'My mommy doesn't have any papers': how the underground life of undocumented immigrants leaves their children cognitively impaired.

• Author: Severns, Maggie
• Position: Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Young Children - Book review

Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Young Children

by Hirokazu Yoshikawa

Russell Sage Foundation, 196 pp.

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In the spring of 2010, Michelle Obama visited an elementary school in Silver Spring, Maryland. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the gym, with news cameras rolling, she called on an apprehensive second grader who had raised her hand. Why, asked the girl, was the president "taking everyone away" who doesn't have papers to live in the United States? "My morn doesn't have any papers," she told the first lady.

Most of us can only guess about this girl's life, or who she will become in the future. But we could use more than guesswork. There are estimated to be more than four million native-born children with at least one undocumented parent living in America today, roughly one child per public school classroom in the country. All are birthright citizens of the United States. Does the undocumented status of their parents negatively affect their chances of growing up to be productive citizens? If so, in what ways, and what might be done to help them? These are hard questions to answer, because few people have studied the lives of children with undocumented parents, in large part because families fear they will be deported.

A new book, Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Young Children, steps into the breach. Its author, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, a professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, has conducted a first-of-its-kind study of how the documentation status of parents in America may be affecting their children's development. He finds that hardships common among undocumented parents, such as low wages and social isolation, can harm their infants' cognitive development at a startlingly young age--as early as twenty-four months into their lives.

Yoshikawa didn't set out to study children of the undocumented. He and his colleagues had designed a study to examine survival strategies among low-income immigrant families in New York City. But they quickly realized that the families' immigration status, rather than their economic standing, was what often drove behaviors of both parents and children, and so the researchers adjusted their study to better examine this phenomenon. Yoshikawa and his team recruited 400 low-income mothers with newborns from public hospitals in New York City and tracked them for the first thirty-six months of the children's lives. These...