ImmigrantChildren.ca Archive

Category: Resources

  • immigrantchildren.ca is on twitter

    immigrantchildren.ca is on twitter. Follow me as I tweet on issues related to immigration, diversity, inclusion, integration, interculturalism and multiculturalism, and citizenship. A little broader than the strict focus here on children (birth to age eight) and their families.

  • Family immigration

    US based Immigration Policy Center, the research and policy arm of the American Immigration Council, has released a paper today on family immigration. Family Immigration: Repairing Our Broken Immigration System addresses the challenges, gaps and lays out what they see as “the key principles for family immigration within the context of  comprehensive immigration reform”. Some useful information for Canada to also consider. An excerpt from the introduction follows.
    Principles for reform of the family immigration system:

    • Family unification must remain a fundamental pillar of U.S. immigration policy. Proposals that sacrifice family immigration for the sake of employment-based immigration create an unfair and erroneous dichotomy. Family immigrants work and contribute to the U.S. in many ways. Both the family-based and employment-based immigration systems can be fixed without sacrificing one for the other.
    • The current backlog of family-based immigrants must be cleared, and law-abiding families must be reunited in a humane and reasonable timeline. There are several possible options to clear the backlogs and promote family unification, including moving spouses and minor children into the “immediate relatives” category.
    • The spouses and minor children of legalized immigrants must be issued visas at the time of the primary applicant’s legalization. Including spouses and children in the legalization provisions will help to prevent future backlogs.
    • Unused and unclaimed family-based visas must be recaptured, and a mechanism to ensure that future unused visas are not wasted must be created. Congress authorizes a set number of visas to be made available annually. When these visas go unused, the problems with backlogs only worsen. Recapturing visas would not overstep the numerical limits set by Congress, but it would alleviate some of the consequences of visa oversubscription.
    • The numerical caps on family-based immigration must be revisited and brought in line with current realities. The last adjustments to the numerical caps were made in 1990.  These numbers must be reconsidered and brought up to 21st century requirements.
    • USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) must receive the resources necessary to resolve backlogged family immigration cases and ensure that processing backlogs do not reoccur. True reform means eliminating the circumstances that led to the problems in the first place.

  • Interviewing immigrant and refugee children

    BRYCS – the US-based group – Bridging Refugee Youth and Children’s Services has released a guide on best practices in interviewing newly-arrived immigrant or refugee children. The introduction to this guide says that in the US, agencies that receive any federal funding must provide “services of an equal quality to people who have Limited English Proficiency” (LEP) and “To provide equal quality services, it is vital to allow LEP children and families to use the language that they are most comfortable speaking”, meaning that federally funded agencies must provide bilingual interviewers or foreign language interpreters.
    Does anyone know if Canada has any similar requirement? Should we?

  • Holiday gifts for newcomers

    1. Subscription to a daily mainstream national newspaper. I recommend The Globe and Mail and/or the National Post. Both often feature items related to immigration and both are well written and present clear points of view on issues of immigration and settlement.
    2. Subscription to a local newspaper. Depending on where the newcomer settles, the local paper offers, often painfully accurately, the local environment: it is important for the newcomer to know where they have landed, how they are welcomed (or not) and avenues for settling, integrating, opportunities for employment and recreation, etc in their chosen community.
    3. “100 Photos that Changed Canada” is a beautiful ‘coffee-table’ book that illustrates and documents the journey and history of immigration to Canada. Both heartening and heart-breaking stories and histories are included, everything from the “Girl from Canada”, a living exhibit of a young woman on a bicycle outfitted with all the bells and whistles that ostensibly depicted life in Canada as an incentive to British, to the injustice of the Komagata Maru incident, documenting the history of the “one continuous voyage” policy in immigration policy, to the repatriation of Japanese Canadians after internment during WWII, to Canada’s disgrace in refusing Jewish children’s emigration, 100 Photos is an illustrated history of Canada.
    4. Rudyard Griffith’s Who We Are: The Citizen’s Manifesto is a current examination of the state of the nation and the place of the newcomer in it.
    5. Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is a beautiful, timeless and ageless picture book that illustrates beautifully the immigrant experience. Children and adults alike will marvel at the empathic depictions of what it is like to land on new shores. Readers will find comfort in this volume, which lovingly and accurately depicts the typical newcomer journey: leaving family, reconciling, being a stranger in a strange land.
    6. Library cards to the local public and local university libraries. Many Canadian university libraries offer a “research reader” or “community member” card for non-students. Local public libraries have agreements with Citizenship and Immigration Canada and offer Library Settlement Service programs, a support to newcomers.
    This list is reading-heavy: What are your suggestions for other/additional best gifts for newcomers?

