Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, co-directors of the Harvard Immigration Project, have spent two decades researching and studying immigration. The result of their work and experiences, this book addresses how immigrant children fare in America. One fifth of all school-age children in America are children of immigrants (in New York City, the rate is 48 percent), and they speak over 100 languages. What thought has American society given to the special needs of these students? Have we done anything to accommodate them? What have they experienced?

Mass imprisonment is one of the most important policy changes the United States has seen in the past forty years. In 2011, 1.6 million people, or 1 in 200 adults, in the U.S. were in prison (Guerino, Harrison, and Sabol 2011). Understanding the factors that affect neighborhood imprisonment rates is particularly important for improving the quality of life in disadvantaged communities. This paper examines the impact of one such factor, racial residential segregation, on imprisonment rates at the neighborhood level.

The Great Recession and the slow recovery since have been the longest economic slump in seventy years. It affected vulnerable populations more than others. In this brief, our aim is to put this disaster into historical context, looking first at the overall state of the labor market and then at how the economic harm has been distributed across the population by gender, level of education, and race and ethnicity.

Four years after the beginning of the Great Recession, the labor market remains historically weak. Many observers have concluded that "structural" impediments to recovery bear some of the blame. This paper reviews such structural explanations. I find that there is little evidence supporting these hypotheses, and that the bulk of the evidence is more consistent with the hypothesis that continued poor performance is primarily attributable to shortfalls in the aggregate demand for labor.

As the economic downturn wears on, the debate about U.S. spending on the safety net has become increasingly rancorous. Indeed, former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich famously referred to Barack Obama as "the food stamp president" in the early-2012 campaign trail. The purpose of this recession brief is to step back from the rancor and describe in straightforward fashion how spending on the safety net has responded to the Great Recession.