The Power of Context: State-Level Policies and Politics and the Educational Performance of the Children of Immigrants in the United States Available to Purchase

Children of immigrant backgrounds—children who are immigrants themselves or were born to immigrant parents—are the largest segment of growth in the U.S. school population. In this exploratory interdisciplinary analysis, Filindra, Blanding, and Garcia Coll ask whether the context of policy and political receptivity, even when they are not directed at school reform or at immigrants, nonetheless affects the high school completion of children of immigrant backgrounds. The novelty of this work is its theoretical integration of insights from multiple disciplines and its emphasis on the larger context in analyzing the educational outcomes for children of immigrants. The authors' findings suggest that policy matters and that it matters in different ways. Specifically, they find a strong positive association between the immigrant inclusion in state welfare programs and high school graduation rates for the children of immigrants. At the same time, the study suggests that multiculturalism policies, targeting racial and ethnic minorities rather than immigrants specifically, may have the opposite effect. Finally, the authors suggest that politics also matters, as seen in the gap in graduation rates between the children of immigrants and the children of U.S.-born parents, which is narrower in Democrat-dominated states than it is in Republicancontrolled states.