Agency revisits alien issues

Advocate: 3 state projects can aid immigrants’ children

University of Arkansas at Fayetteville professor Bill Schwab speaks Wednesday during the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families panel discussion on “Critical Generation: Improving the Well-Being of Children of Immigrants in Arkansas” inside the Springdale Public Schools central office.
University of Arkansas at Fayetteville professor Bill Schwab speaks Wednesday during the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families panel discussion on “Critical Generation: Improving the Well-Being of Children of Immigrants in Arkansas” inside the Springdale Public Schools central office.

— A nonprofit advocacy group has for some time favored a state-level “DREAM” Act, expanded pre-kindergarten programs and extension of ARKids First health insurance, an official said Wednesday.

But when Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families researched related statistics on immigrant children, it changed the three topics from secondary policy issuesto focus areas, the agency’s Northwest Arkansas director said.

In a report it released Wednesday, the group called for more funding for pre-K programs, changing Arkansas’ Medicaid policy to expand ARKids First coverage for “all lawfully residing” immigrant children and passage of a “DREAM” act that would give high school graduates who are illegal aliens a shot at in-state tuition rates.

“Because kids can’t vote,they need a strong voice in the process, and they often don’t have that,” the director, Laura Kellams, said before a panel discussion Wednesday about its report: “Critical Generation: Improving the Well-Being of Children of Immigrants in Arkansas.

“Our success as a state depends on their success.”

In its report, the group argues that well-educated, healthy children are less likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system or requireschool remediation programs to catch up. The 16-page report also makes a case that the phrase “children of immigrants” is the best description of the group as a whole, as only 12 percent are truly immigrants themselves.

The number of children in Arkansas with at least one foreign-born parent has grown 440 percent since 1990, to 67,067. The children of native-born parents grew only 15 percent, according tothe report.

“The overwhelming majority of these children, more than 88 percent, are U.S. citizens,” the report said.

Children from immigrant families account for most of the growth in the state’s child population during the last decade, the report found, and this new population is mostly Hispanic. The advocacy group credits numbers of Hispanic children in Arkansas for preventing the state’s overall child population from declining during the last decade.

About 10 percent of Arkansas’ child population is Hispanic, compared with 23 percent in the nation, but the state has area with high concentrations of Hispanic students, the report said. For instance, in Sevier County in southwestern Arkansas, Hispanics made up half the student enrollment in the 2011-12 academic year.

Bill Schwab, a university professor of sociology at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, said during the panel discussion that he has completed about 50 interviews for a book he is writing related to immigrants. He described children of immigrants as “people who, through no fault of their own, are put in limbo.” One woman he interviewed described what it was like to find both her parents arrested by immigration officials when she was 13 years old. She recalled saying to authorities, “I have a 5-year-old sister: What am I supposed to do?” She was told simply to go home and take care of her.

In states where theDREAM Act has succeeded and failed, he said, there has been a clear difference in the strategy for passing the law.

The proposed federal legislation titled the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act first was introduced in 2001, revised and reintroduced several times but never has passed both houses of Congress.

“The issue passes every time you focus on human capital,” Schwab said. “It fails when the focus is on constitutional issues.”

Others on the panel, Springdale School District Superintendent Jim Rollins and Kathy Grisham of Community Clinic Springdale Medical, covered education and health care.

Afterward, Brig Caldwell of Rogers said he attended Wednesday’s panel for personal and professional reasons.

He works as student relations and community liaison for Rogers Heritage High School but also has a daughter who’s a “child of an immigrant” by the report’s definition. He is convinced she benefited from preschool more than a decade ago, as she is now 13 and in her school’s gifted and talented program.

Her mother is from Costa Rica, while Caldwell was a Costa Rican orphan adopted by an Arkansas family when he was 2 and raised as an American.

“Get this: She was translating for her teacher in preschool, for the other students,” Caldwell said with a laugh.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 07/12/2012

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