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Schools across the United States serve children from families that have crossed the U.S. border without documents. Some of these children have crossed the border themselves. For teachers and other educators, the Supreme Court decision of "Plyler v. Doe" (1982) has set the precedent that all children in the United States are entitled to a public education, regardless of their immigration status. Nevertheless, undocumented immigration remains a highly polarizing issue, and the struggles of immigrant children and their families often takes a back seat to political posturing. The authors of this article believe that it is an act of both courage and solidarity for teachers to provide support for undocumented children and their families. They also assert that it is a moral duty supported by international human rights agreements signed by the United States. The following research study raises questions about how the United States serves and supports the children and families who arrive in our schools and communities with or without "papeles" ("papers")--documentation of their legal entry into the country; about how much Americans will tolerate the abuse, neglect, and death of men, women, and children who attempt to cross our border with Mexico; and about men, women, and children who attempt to cross our border with Mexico. This study describes the involvement with a humanitarian organization on the Arizona border with Mexico, and what was learned from conversations with ranchers, border patrol agents, Mexican officials, and the migrants themselves.

In the current age of border talk, border enforcement, and of draconian policies that further separate and break up families, children who remain in the country of origin are rarely asked what they understand the border and the United States to be like. Media vehicles and academic papers have reported the brutal effects of family separation at the border for children and families. In order to further understand how young children make sense of their feelings of loss and separation psychologists and members of the American Academy of Pediatrics have collected drawings done by children to understand how trauma has manifested in the minds of children during detention and separation. However, another facet of children's perceptions of the United States, migration and family separation also exist a little farther away from the physical border that divides the U.S. and Mexico. This paper, then, addresses the questions: How do Mexican children in Mexico make sense of their family separation through their drawings? How are children's drawings and narratives describing how they see and understand the United States? In this paper, we analyze 50 drawings from children in Puebla, Mexico who have one or more parents living in the United States. Data for this paper stems from a 3 year, multi-sited ethnography that spanned New York City and several states in Mexico.

This practitioner inquiry article examines the role that multimodal literacy plays in the organizing of Latinx immigrant youth in the U.S. Co-written by two of the youth who participated in this research, alongside the fellow immigrant activist who designed and carried out the year-long study, this paper analyzes a subset of qualitative data from the research and argues that young Latinx immigrant organizers are organic intellectuals who, as grassroots educators, mobilize their coalitional multimodal literacies to critically examine the common sense, meaning the dominant and taken-for-granted assumptions, of the immigrant rights movement in the U.S., and transform it into one that is inclusive, intergenerational, and challenging of colonial logics that separate oppressed and racialized communities from each other. Implications include conceptualizing socioemotional relational intuition as a component of multimodality and engaging young Latinx immigrants as grassroots educators whose coalitional multimodal literacies envision and enact a decolonial world.

This paper compares the educational achievement and growth of Latinx third through eighth-grade students attending school along the U.S.-Mexico Border and in the interior of the four Border states. The theories of structural and legal violence predict that powerful Anglos have created systems of social reproduction, concentrated disadvantage, and immigration law that reduce Latinx education close to the U.S.-Mexico Border. We test these theories with data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), which contains information on Latinx achievement and growth in all public school districts in the four Border states. We find that Latinx achievement and growth are similar along the Border and in the interior except in Texas, where concentrated disadvantage dramatically lowers Latinx achievement and growth. We also find that social reproduction is more beneficial for Latinx youth along the Border because, surprisingly, Latinx adults tend to be more educated near the border than in the interior. We find no evidence that immigration laws reduce education more near the Border than in the interior. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and policy.

