Transcript
RON HASKINS: I'd like to welcome you to today's session on children of immigrant families. The logic of the problem that we're dealing with here is straightforward enough, and I think it's pretty interesting for both people left and right of center.
It turns out that we have a lot of children who live in immigrant families in the United States, and a large majority of them are already citizens, even if their parents are not. And again, a large majority of them will stay here for the rest of their life.
So they are going to contribute greatly to the American economy for four or five decades, once they get to be 18 or 21, whatever the age might be. And in addition to that, they are going to disproportionately contribute to Social Security and Medicare in the years ahead.
So they are a really important ingredient to the American economy and to major sections of American social policy. And yet, as a group, these children are considerably behind native-born children in many measures of performance and achievement and, when they grow up, in employment.
So this is an interesting policy issue. Should we do something extra? How should we handle this problem? Should we ignore it, or should we have policy addressed specifically to it? And that's why we're assembled today, to answer that question.
Read the transcript of the introductory remarks, presentation, panel one and the Q&A session. (PDF— 110KB)
Read the transcript from panel two and the Q&A session. (PDF—102KB)