How can schools protect immigrant students from depressive symptoms?

Children and youth from immigrant families may face several obstacles in their developmental paths compared to their native counterparts. For example, the
demands of acculturation and identity development in intercultural contexts (home vs. host nation), discrimination and lack of sense of belonging, and learning via second language may pose challenges (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2018). There is a growing literature demonstrating that immigrant origin children and youth demonstrate a higher prevalence in mental health i.e., depressive, and generalized anxiety symptoms (Abdulhamed et al., 2022). This may risk their academic achievement (Owend et al., 2012), as there is evidence that depression reduces cognitive functions among children and youth (Wagner et al., 2015). However, less is known about school related factors, which protect immigrant children and youth from mental health symptoms, and what kind of a role could the school environment and school related factors play in diminishing the risk of depressive symptoms. This question is in the focus of the present study. We assessed whole population samples of children attending 4th and 5th grades of lower-level comprehensive school from three time points (2017, 2019 and 2021) in Finland. Children from immigrant families in (N = 14 930) were grouped to first- and second-generation migrant groups, and to forced (i.e., refugee background) and voluntary (i.e., migration due to employment) migrant groups. We also assessed estimate differences of immigrant origin youth to host national youth by means of moderation analyses (N = 259 382).