Immigrant Children and Urban Schools: Evidence from NYC on Segregation and its Consequences

Publication Date: December 2001

Publisher: Furman Center for Real Estate

Author(s): Ingrid Gould Ellen; Ingrid Gould Ellen; Amy Ellen Schwartz

Research Area: Social conditions

Keywords: Immigrants; Schools; Segregation; Community and Economic Development

Type: Article

Abstract:

For several decades, social scientists have tracked the fiscal health of American central cities with some degree of concern. Suburbanization, spawned by technological innovations, consumer preferences, and at least to some extent by government policy, has selectively pulled affluent households out of urban jurisdictions. The leaders of these jurisdictions are left with the prospect of satisfying more concentrated demands for services with a dwindling tax base, realizing that further increasing the burden they place on residents will simply drive more of them away. In the process, cities have become concentrated centers of poverty, joblessness, crime, and other social pathologies.