  • Defining cultural competence in early learning settings

    It is increasingly being recognized that practitioners and evaluators using Quality Rating Improvement Services (QRIS) in early child development settings, must address the growing diversity of the families and children served in these settings.
    The US-based National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) has created the Quality Benchmark for Cultural Competence Project (QBCCP) in order to develop a tool to assess the level of competence in programs participating in a QRIS. Driving the process was the fundamental belief that “for the optimal development and learning of all children, educators must accept the legitimacy of children’s home langauge, respect … the home culture, and promote and encourage the active involvement and support of all families, including the extended and nontraditional family units” (NAEYC 1995, 2).
    Eight concepts of cultural competenece:

    1. Acknowledge that children are nested in families and communities with unique strengths. Recognize and mitigate the tension between the early childhood profession’s perceptions of the child as the center of the work versus the family as the center of the work.
    2. Build on and identify the strengths and shared goals between the profession and families and recognize commonalities in order to meet these goals.
    3. Understand and authentically incorporate the traditions and history of the program participants and their impacts on child­ rearing practices.
    4. Actively support each child’s development within the family as complex and culturally­ driven ongoing experiences.
    5. Recognize and demonstrate awareness that individuals’ and institutions’ practices are embedded in culture.
    6. Ensure that decisions and policies regarding all aspects of a program embrace and respect participants’ language, values, attitudes, beliefs and approaches to learning.
    7. Ensure that policies and practices build upon the home languages and dialects of the children, families and staff in programs and support the preservation of home languages.

    For more information, visit the NAEYC website.

  • forcedmigration.org podcasts

    Forced Migration Online has available for downloading a collection of audio podcasts. The latest addition is the Harrell-Bond Lecture by former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, entitled Beyond Blankets: In search of political deals and durable solutions for the displaced.
    The Forced Migration Online podcast series includes lectures and discussions between experts from academia, practitioners and policy-makers and displaced persons.

  • Ontario's McGuinty urged to 'do the right thing' for immigrant children

    There have been a number of initiatives in the last ten years (and previously) to  address the patchwork of services and supports for families with young children in Ontario.
    In the Harris/Eves government, the Ontario Early Years Centres were an attempt to respond to the Mustard/McCain report, The Early Years Study which called for an early child development and parenting model of service, to serve as Tier 1 entry to the formal school system. (See Ontario Early Years: A Very Brief History, at the Health Nexus Sante blog).
    The Best Start initiative was launched by the next government, Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals, and saw communities collaborating in Best Start Networks, working to bring services and supports together in ‘hubs’ for children from birth to age six.
    This summer, The Premier’s early learning advisor, Dr Charles Pascal was asked to look at how to best prepare young children to succeed in school and released With Our Best Future in Mind. Pascals’ report calls for many of the same options of previous investigations but with clear – and implementable – steps.
    For immigrant children and families, the system proposed by Pascal are especially important. Pascal envisions a system of child- and family-centred schools, with access to information, resources, supports and services for parents and caregivers and full-day kindergarten and early learning and child care for children. Pascal’s system builds upon the work – and success of both the Ontario Early Years Centres and the Best Start Networks.
    As the province with the largest number of immigrant families with young children, Premier McGuinty would serve immigrant families very well in adopting the plan. I cannot think of a better way to welcome newcomer children and families to their new communities than by having a school act as the central point of entry into the myriad of social, health and educational services. Such community-based school centres (staffed by kindergarten teachers and Early Childhood Educators and other family support workers) will have expertise to assist the integration of newcomer families with young children into their communities.
    For parents with existing resources (time, funds, language skills and peer support and/or extended family members to help), it is difficult enough to navigate the system. Imagine not having the language, the networks, or knowing where to go to get this kind of information. That is the reality for immigrant families.  The school – an institution universally recognized as the centre of a community – is the best place to act as a central (and a multiple-) point of entry to the world of health, educational and support services for immigrant families with young children.
    {see June 16/09 post for more on how the Pascal plan addresses early child diversity}

  • Online course for settlement workers who work with young immigrant children and their newcomer families

    The Canadian Mothercraft College is offereing an online (or in-person) course for settlement workers who work with young immigrant children and their families. With funding from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the Mothercraft program,  Caring for Canada’s Children offers 3 sessions:

    Session 1
    Healthy Child Development and Family Functioning

    1. Infant and Child Development
    2. The Establishment of Security and Stability
    3. The Importance of the Childhood Years
    4. Adaptations to Parenting and Healthy Family Functioning

    Session 2
    Understanding the Issues for Newcomer Families

    1. Impact of Cultural and Geographic Dislocation
    2. Impact of Parental Trauma on the Parent-Child Relationship
    3. Impact of exposure to War or Natural Disasters
    4. Impact of Exposure to Community Violence

    Session 3
    Identification and How to Help

    1. Red Flags for Identification by Settlement Workers
    2. How to Help; Talking to Parents About Concerns
    3. How to Help; Talking to Parents About Concerns
    4. How to Help; Community Resources

    See the Mothercraft website for more details.

  • Stateless children

    Refugees International presents Futures Denied: Statelessness among infants, children and youth. According to tthe childtrafficking.com listserv, some 11-12 million children, “though born and raised in their parents country of habitual residence” are stateless or without effective nationality.
    Stateless was a concern raised when new citizenship policy, impacting first generation of international adoptees, was introduced by the federal government in the Spring of 2009. The new regulations offered an option to grant immediate Canadian citizenship to adopted children, but put limits or conditions on any children they might have outside of Canada. The rationale for the policy change was to provide an additional option for adoptive parents who were pursuing citizenship status for adopted children through the naturalization process. For more info, including to external links, see the posts at immigrantchildren.ca and chidinterrupted.ca.

  • Importance of retaining "home language" of children

    From the Toronto District School Board, “Research shows that children who have a strong foundation in their home language acheive greater success at school.  Click to watch a film that will suggest different activities that parents, guardians, and caregivers can enjoy together wtih children to encourage development of the home language and ultimately greater success at school”.
    Visit mylanguage.ca for many useful resources and information on this important issue.