Illegal Immigrants’ Children Suffer, Study Finds - NYTimes.com: ...Even though the children have citizenship and live in an immigrant-friendly city that offers them a wide array of services, many are still hobbled by serious developmental and educational deficits resulting from their parents’ lives in the shadows, according to the study, whose author says it is the most comprehensive look to date at the effects of parents’ immigration status on young children.
“The undocumented are viewed in current policy debates as lawbreakers, laborers or victims — seldom as parents raising citizen children,” wrote the author, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, a Harvard education professor who has published the study as a book, “Immigrants Raising Citizens” (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011).
Professor Yoshikawa found that by the time the children of illegal immigrants reached age 2, they showed significantly lower levels of language and cognitive development than the children of legal immigrants and native-born parents.
