Today, one-quarter of all children in the U.S. has at least one immigrant parent. Even though children of immigrants are more likely to be living in a two-parent family than are children of native-born parents, they are much more likely to be poor and to experience material hardship. Because children in single-parent families, particularly single-mother families, are much more likely to be poor than children in two-parent families, children living with an immigrant single-mother may be doubly at risk of experiencing social and economic disadvantage.

Research over the last several decades has increased our understanding of the role that nonresident fathers can play in potentially ameliorating some of these disadvantages, and of the barriers that many fathers, particularly low-income fathers, face in providing adequate financial support to their children and being involved in their lives. These barriers may be particularly acute among immigrant men, who are more likely to be constrained to low-wage and irregular work. Additionally, it is possible that many nonresident fathers in immigrant families are absent not because their relationships with mothers have ended, as is most common among native families, but because of deportation, immigration issues, or migration for work. However, very little is known about the circumstances or involvement of nonresident fathers in immigrant families.

Only one recent study has looked at this population. Nepomnyaschy & Donnelly, (forthcoming), using nationally representative data of children with living nonresident fathers from the Current Population Survey-Child Support Supplement (CPS-CSS), found that children of immigrant mothers (as compared to native mothers) receive less formal, informal, and in-kind child support from their nonresident fathers, but that much of these differences are explained by fathers’ residence outside of the U.S. Important differences were also found by mothers’ citizenship status, years in the US, and region of origin. While the CPS-CSS data are excellent for identifying a large sample of immigrants and for examining formal child support outcomes, these data contain little information about the fathers themselves, about parents’ relationships, and about other indicators of father involvement.

The current study will use five waves of data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (from children’s birth to age 9) to comprehensively examine and describe the circumstances and involvement of nonresident fathers among children born to immigrant parents. We will compare several domains of fathers’ involvement, including participation in activities with children, cooperative parenting with mothers, time spent with children, and provision of material support between native and foreign born families. We will examine differences by nonresident fathers’ nativity (which is not available in any other data source), mothers’ nativity, and both parents’ citizenship status. Further, we will examine the reasons why parents are not cohabiting, as reported by mothers and nonresident fathers, in order to understand whether the nature of fathers’ nonresident status is different between immigrant and native families.