Children from immigrant families: introduction to the special section.

Immigration is certainly one of the great issues of the day. In many developed countries across the world, immigrant families account for almost all population growth, and often heated debates about immigration and assimilation dominate political discourse and public discussion (Levels, Dronkers, & Kraaykamp, 2008; Olneck, 2009). Not surprisingly, research on immigration has become a major activity among social and behavioral scientists from a diverse array of disciplines. Their work is shedding light on the complex ways in which immigration intersects with race-ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious stratification to transform cultures and remake societies. This macro-level trend is of the utmost relevance to developmentalists. After all, immigration has become a major force organizing the developmental ecologies of children and youth, and the health, achievement, and general well-being of immigrant children themselves have become major targets of policy intervention (Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 2001; Tienda, 2009). What we are learning from this emerging body of developmental research on immigrant children points to new insights about a major segment of the population but, more broadly, suggests many new qualifications of old ideas in developmental science (Crosnoe & Lopez-Turley, 2011). For the purposes of this special section of Child Development, we defined an immigrant family in accordance with contemporary practice in the social sciences. An immigrant family is one in which at least one of the parents was born outside of the country of residence. Of course, this allows for further variations among immigrant families themselves according to whether one or both of the parents are foreign born, whether the child was born in the host country, and the ages at which immigration occurred for both the parents and their children. These variations represent critical questions in the study of children from immigrant families and are explored by many of the articles in this volume.