Children Abroad: Immigrant Children's Development in Worldwide Perspective

摘要

In recent decades, multidisciplinary interest in immigration and acculturation has grown rapidly, and the body of literature regarding cultural psychology has, accordingly, ballooned. This profusion of new research reflects worldwide trends in increasing internationalism and globalization, the result of a confluence of factors such as sociopolitical (in)stability and technological advances in international transportation, trade, and communication. With these changes has come a boom in migration; together, the aggregated migrant population (i.e., people who live outside the country of their birth or citizenship) would comprise the fifth most populous country in the world. Worldwide, approximately 214 million people are migrants [International Organization of Migration, n.d.], and, in the United States alone, the foreign-born population is nearly 40 million, over a third of whom immigrated after 2000 [Grioco et al., 2012]. It has been estimated that nearly one quarter of children in the USA under the age of 18 are either immigrants themselves or are the children of immigrants [Hernandez, Denton, & Macartney, 2008].