Report: Nebraska’s immigrant kids live in poverty, face other barriers that threaten future

Report: Nebraska’s immigrant kids face barriers

OMAHA, Neb. — A significant number of immigrant children in Nebraska are growing up in poverty and face barriers to developing into productive adults, according to a report released Wednesday by a children’s advocacy group.

The annual Kids Count report on child well-being by Voices for Children in Nebraska focused for the first time on the challenges facing children in immigrant families. The report concluded that the unique needs of the fast-growing segment of the population must be addressed or the state could lose out in the long run.

In 2007, some 52,000 children — nearly 12 percent of all Nebraska’s kids — were born in another country or had at least one foreign-born parent. Some 85 percent of those children are U.S. citizens, the nonprofit group said in its report.

A year earlier, 61 percent belonged to low-income families. Advocates say children in low-income households face the greatest risk of receiving low-quality child care, having inadequate nutrition, being uninsured and growing up in an unsafe neighborhood. They are also the kids most likely to end up in the juvenile justice system.

Some 64 percent of immigrant children lived with parents who had difficulty speaking English in 2007, according to the report. Those parents often struggle to navigate the school system or access health care and other services for their children, meaning that their offspring could miss opportunities for improvement and better health.

It also means those children have to shoulder more responsibility, said Mark Mather with the Population Reference Bureau, who has studied the issue on a national scope.

“What we have here is a generation of translators,” he said. “These kids are kind of between two worlds.”

Children of illegal immigrants are even more vulnerable because their parents are too scared to access public services for their children for fear of being discovered and deported, the report found.

In its analysis of immigrant children in the state, the Voices for Children largely drew on 2006 and 2007 data — deemed the most recent and reliable data available on the topic — compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Washington D.C.-based Population Reference Bureau and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

The report criticized “increasingly exclusionary and restrictive” policy attempts and urged lawmakers to pursue legislation that integrates immigrants and offers equal treatment to all children in Nebraska.

Children who are deprived of access to community, opportunity, equality and justice are “less likely to benefit our state through their skills, family values and tax contributions, among other things,” the report found.

In fact, the economic well-being of all children in the state remains an issue as families continue to struggle under the weight of the recession, said Annemarie Bailey Fowler with Voices for Children.

“We believe that our communities and our state are stronger when all of Nebraska’s families are financially stable and able to participate fully in the work force and the economy,” she said.

The state’s child poverty rate was 13.4 percent in 2008, continuing its rise from 10 percent in 2000.

Among the report’s other findings:

— In 2007, 183 infants died in Nebraska. At 6.8 deaths per 1,000 births, that is the state’s highest infant-mortality rate since 2002.

— The rate of babies born with low birth weight, below 5.5 pounds, continued to rise in 2007. That year, more than 7 percent of newborns were of low birth weight, up from above 5 percent in 1990.

— Reports to state officials alleging child abuse or neglect in 2008 were at their lowest in the last four years. A state hot line received 24,073 such reports, with 3,260 of those substantiated. In 2005, it received 24,397 reports, with 3,324 of those substantiated.