Barriers to Immigrant Achievement

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             Recent interest has been in participation in ECE programs as an entirety. Karoly and Gonzalez, however, focus their study on participation patterns specifically of immigrant children. Their research documents considerable proof that immigrant children are more likely than others to only partake in parental care before attending school (59 percent versus 44 percent), and less likely to be in centre-based care (14 percent versus 25 percent). Patterns such as this have been confirmed in their studies by data taken from the 2000 Census and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study- KIndergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) with a focus exclusively on preschool children. This report outlines that for the cohort that entered kindergarten in 1990-99, children of immigrant mothers were less likely to be enrolled in center or school-based preschool programs than other children in the year before they entered kindergarten. Evidence suggests considerable variation by subgroup of immigrants by geography in their use of specific types of care arrangements. Karoly and Gonzalez note "immigrant children are disproportionately from families with low income, with low parental education, with two parents" and ask "To what extent can those and other demographic or socioeconomic characteristics explain the immigrant-native gap in regards to non parental care?" A table is provided to explore the question, reporting the differences in non parental care taken from the National Household Education Survey (NHES) within subgroups defined by poverty status, parental education, the number of parents in the family, and ethnicity. As expected, any center based care is higher for children within each of the subgroups. This shows that, for example, immigrant children, above the poverty line, are more likely to participate in any out of home based care than children below the poverty line. Having access to this evidence that proves the point made by Karoly and Gonzalez acts more as a strategic undertaking to be made by immigrants than it does an accessible solution to the barriers that immigrants will encounter through their journeys of becoming citizens of a new country.