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Children and Migration - Perspectives
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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
Children and Migration - Perspectives
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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.
Children and Migration - Perspectives
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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).
Children and Migration - Perspectives
Four issues, rather than questions:
a) we need to study developmental issues in immigrant populations that are
common across all children such as attachment, language acquisition, and
family development,
b) 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,
c) 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,
d) 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.
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
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…