As School Systems Receive Growing Numbers of Recently Arrived Immigrant Students, Better Data Are Needed on Characteristics of this Group

WASHINGTON, DC — The increase in the number of immigrant-background children in U.S. schools over the last decade has challenged K-12 educators to expand their capacity to serve students who may have unique characteristics and particular needs.

School systems tend to focus on children through the lens of their English proficiency level, which has meant a limited scope and availability of data on immigrant students as a distinct group. But these data limitations can hinder the ability of educators and policymakers to improve instruction and services for recently arrived immigrant students, many of whom arrive with limited or interrupted education and have experienced trauma. They also are more likely than their peers to live in low-income and linguistically isolated households, which are factors associated with academic struggle.

A new fact sheet from the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy draws on analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Education data to explore the characteristics of recently arrived immigrant children.

An estimated 649,000 children ages 5 to 17 — representing 30 percent of all foreign born children — had been in the United States for three years or less as of the Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey. While the highest numbers could be found in traditional immigrant destinations such as California, Florida and New York, recent arrivals made up particularly large shares of all immigrant children in Alaska, Delaware and West Virginia.

Among the fact sheet’s findings:

• Half of recently arrived immigrant children in 2021 were Latino. Asian American and Pacific Islander children were the second largest racial or ethnic group after Latinos, representing 20 percent of all recently arrived children ages 5 – 17, followed by White and Black children, at 13 and 10 percent respectively.
• The largest share of all immigrant children who had arrived in the past three years, 13 percent, came from Mexico, with children from the northern Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras combining for 21 percent. India (6 percent), the Dominican Republic and Brazil (4 percent each) and Venezuela (3 percent) were also among the top origins for recently arrived immigrant children.
• Nine percent of recently arrived youth ages 14 to 17 were not enrolled in and had not completed high school — triple the 3 percent share for longer-resident immigrant and U.S.-born youth. Similarly, the share of 18 to 21-year-olds out of school and without a high school diploma was three times as high for recently arrived students as for the U.S. born: 15 percent versus 5 percent. (It was 8 percent for longer-resident immigrants in that age bracket.)

“It is critical for school staff to understand students’ backgrounds, especially as migration trends shift, to provide appropriate resources and support for their linguistic, academic and socioemotional growth,” the fact sheet’s author, Julie Sugarman, concludes. “At a minimum, school systems should track the educational progress of students new to the United States — and ideally, subgroups such as those with limited or interrupted education in their countries of origin — in order to plan and evaluate educational programs that meet their unique needs.”

Read the fact sheet, Recent Immigrant Children: A Profile of New Arrivals to U.S. Schools, here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/recent-immigrant-children.

For more MPI work on K-12 issues, visit: www.migrationpolicy.org/topics/k-12-education.