Review of the Circumstances among Children in Immigrant Families in Australia
Author(s): G. Redmond I. Katz
About 33 per cent of all children live in immigrant families in Australia. In many cases, children with English-speaking backgrounds who are born in Australia or who immigrated when they were young are already, for all practical purposes, Australian in both nationality and culture. The concepts of immigrant children and children of immigrants do not have the same connotations as they might in Europe or North America. Immigrant families with non-English-speaking backgrounds show average incomes that are lower than the average incomes among immigrant families with English-speaking backgrounds. Both with and without controls for a range of socioeconomic background variables, educational outcomes among 15-year-old children in immigrant families are not significantly different from the educational outcomes among native-born children. The research indicates that children in immigrant families in Australia, like their counterparts in other countries, face difficulties in accessing services, encounter discrimination and significant racism in the workplace and elsewhere and suffer the trauma associated with separation from social networks in their countries of origin. Despite these challenges, even the most disadvantaged immigrant groups do relatively well on some measures and generally tend to fare reasonably well, possibly because they have been able to find steady employment at a good level relatively quickly. This finding seems to indicate that immigration does not, by itself, necessarily produce poor outcomes.