The Health and Well-Being of Children in Immigrant Families

growing segment of the U.S. population under age 18 (Van Hook and Fix 2000). One in five children in the United States is the child of an immigrant, evidence of the demographic impact of recent rapid immigration. In addition, one in four lowincome children is an immigrant’s child (Fix, Zimmermann, and Passel 2001). But despite their demographic and policy significance, children of immigrants and their well-being are rarely studied on a national scale. In this brief, we present a number of key indicators—both positive and negative—of child well-being. The measures fall within three areas: (1) family environment, (2) physical and emotional health, and (3) access to needed services. To gauge well-being, we compare children in immigrant families with those in native-born families. We define “children of immigrants” as those with one or more foreign-born parents, regardless of whether the child was born abroad or in the United States. “Children of natives” are defined as those with no parent born outside the United States. Because income affects wellbeing, we often compare children of immigrants who are low-income (i.e., in families with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level [FPL]) with their native counterparts. And in some cases we compare foreign-born children with U.S.-born children of immigrants. Because U.S.-born children of immigrants are citizens, they have broader access to benefits than the foreign-born. Our findings are based on the 1999 National Survey of America’s Families (NSAF), a nationally representative survey of households with persons under age 65 that includes data on 11 million children of immigrants. The NSAF makes this analysis possible because it is one of the few national surveys with a large number of immigrant families that include broad, detailed measures of child and family well-being. The results, then, represent some of the first national estimates comparing children in immigrant families with those in native families on these measures of well-being. We combine both native and foreignborn children in immigrant families for several reasons. In the first place, our research has found that policies such as the 1996 welfare reform law that disadvantage noncitizen adults are felt by both foreignborn and U.S.-born children in immigrant families (Fix, Zimmermann, and Passel 2001). Moreover, most children in immigrant families (78 percent) are citizens (Capps 2001). In addition, child success in immigrant families is heavily influenced by the acculturation rates and legal status of immigrant parents (Coll and Magnuson 1997). Hence policies (such as welfare reform) that may affect the pace of immigrant parents’ integration will be felt by native and foreign-born children alike. Congress is currently deliberating the reauthorization of the 1996 welfare reform law, which severely restricted noncitizens’ access to a wide range of federal public benefits. Despite significant restorations in 1997 and 2002, most legal immigrants admitted to the United States after 1996 are ineligible for welfare, public health insurThe Health and Well-Being of Children in Immigrant Families