No term defined the last U.S. presidency, and public discourse accompanying it, more so than "the Wall" and, with it, the U.S.-Mexico border more broadly. That discourse, however, has mostly been characterized by an a-historic, unproblematized, and under-theorized notion of "border." Our experiences as curriculum scholars and teacher educators have illustrated that a similar stance about the border has taken place in public education. We begin from the assumption that the border is very real, but it is socially constructed and maintained, and impacts different groups differently. Borders are thus not only geographic markers but political, cultural, economic, and psychological disruptors of places and those living in them. In order to better understand these complex dimensions, we engage in an extended analysis of two cases, the U.S.-Mexico border and the internal displacement of the Rohingya of Myanmar, building upon prior theorizing by considering both the discursive and affective dimensions of each and implications for curriculum and pedagogy. The paper concludes with suggestions for applying these considerations in practice and questions for future inquiry.

This paper examines the relationship between skills prices (wage premiums) and inequality in migrant sending countries (mainly from Latin America) and explores the implications for education policies. Most of the evidence is based on the case of Mexico, a Latin American country that is also an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member. Despite the belief that Latin American countries tend to pay less for their skilled workers than developed countries, they invest a considerable amount of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in education and sometimes in scholarships abroad. Therefore, our main question is: Are skill prices really so proportionately low in Latin America? Likewise, what are the impacts of skills prices on migration in Latin America, and Mexico in particular? And, what is the importance of "brain drain" in terms of the relationship between migration and education? We find that despite the enormous inequality in the region, skills prices are not low. Furthermore, high expenditures on education combined with low skills prices do not necessarily result in brain drain. Other factors, such as perceptions of insecurity and corruption, have a stronger effect on the migration of Mexican professionals. Likewise, although high skills prices may lead to economic development, they may also increase social inequality, leading to greater brain drain. Therefore, the expansion of higher education is recommendable even if it reduces salaries and wage premiums in the short term.

The Changing Academic Profession (CAP) international survey was designed in part to consider the effects of globalization on the work context and activities of academics in 19 countries or regions around the world. This paper draws from a subset of these data to explore the extent to which academics are globally connected in their research and teaching, and the ways this connectedness relates to global migration. Across multiple measures, immigrant academics (i.e., academics working in countries where they were not born and did not receive their first degree) were more globally connected than national academics (i.e., those working in the countries of their birth and first degree). Global migration by academic staff is clearly a major contributor to the internationalization of higher education institutions, yet there was no evidence these contributions led to enhanced career progress or job satisfaction for immigrant academics relative to national academics. The international expertise and experience of immigrant academics may not be sufficiently recognized and valued by their institutions.

This essay addresses Katherine Richardson Bruna's paper: "Mexican Immigrant Transnational Social Capital and Class Transformation: Examining the Role of Peer Mediation in Insurgent Science", through five main points. First, I offer a comparison between the traditional analysis of classism in Latin America and Richardson Bruna's call for a class-first analysis in the North American social sciences where there has been a tendency to obviate the specific examination of class relations and class issues. Secondly, I discuss that a class-first analysis solely cannot suffice to depict the complex dimensions in the relations of schools and society. Thus, I suggest a continuum in the class-first analysis. Third, I argue that social constructions surrounding issues of language, ethnicity, and gender necessarily intersect with issues of class and that, in fact, those other constructions offer compatible epistemologies that aid in representing the complexity of social and institutional practices in the capitalist society. Richardson Bruna's analysis of Augusto's interactions with his teacher and peers in the science class provides a fourth point of discussion in this essay. As a final point in my response I discuss Richardson Bruna's idea of making accessible class-first analysis knowledge to educators and especially to science teachers.

Through narratives taken from life history interviews with an indigenous Mexican male immigrant in California, this paper examines the connection between masculinities and the learning of dominant languages associated with access to economic opportunities. In portraying the teller's engagements with work and education in both countries, these life history narratives index the way changing social contexts have caused him to emphasise different masculinities at different times in his life. Specifically, this paper explores the way a serious work injury led the teller to place new emphasis on learning English and computer skills in order to reconstruct a kind of "technical masculinity" that he had previously found little scope for in the United States.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study conducted in fifth and sixth grade classrooms in five public schools in Guadalajara, Mexico, in June of 2009. The goal of the study was to learn about current instructional and institutional practices in a region with high migratory rates to the United States, with the express purpose of understanding the type of school experiences Mexican-born English learners usually gain before entering the American school system. Findings include close teacher-student relationships, a strong respect for teachers, school-wide disciplinary chants and in-class routines in which all students participate, and the integration of Enciclomedia in the classroom.

