Children and Migration - Perspectives

1. Children and Migration - Perspectives • Widespread agreement about the need for active cooperation among researchers and policy makers to improve the opportunities of immigrant youth in society and to ease the process of integration. • Consequences of migration include growth, change, and conflict at many levels of human life, from the level of individual development and adaptation to integration at the level of nations and international global politics. • Consequently, the success of immigrant youth may be influenced by complex interactions among characteristics of receiving and sending cultures, the nature of the contexts in which immigrant youth live, learn, play and work (e.g. families, peer groups, schools and neighbourhoods), and – perhaps most importantly – individual development

2. Children and Migration - Perspectives It is therefore of crucial importance to fully understand the forces that undermine young immigrants’ adaptation and those that actually promote their integration and positive adaptation in the host societies. Only understanding the factors in society and in the individual that foster adaptive functioning or prevent maladaptation of immigrant youth will allow us to capitalize on migration and to help youth with migrant backgrounds integrate in our societies. Immigration poses serious challenges to migrating individuals because it involves a number of stressful processes: immigrants are uprooted from their homeland; they must settle into a new country and adapt to a sometimes markedly different culture, often while retaining their cultural ties; they often face discrimination, racism and prejudice. Immigrant youth in particular has to contend with all these stressors at the same time as they confront the normative developmental challenges.

3. Children and Migration - Perspectives In recent years, it has been argued that challenging as immigration may be, it also presents significant opportunities for growth. A number of scholars have argued that immigrant children show satisfactory levels of mental health and adaptation. Their observation that immigrants have better health, fewer conduct problems and better academic achievement than their native counterparts (e.g., Fuligni, 2003) came to be known as the “immigrant paradox” (Garcia Coll, 2005). Immigrant youth’s adaptation and psychological well being seem to be affected by characteristics related to the society of origin, such as the motives for migrating, the cultural distance between the immigrant and the native population, the attitudes of immigrant families toward education, as well as by characteristics of the society of settlement, such as the levels of xenophobia, racism and discrimination, the degree of cultural diversity found in the society and the national policy toward such diversity (e.g., Phinney, Horenczyk, Liebkind & Vedder, 2001).

4. Children and Migration - Perspectives Four issues, rather than questions: we need to study developmental issues in immigrant populations that are common across all children such as attachment, language acquisition, and family development, immigration involves young people growing up in a different cultural context from the typical larger society of settlement. Yet, immigrant children still face specific developmental issues associated with the culture of their family and the country of origin, immigrant children in addition to their own culture are exposed to two or more contrasting cultural system as well as the experience of belonging to a minority group and possibly discrimination as a result of being a minority, immigration and acculturative changes take place simultaneously with developmental changes, and the two confound each other, making it difficult yet necessary to disentangle the effect of acculturation from development, and thereby making it difficult yet possible to introduce prophylactic measures and intervention.

5. Our next steps – “Competing” with Rockefeller? EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY and JACOBS FOUNDATION SUMMER SCHOOL on IMMIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT: CONCEPTUAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS August 2-6, 2008 Island of Syros, Greece

6. Our next steps – “Competing” with Rockefeller? 2009 Jacobs Foundation Conference Capitalizing on Migration: The Potential of Immigrant Youth Marbach Castle, Lake Constance April 22-25, 2009 Hope to see a lot of you there…