American Immigrant Students

Words: 1979
Pages: 8

United States will continue to change within its rapid demographics as continuing levels immigrants and refugees arrive to this land to create a brand new life. Upon arriving in the United States, many of the immigrant students are either a foreign-born U.S. citizens, native-born children of immigrant parents, or undocumented immigrants will often face mild obstacles, mainly in public schools. Dealing with the culture shock and emotional stress associated with adjusting to a new culture and social environment, as students they must learn to communicate with everyone around them and find ways to adapt to a new culture and its expectations. According to Linda Silka a psychologist from the University of Massachusetts stated that the newcomers …show more content…
American society expects immigrants to fully integrate into the American culture in order for them to succeed; that expectation causes the American society to be limited socially, and economically.
Immigrant students were found to be concentrated in high poverty schools troubled by not appropriately trained teacher and instructional materials, and with generally low capacity to educate either immigrant or native-born children (Camarota). One of the reasons that may have caused this is that immigrants are struggling from not having the ability to speak and learn English young enough to be able to communicate with others. About 40% of foreign-born immigrants are limited English Proficiency students and the largest share of foreign-born immigrants is found in middle and high school (Szu-Yin). Often time’s immigrants and refugee children are not prepared for success at schools in the United States because they fall back on schooling not knowing the standards here in the states and they sometime can be
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Evidence have shown that immigrant teens suffered extraordinarily high school dropout rates, because upon arriving with a difficult approach at school and how difficult they find it to speak or comprehend instructions in English (Camarota). Schools are always impacted because new immigrant youth would come from a different country that has an educational system that they are not used to and sometime they would not have any type of learning experience at all depending where they came from. Many kids go to school not being accepted right away and they are being judged for their culture including their accents, appearance, and ideas. For example, immigrant student may be discriminated because of their looks, customs, or language and it is not necessary for him or her to prove where their ancestors came from, they would automatically be perceived to be a race that is stereotypical such as Chinese or Mexican when one could be from Thailand and the other is from Colombia. Children are very naïve and when they see something they are not familiar with, they stay away from that. So when immigrants speak in a funny way, they American kids stay away from that. Humans tend to naturally show fear and discomfort towards cultures that aren’t their own which can lead to social discrimination. There is also discrimination based on appearance. Lately there has been a controversy with allowing Muslims to enter the