Drawing from Brofenbrenner's multilevel, bioecological model of development, this paper presents a framework that charts environmental processes which generate or buffer acculturative stress and, therefore, mediate the impact of immigration on psychological well-being. Empirical research shows that Mexican immigrants, on the whole, fare better than U.S.-born groups in terms of mental health outcomes. These results are explained in the context of the presented theoretical model. Though further research is needed, preliminary evidence suggests that encouraging "enculturation", as opposed to "acculturation", has positive mental health repercussions for Mexican American children. Further research using the presented theoretical framework as well as policies and practices that incorporate and leverage cultural strengths of Mexican immigrant children should be pursued. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

Initially written in the form of an essay, this letter is written to my children from a place called Land. It unveils the entanglements coloniality creates in young, racialized, and gendered lives through the colonial logics structuring childhood, memory, and borders. From a diasporic perspective, Land emerges as "flesh" rooted in the "saberes," the knowledge of our mothers and grandmothers. Remembering and returning to the places we call home, in my case, US/Mexico border, help us grapple with trauma and also learn ways people respond to the violence. I illuminate the colonial wounds we bare and the knowledge we carry to suture and heal.

This paper discusses findings from focus groups with youth located in underprivileged surroundings in one large multicultural city in Canada and in a moderately large city in Mexico, examining their understandings and lived experiences of migration-related conflicts. Canadian participants framed these conflicts as a problem of racist attitudes towards immigrants in an otherwise welcoming city. Mexican youth understood emigration as a questionable individual dream to overcome precarious economic conditions, bringing about violence to those travelling and family fractures for those who stay. We identify tensions between these dominant narratives about mobility and conflict--usually also present in intended curriculum--and students' first-hand, every day experiences with migration in each setting. We point out to youths' contrasting imaginaries of citizenship--sense of agency and identity positions--with regards to migration in each setting, showing the limited opportunities they have to make sense of their lived (globalized) conflicts beyond their own localized cultural explanations. We argue that connecting the recognition of cultural differences in the world with the power imbalances, unequal positions, and historically structured global inequities revealed by issues such as migration, must become a crucial effort in citizenship education on global issues.

This comparative study examines the learning trajectories of two groups of Mexican novice language teachers, three locally raised and educated ones and three repatriates from the USA. The study makes use of a combination of retrospective life-history research and the analysis of academic documents to look at the interrelationship between teachers' identities and their degree of investment in academic and professional activities. The analysis revealed marked differences in the ways in which these two groups of teachers' identities have been developed. While the locally educated teachers have constructed strong and articulated identities as a result of a stable family context and smooth transitions in their lives, the development of their returnee counterparts' identities has been characterized by fragmentation due to the little, or lack of, stability in their home contexts as well as the complex and painful transitions in their lives. The paper discusses the impact that these differences have on participants' degrees of investment in educational and work-related opportunities available to them in their contexts. Implications for researchers, language teacher trainers and applied linguistics academic program administrators are provided.

