Migrant children and migrants' children: Nativity differences in school enrollment in Mexico and the United States

1. IntroductionAs migration increases around the world, interest in the role of migration for children's health and well-being continues to grow. Most needed are comparative studies that give greater insight into how children's outcomes vary across diverse migration contexts. Despite long-term flows of migration such as those between the United States and Mexico, there is limited understanding of the variations in outcomes among children who migrate (Donato and Duncan 2011). This dearth of knowledge about the fate of migrant children is particularly notable for one of the fastest growing groups of children: U.S.-born children living in Mexico. By 2010, foreign-born residents in Mexico accounted for approximately 1% of the population, which represents a tripling of the size of the foreign-born population over 20 years. Over half of the foreign-born residents in Mexico in 2010 were children under age 15 (INEGI 2012). Research on this subgroup is timely, given the multiple factors in the United States that led to an increase in this population: the recession, the increasingly hostile immigration laws passed at the state level, and a rise in family members' deportations. These children occupy a unique niche in the transnational realm because they are migrants themselves and yet, more often than not, are living with family members who are familiar with what is essentially the children's country of settlement. This turns the more traditional intergenerational pattern of migration and the attendant expectations for incorporation upside down (Rendall and Torr 2008; Zuniga and Hamann 2009).Much of the research on outcomes for children of immigrants tends to be set in receiving contexts where children migrate with family members. These studies often draw from assimilation theory, which provides expectations of structural incorporation - schooling and educational progress being one example - predicated on generational progression from the first or immigrant generation through their descendants born in the country of settlement, or delayed incorporation for those facing structural barriers in the community of settlement (Alba and Nee 2003). These perspectives hold the underlying assumption that each subsequent generation accrues more knowledge of and accommodation to the 'receiving' society and less knowledge of the 'sending' society. This perspective is less well positioned to anticipate outcomes for transnational families, those families with continued connections and communications across national boundaries (Levitt 2001). Nor do we have strong theories of incorporation that might lead to a clear prediction of migrant children's schooling or educational progress in the case of return migration to parents' origin communities. Thus there is limited guidance for predicting how duration of residence in these settings of return migration might be associated with children's schooling.This paper considers the role of nativity and duration of residence on children's school enrollment in two different migration contexts: Mexico, which has seen an increase in return migration and a new influx of foreign-born children, and the United States, which receives many foreign-born children and where studies of these children's educational experience are more plentiful. The analyses address whether there is a consistent role of nativity and duration of residence in these different receiving contexts. Foreign-born children may face similar constraints to school enrollment, particularly among recently arrived youth, regardless of the country under study. In both settings, families and youth may face difficulties navigating school enrollment procedures, lowering school enrollment for the most recently arrived (Medina 2012; Lukes 2013). But among immigrants in the United States there is considerable variation in educational outcomes by age and age at arrival, as well as a significant age pattern to school enrollment in general. In this case, nativity differentials in school enrollment in Mexico and the United States are likely to diverge according to children's age. …