New York state is home to one in 10 of the country's immigrants, a rapid infusion of culture that can make it difficult for state agencies to meet the needs of its new residents and their children.
More than 200 people from 40 agencies across the state hoped to create dialogue about how to care for these families and their children at “The Immigrant Child: Past, Present and Future,” a conference held Friday and Saturday at Cornell University.
“There are new groups that are here now — Why are they here? What are their particular strengths? What will some of their problems here be? It's the whole idea of globalization of the world,” said conference Director Joan Jacobs Brumberg. “Does the process make immigration more difficult, and if so, how can we make it easier?”
Planning for the conference began 18 months ago, largely through Brumberg and the Family Life Development Center in Cornell's College of Human Ecology, where she is a faculty fellow.
The office takes research and “disseminates the findings in an accessible way.”
Brumberg said they looked at who was “in the trenches” working with immigrant children and their families, and then looked at the best practices and the biggest challenges.
“We've been through this before as a nation, huge waves of immigration,” Brumberg said. “When we were planning the program, we asked, ‘What can we learn from that?'” she said.
The program opened with an overview of “The Immigrant Experience in New York State,” which offered anecdotes and statistics, including one for the Ithaca City School District that showed 526 foreign-born students from 81 countries were enrolled last year.
During a session about health care, titled “Health Care and Well-being: Promoting Access and Culturally Sensitive Practices,” Dr. Louise Bennet, director of the Westside Health Services at the Brown Square Refugee Resettlement Program in Rochester, offered suggestions for how to give better care to people who settle in the area.
She said her office has adopted a number of new initiatives, including keeping translators on staff and doing outreach programs, like organizing a trip to help immigrants learn how to switch lines on the bus system.
“Just putting yourself out there like that, that's letting them know that you're connected to the community and you want to help them,” she said.
Sirene Garcia attended the conference as an employee of Finger Lakes Health, where she said she helps migrant farm workers get dental care and insurance for their children.
“I was also raised as a child of an immigrant, and I want to find ways to make it easier for these children to get health care, but also go to colleges, and help families as their children go off to school,” Garcia said.
Other sessions included a panel with Cornell University students representing different ethnic communities in the state, the implication of bilingualism, policy and discussions with Cornell faculty.
The closing reception also marked the opening of “The Immigrant Child” photography exhibit by photojournalist Spencer Tulis, who photographed undocumented people in Upstate New York, in the Mann Art Gallery.
“We played to both hot issues in the field that people were asking about and also the strengths of Cornell faculty,” she said. “What's the difference ... between a Russian-Jewish immigrant in 1902, and a Laotian immigrant in 2002? We can try to answer that over a long period of time.”
