By Selen Ozturk, American Community Media
Amid federal immigration crackdowns, migrant parents view education as a “currency of love,” writes Gabrielle Oliveira.
The Harvard professor, in her new book “Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life,” explores the hope for social mobility families find in education amid an emerging immigration control pipeline in schools that threatens children’s health—and the U.S. social fabric—in the long term.
“Migrant families are often one-dimensional characters in the media where you just hear about their coming for economic reasons, coming to escape something … but you rarely hear how education is a stabilizing force where the promise of your kid going to school, being in a classroom with a teacher, reading books, brings the sense of sacrifice being worth it,” said Oliveira, a Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and Brazil Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Describing “two parallel narratives” that intersect throughout her book, Oliveira said “For the parents’ success, they’re (thinking) ‘I need to be able to work and support my children,’ but for the children, what success looks like is going to school, staying in school and graduating, because social mobility is going to come from education.”
For these families, even amid crackdowns under the first Trump administration, “The American dream is very much alive,” she continued. “The sense of a land of opportunities, the promise of a meritocracy, that if you go to school and you work hard … is prevalent for folks, particularly from Latin American countries with less public schooling resources.”
Approximately 18 million children in the United States, or over one in four, have at least one immigrant parent, with most of these children being US-born citizens.
School district under-resourcing that the families in Oliveira’s book face under the first Trump administration are more pertinent than ever now under the second. The administration announced plans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and has proposed $12 billion in cuts to public education for fiscal year 2026.
The budget proposal includes $3.8 billion in cuts for many school district-operated social support and college access programs nationwide, particularly for English-learner and migrant students.
Her book holds that the biggest challenge facing school districts in supporting migrant families is staffing, especially in the case of language access.
“When you don’t have folks that are speakers of the children’s main language … communication can lead to very distant relationships where you push these families further away,” she explained, “at a time they’re already worried about taking their kids to school.”
Oliveira’s book encourages districts to create translator volunteer opportunities and cultural events like potlucks for parents to participate and share their culture in the classroom. “It builds trust between the kids… in this moment of invisibility where they’re afraid to call attention or assert their belonging.”
