Amid federal immigration crackdowns, migrant parents view education as a “currency of love,” writes Gabrielle Oliveira.
The Harvard professor, in her new book “Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life,” explores the hope for social mobility families find in education amid an emerging immigration control pipeline in schools that threatens children’s health — and the U.S. social fabric — in the long-term.
“Migrant families are often one-dimensional characters in the media where you just hear about their coming for economic reasons, coming to escape something … but you rarely hear how education is a stabilizing force where the promise of your kid going to school, being in a classroom with a teacher, reading books, brings the sense of sacrifice being worth it,” said Oliveira, a Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and Brazil Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, at an American Community Media briefing.
Gabrielle Oliveira, Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and Brazil Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, discusses the consequence of an immigration system designed to discourage and deter migration.
“Now We Are Here,” which follows 16 migrant families from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras as they navigate the American education system from 2018 through the early pandemic, draws upon concurrent ethnographic research done in homes and schools to weave migrant children’s lifelong development with their parents’ sacrifices.
Describing “two parallel narratives” that intersect throughout her book, Oliveira said “For the parents’ success, they’re (thinking) ‘I need to be able to work and support my children,’ but for the children, what success looks like is going to school, staying in school and graduating, because social mobility is going to come from education.”
For these families, even amid crackdowns under the first Trump administration, “The American dream is very much alive,” she continued. “The sense of a land of opportunities, the promise of a meritocracy, that if you go to school and you work hard … is prevalent for folks, particularly from Latin American countries with less public schooling resources.”
Approximately 18 million children in the U.S., or over one in four, have at least one immigrant parent, with most of these children being U.S.-born citizens.
School district underresourcing that the families in Oliveira’s book face under the first Trump administration are more pertinent than ever now under the second, with a plan announced by the administration this month to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.
Meanwhile, the administration has proposed $12 billion in cuts to public education for fiscal year 2026.
The budget proposal includes $3.8 billion in cuts for many school district-operated social support and college access programs nationwide, particularly for English-learner and migrant students.
Gabrielle Oliveira discusses the views immigrants hold on the United States and the futures they can build here, especially for their children.
Oliveira’s research finds that amid these resource challenges, there is a new divergence from trends from the 1980s through the early 2000s “where the first generation of immigrants had a social mobility much steeper than the second generation. We’re seeing (more variations in mobility) now, because the number of second-generation immigrants is growing so much.”
While English-language learners “don’t score as well academically versus the U.S.-born kids, by fifth grade, they’re equal in formal testing. And after that, (the first generation) slightly surpasses in terms of achievement,” she explained. “It’s not so much just about being first- and second-generation; it has to do with zip code and which schools they’re going to … because a lot of these kids are often sent to overcrowded schools that are underfunded, and that has a huge impact on what they can achieve.”
“If they’re younger, they’re more likely to actually stay in school and graduate,” Oliveira added. “Adolescents who arrived here as adolescents feel often that they have less of an incentive to graduate and stay in school, because they’re thinking, ‘What if I only have two years?’ and ‘Maybe I just want to work and get income while I’m here.’”
Her book holds that the biggest challenge facing school districts in supporting migrant families is staffing, especially in the case of language access.
Gabrielle Oliveira discusses the challenges both immigrant students and their teachers face and offers insights into what teachers can do to support immigrant children as they process the difficult transition.
“When you don’t have folks that are speakers of the children’s main language … communication can lead to very distant relationships where you push these families further away,” she explained, “at a time they’re already worried about taking their kids to school.”
A Stanford University analysis of three years of daily attendance data from five school districts in California’s Central Valley found an average 22% increase in student absences in January and February 2025 alone, compared with the same months in previous years.
Oliveira’s book encourages districts to create translator volunteer opportunities and cultural events like potlucks for parents to participate and share their culture in the classroom: “Even if they’re busy working and it’s only 30 minutes where they’re in the schools and they’re doing a little bit of translating … or sharing their food and history, it builds trust between the kids … in this moment of invisibility where they’re afraid to call attention or assert their belonging.”
“If we don’t make immigration policy thinking about children, we’re stuck in this cycle of damaging the lives of very young people,” she said. “It’s designed to hurt in this way; it’s this idea of deterrence. The more you do that, the less people are going to try to come. The terror is part of the strategy, but long-term, in the fabric of society … it generates exclusion and consistent trauma in these young people’s lives.”
“These families are not here to take … It’s the complete opposite. They’re here to give the gift of education, to give the gift of a better life,” she added. “In talking about immigration policy, I tend to see more common ground when we talk about that, about how we make sure we’re thinking about the well-being of children.”
