Immigrants’ Children Quickly Embrace English Study Finds They Generally Outperform Peers In School, Often Set Higher Goals

A five-year study of the educational progress of 2,400 children of immigrants in San Diego has found that they quickly embrace English over their parents’ native tongues - contrary to the fears of anti-immigration groups.

The study - part of the largest long-range survey of immigrant offspring in the United States - also found these youths received better grades and had lower dropout rates than fellow public school students whose parents had been born in the United States.

But the study also found stark disparities in ambition among various immigrant groups.

The research is part of a massive effort by researchers from Michigan State and Princeton universities to follow 5,000 children in San Diego and Miami.

“Some immigrant groups and their children are doing well and seem poised to join the middle-class mainstream - if they are not there already,” said Michigan State sociologist Ruben G. Rumbaut, who coordinated the project in the San Diego Unified School District.

Starting in 1991, Rumbaut chose as his subjects 2,420 San Diego students in the eighth and ninth grades who had at least one foreign-born parent, then followed them until 1995. The students represented more than 60 nationalities, and about half had been born in the United States.

Rumbaut found that the children of immigrants were not driving down achievement levels but were outperforming students in the district as a whole. For example, 29 percent of all ninth-graders in the district had grade point averages higher than 3.0, compared with 44 percent of immigrant children. In the 12th grade, 46 percent of all students had a 3.0 GPA or better, while 50 percent of immigrant youths performed that well.

Rumbaut found that the immigrant youths placed a high value on schooling, with more than 90 percent agreeing that a good education is essential to upward mobility. Forty-six percent aspired to occupations such as doctor and lawyer, with Filipinos, Vietnamese and other Asians having the loftiest goals.

But far fewer Mexicans, Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong set goals that high. Only 22 percent of Laotians and Cambodians and 24 percent of Mexicans said they wanted an advanced degree, compared with 63 percent of Asians, 52 percent of non-Mexican Latinos and 47 percent of Vietnamese.

Rumbaut said the immigrant youths spent more than two hours a day on homework. But the more recent immigrants - those who have arrived in the United States since 1985 - devoted four hours a day to it, more than those whose families had arrived earlier.

Rumbaut said this raises concerns “Americanization may be a double-edged sword.”

Rumbaut also found that 68 percent of the immigrant students read English “very well.” Rumbaut said these findings are proof that “contrary to nativist alarms … English easily remains the language of the land.”