Trying to excel in the Golden State: anti-immigrant sentiment and immigrant educational achievement in California

ABSTRACT

Anti-immigrant hostility continues to rise throughout multicultural societies. Building on segmented assimilation theory, in this manuscript I examine whether anti-immigrant sentiment might decrease school performance of immigrant children using the case of California, the state with the largest population of immigrants in the United States. I find a negative association between an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment at the community level and academic performance of immigrant students. This finding has broad implications for our understanding of immigrant educational experiences. It is also especially relevant at a time when multicultural societies are struggling to incorporate immigrants successfully into their economic, social, and political spheres.

KEYWORDS:

• Education of immigrant children
• anti-immigrant sentiment
• academic performance
• immigrant incorporation
• schools and communities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Author's own estimation using the information publicly available on the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) website: https://www.fairus.org/legislation/reports-and-analysis/voting-reports-fair. FAIR does not yet provide the information for voting on anti-immigrant bills during the Trump or the Biden administrations.

2 More information about the organisation can be found here: http://proximityone.com/cd_employment.htm.

3 The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) is an excellent data archive for education researchers wishing to use state assessment data in their analyses, but it does not include information about the immigrant status of test takers.

4 More information about the programme can be found here: https://azmigranttrail.com/.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.