Children of Immigration. By Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco.  Harvard University Press, 2001.

Immigration has emerged as one of the most significant sociological phenomena of the past century, having directly affected hundreds of millions of children and adults globally. Along with its attendant hopes and despair, triumphs and disappointments, immigration has irrevocably transformed lives around the world. In the United States, one of every five children is a first or second generation immigrant, constituting the fastest growing segment of the country's child population. The authors of this book hope to fill a void in the literature on immigration, most of which does not focus on children and their own journeys. They aim to “explore the emotional and psychosocial experience of immigration for children …” (p. 13). Yet in spite of this, much of the book leaves out a direct consideration of children—there is no focus on them in the first two of the five chapters- and instead is oriented toward contextualizing the experience of immigrant children via a discussion of policy-related, economic, social and familial issues.

However, this is a highly readable book written by the co-directors of the Harvard Immigration Project, a husband and wife team who are respectively an anthropoldgist and a cultural psychologist. Here they draw on two decades of work, including their most recent research-a longitudinal study of over four hundred foreign-born children in over fifty schools in the Boston and San Francisco areas. The Suarez-Orozcos are concerned with the “new” immigrants, from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, who more so than the “old” European immigrants of the past century, find their journey tainted by the issues of race, color, public antipathy, “hypersegregation” of schools and neighborhoods with their attendant ills, and “structural inequalities” in American society. They claim that unlike the European immigrants, who were on a path of upward mobility, the new immigrants increasingly come to join the “multicultural underclass” of the country.