and Moroccans in the Netherlands; West Indians and South Asians in both the U.S. and Britain; Mexicans in the U.S. and Moroccans in Spain.

Funding for Children of Immigrants in Schools is provided by the National Science Foundation. The Nuffield Foundation will support a complementary fellowship program that will enable five European post-doctoral fellows to join the project and conduct research in the United States.