School Performance of Children of Indian and Cape Verdean Immigrants in Basic Schooling in Portugal

Immigration and the Ambivalence of the School: Between Inclusion and Exclusion of Migrant Youth

“…Recent studies have repeatedly stressed that young immigrants in Portugal have worse school performance than the nationals (e.g., Pires, 2009; Seabra, 2012), a situation that has also been reported in other European countries (e.g., Govaris & Kaldi, 2012; Hackett, 2012) and also outside Europe (e.g., Darmody, Byrne, & McGinnity, 2014; Nicolas, DeSilva, & Rabenstein, 2009; Zufiaurre, 2006). Despite this identification of cultural and ethnic specificity as a main cause for the academic underperformance of young immigrants, several studies have emphasized that the families’ social condition has a significant impact on the results of immigrant pupils (e.g., Darmody, Smyth, Byrne, & McGinnity, 2012; Seabra, 2012), namely the socioeconomic status (Nicolas et al, 2009). This fact points to the classical idea in “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction” (Bourdieu, 1977): the denunciation that equal opportunities are an illusion given that the school, instead of ameliorating the social and cultural conditions of young immigrants, reproduces conditions of inequality (cf.…”