Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society

This book is an easy read. It helped me understand why people migrate and what they have to give up to get out of a very bad sitution in hope for a better future. Unfortunately for some of these immigrants, it also shows them the reality of America and the hardships that they will face, not the "America of dreams come true" that they expected. After reading this book as a teacher, my perspective for immigrants students and their struggles changed for the better. I have a better unstanding of how hard it is for them to learn in a school setting, what they had to give up to come here and how they continue to sacrifice and hope for a better future.

This book is incredibly helpful. The authors pull from an in-depth five year study to describe the lives of immigrant children who are trying to navigate their way through educational systems under difficult conditions. The writing is clear, the case studies are fascinating, and the policy recommendations are well-informed.

Suarez-Orozco et. al set out with a distinct goal for the Longitudinal Immigration Student Adaptation study, and they met this goal through a robust, mixed-methodologies study of recently arrived immigrant students in the United States. The mix of ethnographic, psychological, and educational metrics used are artfully described in the introduction, contextualizing the resultant data in meaningful ways. The outward purpose of Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation Study, and by extension Learning in a New Land, is to "gain a more complete understanding of the experience of immigration," (p.6). More specifically, the book seeks to illuminate the academic progress of recently arrived immigrant children over five years. The authors successfully achieve this, reporting the statistically significant and case study-based findings for how elements of immigrant children's lives interact to affect academic achievement. Overall, the book does an excellent job in presenting the results of a large-scale study in a relevant, nuanced form that is easily read by educational professionals of varying orientations. The policy implications are clearly advocated. However, the book's treatment of micro-issues, such as how educators can mitigate the effects gender has on educational achievement, lacks concrete suggestions. The field can pick up where the authors left off by discussing such issues that were raised in the research. I expect discussion of theory and possible interventions to follow this work. Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Irina Todorova, and the myriad field researchers deserve congratulations for a comprehensive, well-defined, rigorous study that is expertly summarized and discussed in Learning in a New Land.