This paper explores the ways in which Mexican immigrants experience, narrate, and describe stress and the extent to which it impacts their efforts at engaging in physical activity using a biocitizenship framework. Data were derived from a mixed-method study among Mexicans living in New York City recruited from a large Catholic church. The qualitative sample of 25 participated in quantitative and qualitative components of the study and as such we include some of these quantitative indicators as descriptors. Our main qualitative findings reveal that study participants experience stress and time constraint as factors that contribute to the waning of their physical and mental well-being. As such, time constraints for many of our participants were among the factors that contributed to high perceived levels of stress. They attributed this to their difficulty maintaining a physically active lifestyle due to factors like the fast-paced lifestyle in New York, working long hours, and not having enough time to exercise, though some important differences in narratives were noted across gender. Findings have implications for interventions aimed at improving the health of immigrants in general and Mexican immigrants in New York City specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Sarah Mazelis Paper of the Year Award, which recognizes authors whose articles in the journal "Health Promotion Practice" made contributions to the fields of health education and health promotion and reports that in 2014 the award was given for the article "Integrating Health Literacy and ESL: An Interdisciplinary Curriculum for Hispanic Immigrants" by Francisco Soto Mas, Erika Mein, Brenda Fuentes, Barry Thatcher, and Héctor Balcázar.

In this paper, I use critical discourse analysis to analyze a student's narrative about the arrest, incarceration, and deportation of her mother to Mexico. The student, Gisela, was a fifth grader in my classroom during the 2008/2009 school year, and I encouraged the students to collect family stories from their relatives. Gisela created this story, and she wrote and illustrated this with the help of her father, student peers, and me. I draw on Gloria Anzaldúa's constructs of nepantla and nepantlera, narrative analysis, and systemic functional linguistics to show how Gisela's construed this story to create a powerful and creative narrative that disrupted autonomous forms of literacy along with the excluding and damaging discourses circulating about immigrants in our community.

In this case study, I use an ethnographic-style approach to understand the funds of knowledge of immigrant families living in "colonias" on both sides of the US/Mexico border. I focus on how these "knowledges" and concomitant experiences impact the ways we perceive and treat immigrant students who have all too often been viewed through deficit lenses that relegate them to the lowest expectations and outcomes in the classroom. I find that Mexican and Mexican-American families hold unusually sophisticated and relevant "knowledges" to mitigate their everyday lives. In this paper, I will refer to citizens of Mexico, whether they reside in Mexico or have crossed to the United States legally or without documentation for purposes of work, as Mexican. People who have crossed the border and are living in the US as legal residents or have gained citizenship are referred to as Mexican-Americans. They live a hybrid identity that is varied and dynamic, an issue that adds to the complexity of the content and contexts of this study. These families know and use these "knowledges" on a daily basis, yet they are not recognized by teachers in the US as a starting point to affirm and support immigrant children. Instead, immigrant children are relegated to the non-gifted and lower track classes where science is taught from an abstract and non-contextual and therefore less engaged basis. The approach I outline here, based on insights from my case study, can greatly improve teachers' abilities to prepare their curricula for diversity in science education and science literacy as well as for broad expectations for student success.

Current figurations of the "immigration problem" in the United States challenge our understanding of the rhetoricity of contemporary bordering practices. The public discourse of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps serves to chart the alienization of undocumented migrants and the enactment of alien abjection on the U.S.-Mexico border. Alienization promises an antidote to majoritarian anxieties regarding national disunity in the form of a shoring-up of cultural boundaries that border-crossing subjects render troublesome. Ultimately, the fence logic engendered by groups such as the Minutemen reveals how struggles over the boundaries of citizenship both enable and limit an affect-charged civic imaginary. (Contains 81 notes.)

This paper presents findings from an innovative school-based youth radio project for Mexican immigrant students. We draw on ethnographic and discourse data collected over an academic year, including multiple data representations from video and audio recordings, radio production artefacts, interviews, and still images. We begin our discussion with a close analysis of a rich moment in the project brought-on by the collision of divergent and contested models of literacy. We then follow the thematic development of literacy across chains of events and contexts to understand how literacy was constructed and enacted in relation to language, identity, empowerment and voice. The findings suggest that although school-community linked collaborations can give rise to contradictions and disturbance, such collaborations have the potential to become productive learning contexts for disaffected and underachieving students and their teachers. (Contains 2 tables, 1 figure, and 1 note.)

