Marcelo Suárez-Orozco

Over the last twenty years immigration to the United States grew at a brisk pace. Approximately 70 million people living in the United States are either immigrants (foreign-born) or the (U.S. born) children of immigrants. This massive immigration wave would have ideally taken place within a coherent policy framework synchronized to ease the transition of new arrivals to education, the labor market, and the practice of citizenship. Instead, the United States is facing a gathering storm. The current policy architecture is at once misaligned with the realities of global migration and plagued by unclear, contradictory, and unrealistic objectives. The result is an immigration system now largely irrelevant to any rational labor market objectives, the vicissitudes of language and education policies, and requirements of citizenship and social cohesion in the 21st Century. The proposed joint study (with Carola Suárez-Orozco) shall deploy data from the LISA Study of the Harvard Immigration Projects, the largest study ever funded in the history of the NSF Cultural Anthropology division, as well as data from two other funded field projects, to develop a conceptual framework for understanding various aspects of this perfect storm on the lived experiences of immigrant children and youth with a focus on schools.