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Lessons from the children of immigrants

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By EDWARD SCHUMACHER-MATOS

Washington Post Writers Group

Published: November 1, 2009

BOSTON - By all indicators, Raquel Torres should be cleaning houses.

And that's only if she had stayed out of a drug gang.

Her parents were illegal immigrants from Tijuana. Neither had a high school diploma. Her father worked as a waiter, and she was raised in National City, a poor barrio near San Diego. She had trouble at El Toyon Elementary School because of her weak English.

Nearly one in four schoolchildren are foreign-born or the children of immigrants, and most are still moving up into the American dream. But a disturbing number with hardship backgrounds similar to Raquel's are not.

Many Mexicans, Central Americans and Caribbean islanders in particular have been stagnating compared to their parents. Worse, some peddle drugs and fall into an underclass of joblessness.

A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center found that roughly one-fifth of Hispanic males between the ages of 16 and 25 are high school dropouts, and 3 percent are in jail.

But Raquel Torres was one of 50 children of immigrants tracked over 14 years who beat the odds to graduate from a university and move solidly into the middle class. How did these 50 outliers - out of 5,200 who were surveyed - manage to do it?

The lessons from Raquel and the others contradict the child-rearing and language-acquisition policies prevalent among educators, psychologists and politicians. They also suggest a need for more self-help involvement by Latino community leaders.

Instead of today's preached tolerance, the parents of Raquel and the other successful children were remarkably uniform in being authoritarian and stern, sometimes even employing corporal punishment, according to Princeton sociologist Alejandro Portes, leader of the study.

Instead of being fully Americanized in their school years, the 50 outliers also maintained their parents' language and cultural traditions.

So that more immigrant children are like Raquel, our schools and local and national governments need to do more to promote involved teachers and counselors, work with parents and be supportive of their languages and customs. Learning English is crucial, but repeated studies show that by high school, students who are proficient in two languages academically outperform students who speak only English.

Meanwhile, all of us who mentored disadvantaged students when we were in college should know from Raquel that our time was not in vain. Our immigrant children are calling for your volunteer help.

Edward Schumacher-Matos' column is distributed by Washington Post Writers Group.

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