Ricerc@Sapienza

Immigrant children are exposed to high levels of psychological distress, leading to an increased risk of mental and physical health problems. In the present study we investigated the impact of first and second generation immigrant children’s proficiency in the host country language on their psychological well-being one year later. The effects of gender, family SES, and classmates’ characteristics were also examined. A structural equation model was tested on 2334 immigrant children in a representative sample of 561 Italian primary schools taking measurement errors into account.

Education policies can work as integration policies for children with immigrant origins.
The literature on that matter is rich for settlement countries and for the European
countries that have a long tradition of immigration. The lack in the availability of data
in many EU has made dicult to carry out comparative analysis of the integration
process in those countries, particularly for the second-generation. This work lls this
gap, analysing the role of the socio-economic background in the educational outcome of

Immigration into the OECD countries has seen a sharp increase since the middle of the 1980s, even if not at a constant rate. Integration policies are a fundamental tool to help the newly arrived to integrate and assimilate with the native population.

In recent years, the prevalence of Unaccompanied Refugee Minors (URMs) in Europe has increased and not much research has been carried out in the area of quantifying the psychological problems facing such minors. The aim of this study is to assess whether URMs have more emotional and behavioral difficulties than Italian children and if there were any significant differences in psychological problems comparing URMs who come from different countries. The URM group, composed of 98 males aged 11–17 years, was compared with 103 Italian adolescents aged 12–17 years.