Immigration Status, Family Structure, and Children's Cognitive Development

Purpose: Today more than one in five U.S. children has one or more foreign-born parents. These children face unique challenges associated to their parents’ experiences with immigration, including their immigration status. Despite the well-documented challenges that immigrant families face and the increasing interest in the literature regarding children of immigrants, little is known about the association between their parents’ immigration status and their cognitive development. To date, only one study has shown that early cognitive achievement is lower among children with undocumented versus documented immigrant parents. As far as we know, evidence for older children is non-existent. The current study contributes to the existing literature by examining: (1) the role of parental immigration status on children’s cognitive skills in middle childhood and adolescence, and (2) whether the role of immigration status changes over time. Furthermore, as family structure has been suggested as a moderator of the disadvantages experienced by immigrant families, this study also tests (3) whether family structure is a moderator of the association between parents’ immigration status and children’s cognitive skills.

Methods: Data are drawn from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A. FANS), a longitudinal study of families in Los Angeles County, California. Data were collected in two waves (2000-2001 and 2006-2008) on a stratified random sample of adults and children, where poor neighborhoods and families with children were oversampled. Our sample consists of 908 U.S. born children aged 9 to 17 in the second wave, who were tested in both waves. Immigration status is measured through parents’ reports. Family structure indicates if the child´s parents are legally married, cohabiting, separated, divorced or never married. Children´s cognitive outcomes include the applied problems test and the letter-word identification test. We use pooled OLS regressions that control for a wide set of demographic and socioeconomic child and family characteristics, including neighborhood fixed effects. In addition, for our second and third aims, we include child fixed effects, which allows us to control for all time-invariant differences across children.

Results: Results confirm the negative association between children’s cognitive skills and parental immigrant status. Furthermore, we find that children from undocumented immigrants experience more disadvantages compared to those from documented immigrants. Results also show that this disadvantage does not vary significantly between waves. Although children living with single mothers had lower achievement compared to those living with married couples, family structure as a protective factor did not moderate the association between immigration status and children’s cognitive outcomes.

Implications: Findings suggest that immigrant-origin children´s academic disadvantages vary across parental immigration status. Children from undocumented immigrant parents face more persistent disadvantages than children from documented ones. In addition, contrary to what is thought of marriage as a strength of immigrant families, parental marriage status do not operate as a moderator of the negative association between immigration status and children’s cognitive outcomes. Results provide support for increased attention to the wellbeing of immigrant-origin children particularly to those with undocumented status.