{"id":77458,"date":"2025-11-20T13:27:40","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T21:27:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=77458"},"modified":"2025-11-20T13:27:40","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T21:27:40","slug":"education-a-currency-of-love-for-migrant-parents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=77458","title":{"rendered":"Education: A \u2018Currency of Love\u2019 for Migrant Parents"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Amid federal immigration crackdowns, migrant parents view education as a “currency of love,\u201d writes Gabrielle Oliveira.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Amid federal immigration crackdowns, migrant parents view education as a \u201ccurrency of love,\u201d writes Gabrielle Oliveira.<\/p>\n

The Harvard professor, in her new book \u201cNow We Are Here: Family Migration, Children\u2019s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life,\u201d explores the hope for social mobility families find in education amid an emerging immigration control pipeline in schools that threatens children\u2019s health \u2014 and the U.S. social fabric \u2014 in the long-term.<\/p>\n

\u201cMigrant families are often one-dimensional characters in the media where you just hear about their coming for economic reasons, coming to escape something \u2026 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,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNow We Are Here,\u201d 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\u2019s lifelong development with their parents\u2019 sacrifices.<\/p>\n

Describing \u201ctwo parallel narratives\u201d that intersect throughout her book, Oliveira said \u201cFor the parents\u2019 success, they\u2019re (thinking) \u2018I need to be able to work and support my children,\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

For these families, even amid crackdowns under the first Trump administration, \u201cThe American dream is very much alive,\u201d she continued. \u201cThe sense of a land of opportunities, the promise of a meritocracy, that if you go to school and you work hard \u2026 is prevalent for folks, particularly from Latin American countries with less public schooling resources.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

School district underresourcing that the families in Oliveira\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the administration has\u00a0proposed<\/a>\u00a0$12 billion in cuts to public education for fiscal year 2026.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Gabrielle Oliveira discusses the views immigrants hold on the United States and the futures they can build here, especially for their children.<\/em><\/p>\n

Oliveira\u2019s research finds that amid these resource challenges, there is a new divergence from trends from the 1980s through the early 2000s \u201cwhere the first generation of immigrants had a social mobility much steeper than the second generation. We\u2019re seeing (more variations in mobility) now, because the number of second-generation immigrants is growing so much.\u201d<\/p>\n

While English-language learners \u201cdon\u2019t score as well academically versus the U.S.-born kids, by fifth grade, they\u2019re equal in formal testing. And after that, (the first generation) slightly surpasses in terms of achievement,\u201d she explained. \u201cIt\u2019s not so much just about being first- and second-generation; it has to do with zip code and which schools they\u2019re going to \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they\u2019re younger, they\u2019re more likely to actually stay in school and graduate,\u201d Oliveira added. \u201cAdolescents who arrived here as adolescents feel often that they have less of an incentive to graduate and stay in school, because they\u2019re thinking, \u2018What if I only have two years?\u2019 and \u2018Maybe I just want to work and get income while I\u2019m here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Her book holds that the biggest challenge facing school districts in supporting migrant families is staffing, especially in the case of language access.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you don\u2019t have folks that are speakers of the children\u2019s main language \u2026 communication can lead to very distant relationships where you push these families further away,\u201d she explained, \u201cat a time they\u2019re already worried about taking their kids to school.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Stanford University\u00a0analysis<\/a>\u00a0of three years of daily attendance data from five school districts in California\u2019s Central Valley found an average 22% increase in student absences in January and February 2025 alone, compared with the same months in previous years.<\/p>\n

Oliveira\u2019s book encourages districts to create translator volunteer opportunities and cultural events like potlucks for parents to participate and share their culture in the classroom: \u201cEven if they\u2019re busy working and it\u2019s only 30 minutes where they\u2019re in the schools and they\u2019re doing a little bit of translating \u2026 or sharing their food and history, it builds trust between the kids \u2026 in this moment of invisibility where they\u2019re afraid to call attention or assert their belonging.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we don\u2019t make immigration policy thinking about children, we\u2019re stuck in this cycle of damaging the lives of very young people,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s designed to hurt in this way; it\u2019s 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 \u2026 it generates exclusion and consistent trauma in these young people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese families are not here to take \u2026 It\u2019s the complete opposite. They\u2019re here to give the gift of education, to give the gift of a better life,\u201d she added. \u201cIn talking about immigration policy, I tend to see more common ground when we talk about that, about how we make sure we\u2019re thinking about the well-being of children.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BySelen Ozturk Nov 20, 2025 Amid...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ca-local","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77459,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77458\/revisions\/77459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}