Schools face increasing diversity within their student population while teachers remain predominately White, female, and middle class. These contrasting demographics demand that teacher preparation programs produce culturally competent teachers who are able to work effectively with students and families from backgrounds different from their own. For teacher candidates who may lack a critical view of society, exposure to the experiences of diverse families and discussions related to the impact of such experiences on parent involvement and school personnel interaction is essential. This paper describes experiences of discrimination faced by Latina single mothers of children with a disability. A discussion of results and implications for teacher educators with suggestions for use of findings with teacher candidates is included. (Contains 2 tables and 2 footnotes.)

Utilizing data on approximately 16,000 children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-Kindergarten Cohort and a rich set of mediating factors on 16 immigrant groups, this paper examined the associations between children's immigrant generation status and their academic performance. The changes in academic achievements during kindergarten and first-grade were also examined to explore the varying learning paces exhibited by children from different countries of origin. Results indicate that, compared to third and later generation non-Hispanic white children, children of Latin American regions tended to have lower reading and math scores, while children of Asian regions tended to have higher reading and math scores. In addition, although children of immigrants may have either higher (e.g., children from East Asia) or lower scores (e.g., children from Mexico) by first-grade compared to third and later generation non-Hispanic white children, the former generally learned skills at faster paces, thus widening (e.g., for children from East Asia) or narrowing (e.g., for children from Mexico) academic achievement gaps. Child and family characteristics accounted for a large share of the differences in children's academic achievements. Home, school, and neighborhood environments may also matter but to a lesser extent. Research implications are discussed. (Contains 8 tables and 8 footnotes.)

Children of Mexican immigrant families represent the largest segment of immigrant children in the U.S. Achievement gaps of Mexican immigrant children compared to their peers present at the beginning of kindergarten persist throughout the K-12 years. These achievement differences are partly influenced by the level cultural and linguistic sensitivity in the school. This paper explores the cultural context of schooling at a public primary school in Mexico via field observations and interviews with students, teachers, school administrators, and parents. Findings are couched in the context of improving practices and policies in U.S. schools that serve Mexican immigrant children. (Contains 2 tables and 7 figures.)

U.S. support for border enforcement in Mexico has been ongoing for decades, but in 2014, after the arrival of unprecedented numbers of Central American minors and families to the U.S., even greater pressure was placed on Mexico to seal its border with Guatemala. This paper explores the resulting tensions between Mexican border enforcement policies outlined under Programa Frontera Sur, intended to tighten security and surveillance in the south of the country, and Mexico's 2011 Migration Law, intended to facilitate the protection of migrants' rights. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how the borders of the Mexican state are maintained through the (il)legibility of administrative rules and procedures in the context of conflicting immigration agendas. Specifically, this paper explores the precarious paths to legal protection via regularización de estancia por razones humanitarias, a temporary legal status granted to victims of grave crimes. It traces applicants' circuitous trajectories through bureaucratic processes and evolving enforcement landscapes, noting the costs and contingencies involved in making claims 'legitimate' and legible in the eyes of the state. This paper also brings attention to the positioning of migrant shelters at the margins of state inclusion, where formal and informal mobilities often intersect. As a feminist geopolitical study of state bordering practices, this research is useful in understanding lived impacts and responses to more recent strategies of administrative border enforcement, including the MPP and Title 42 programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) initiated its "Democratizing Data" project in 2013 to make detailed demographic information widely available on the US undocumented, eligible to naturalize, and other non-citizen populations. The paper begins by outlining top-line findings and themes from the more than 30 CMS studies under this project. It then examines and refutes four persistent misconceptions that have inhibited public understanding and needed policy change: (1) migrants never leave the United States; (2) most undocumented migrants arrive by illegally crossing the US-Mexico border; (3) each Border Patrol apprehension translates into a new undocumented resident; and (4) immigrants are less skilled than US-born workers. The paper then offers new analyses in support of select policy recommendations drawn from a decade of democratizing data. It concludes with a short reflection and a case study on the failure of data, evidence-based policy ideas, and national ideals to translate into necessary reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]