Abstract
We use data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999 as well as neighborhood data from the 2000 U.S. Census to examine relationships between neighborhood Mexican immigrant concentration and reading (n = 820) and mathematics (n = 1,540) achievement among children of Mexican descent. Mixed-effects growth curves show that children living in immigrant-rich communities enter school at an achievement disadvantage relative to children in neighborhoods with fewer coethnic immigrant families. However, these disparities are driven by lower-SES families’ concentration in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods as well as these neighborhoods’ structural disadvantages. Controlling for children’s generation status and socioeconomic status, as well as neighborhood-level measures of structural disadvantage, safety, and social support, neighborhood immigrant concentration demonstrates a modest positive association with mathematics achievement among children of Mexican immigrant parents at the time of school entry. However, we do not find strong positive associations between Mexican American children’s rate of achievement growth over the elementary and middle school years and their neighborhoods’ concentration of Mexican immigrants.
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Notes
Disclosure safeguards established by the National Center for Education Statistics require that exact sample sizes not be reported
All descriptions of the ECLS-K study are taken from Tourangeau et al. (2009) unless otherwise noted.
As a test of the potential bias arising from non-English-proficient students’ exclusion from the English achievement analysis, we present math achievement results from the same restricted sample in the Table 5 in Appendix. While the substantive conclusions suggested by this analysis are largely the same as those from the full-sample analysis, the restricted analysis reflects the higher average achievement and smaller immigrant-native disparities among English-proficient Mexican American children when compared to results from the sample including Spanish-speakers. In addition, unlike results from the full-sample analysis reported in Table 4, residence in a high-immigrant neighborhood is not significantly associated with higher math achievement at kindergarten entry among English-proficient children of immigrants.
Describing early-childhood immigrants to the U.S. (to whom he refers as the 1.75 generation), Rumbaut writes: “(T)hose who arrive in early childhood (ages 0-5)… are pre-school children who retain virtually no memory of their country of birth, were too young to go to school to learn to read or write in the parental language in the home country (and typically learn English without an accent), and are almost entirely socialized here.” (2004:1167).
In alternative model specifications (results not shown), we tested a binary immigrant enclave variable, coded “1” if a child’s residential census tract contained 25 % or more Mexican immigrant residents or immediately bordered such a tract and had 15 % or more Mexican immigrant residents. While the pattern of results was essentially the same as those presented below, models using a continuous indicator of percent Mexican immigrant residents provided a better fit to the data.
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Hibel, J., Hall, M. Neighborhood Coethnic Immigrant Concentrations and Mexican American Children’s Early Academic Trajectories. Popul Res Policy Rev 33, 365–391 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-013-9314-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-013-9314-5