Intergenerational Mobility of the Mexican‐Origin Population in California and Texas Relative to a Changing Regional Mainstream

We combine two approaches to gauge the achievements of the Mexican‐origin second generation: one the intergenerational progress between immigrant parents and children, the other the gap between the second generation and non‐Latino whites. We measure advancement of the Mexican‐origin second generation using a suite of census‐derived outcomes applied to immigrant parents in 1980 and grown children in 2005, as observed in California and Texas. Patterns of second‐generation upward mobility are similar in the two states, with important differences across outcome indicators. Assessments are less favorable for men than women, especially in Texas. We compare Mexican‐Americans to a non‐Latino white reference group, as do most assimilation studies. However, we separate the reference group into those born in the same state as the second generation and those who have migrated in. We find that selective in‐migration of more highly‐educated whites has raised the bar on some, not all, measures of attainment. This poses a challenge to studies of assimilation that do not compare grown‐children to their fellow natives of a state. Our model of greater temporal and regional specificity has broad applicability to studies guided by all theories of immigrant assimilation, integration and advancement.     

Does Where I Live Affect Whether I Apply? The Contextual Determinants of Applying for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program provides temporary relief from deportation and legal work authorization for eligible undocumented youth in the United States. This study investigates the factors that help or hinder undocumented youth in applying for DACA. We focus on contexts of reception to understand the determinants of DACA applications, as studies of previous legalization programs indicate that the communities in which immigrants live help shape application decisions. Our analysis shows that more immigrant‐serving organizations in a state translate into more applications, that DACA implementation rates are not statistically significantly lower in states with hostile policy climates, and that socioeconomic factors are most significantly related to DACA applications. In identifying the collective factors that influence applying to DACA, we demonstrate that the structural opportunities and barriers present in receiving locales shape undocumented youths’ decisions to regularize their immigration status, which has significant implications for their resulting incorporation trajectories.     

Trapped in the Working Class? Prospects for the Intergenerational (Im)Mobility of Latino Youth

Opportunities for upward mobility have been declining in the United States in recent decades. Within this context, I examine the mobility trajectories of a contemporary cohort of 1.5‐, second‐, and third‐plus‐generation Latino youth. Drawing on survey data from California that accounts for the precarious legal status of many 1.5 generation immigrants, I find that Latino youths' patterns of postsecondary enrollment and employment do not differ by generation since migration. Additionally, I do not find evidence of racial/ethnic barriers to Latino youths' enrollment in less selective colleges and participation in the labor market. Yet, given the low socioeconomic origins of many Latino youth and their correspondingly low 4‐year college enrollment rates, only a small proportion will likely enjoy upward mobility through jobs that require a bachelor's degree. Overall, the cohort of Latino youth coming of age during the Great Recession is poised to experience working‐class stagnation. This group's future access to economic and political positions of power will likely be limited by their low enrollment rates in 4‐year colleges in general, but in selective postsecondary institutions in particular.     

The Past is Ever Present: Transnationalism Old and New – Italian and Mexican Immigrants in the US

The paper focuses on what is old and what is new in transnationalism by analyzing extraterritorial attempts of the Italian and Mexican governments. During the large southern/ eastern European immigration to the US from 1890 to the 1920s, Italian immigrants reached 24 percent of the immigrant wave. Mexican documented and undocumented immigrants from the 1980s until 2010s made up 30 percent of the immigrant wave almost a century later. Transnational immigrants live in a country in which they do not claim citizenship rights and claim citizenship rights in a country they do not live in. Therefore migration and immigrant policies challenge both sending and receiving states. Foreign governments are limited in the policies and practices that they can enforce. A comparison of state policies from Italy and Mexico challenges the fact that transnationalism is significantly different and new.     

Could “Acculturation” Effects Be Explained by Latent Health Disadvantages Among Mexican Immigrants?

This paper tests portions of a new theory of immigrant health by focusing exclusively on latent biomarkers of future health risks. Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III, 1988–1994 – we uncover the typically observed immigrant health advantage among recent immigrants that diminishes among long‐term immigrants. In addition, we observe worse health among U.S.‐born Mexican Americans relative to non‐Hispanic Whites. Finally, although our theory suggests that recent immigrants may have latent health risks due to disadvantaged childhood experiences, we do not find evidence in support of this theory.     

Documented,Undocumented, and Liminally Legal: Legal Status During the Transition to Adulthood for 1.5‐Generation Brazilian Immigrants

This article deconstructs the “illegal–legal” binary that characterizes much immigration scholarship. Using in‐depth interviews with 42 1.5‐generation Brazilian immigrants in young adulthood, I find that respondents discuss a distinct hierarchy with four categories of legal membership—undocumented, liminal legality, lawful permanent resident (LPR), and citizen—that affect their daily lives and incorporation. Liminally legal and LPR statuses in particular challenge this illegal–legal dichotomy. Liminal legality is an “in‐between” status in which immigrants possess social security numbers and work permits but have no guarantee of eventual citizenship. Without opportunities to regularize their status, both undocumented and liminally legal young adults face increased vulnerabilities to poverty and social exclusion. Liminally legal youth, however, are in better positions than their undocumented peers during early adulthood because of state‐delimited rights associated with their legal status.     

Becoming Overweight without Gaining a Pound: Weight Evaluations and the Social Integration of Mexicans in the United States

Mexican women gain weight with increasing duration in the United States. In the United States, body dissatisfaction tends to be associated with depression, disordered eating, and incongruent weight evaluations, particularly among white women and women of higher socioeconomic status. However, it remains unclear how being overweight and obesity are interpreted by Mexican women. Using comparable data of women aged 20–64 from both Mexico (the 2006 Encuesta Nacional de Salud y Nutricion; N = 17,012) and the United States (the 1999–2009 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys; N = 8,487), we compare weight status evaluations among Mexican nationals, Mexican immigrants, US‐born Mexicans, US‐born non‐Hispanic whites, and US‐born non‐Hispanic blacks. Logistic regression analyses, which control for demographic and socioeconomic variables and measured body mass index and adjust for the likelihood of migration for Mexican nationals, indicate that the tendency to self‐evaluate as overweight among Mexicans converges with levels among non‐Hispanic whites and diverges from blacks over time in the United States. Overall, the results suggest a US integration process in which Mexican‐American women's less critical self‐evaluations originate in Mexico but fade with time in the United States as they gradually adopt US white norms for thinner body sizes. These results are discussed in light of prior research about social comparison and negative health assimilation.     

Pathways to El Norte: origins, destinations, and characteristics of Mexican migrants to the United States

The geography Mexican migration to the U.S. has experienced deep transformations in both its origin composition and the destinations chosen by migrants. To date, however, we know little about how shifting migrant origins and destinations may be linked to each another geographically and, ultimately, structurally as relatively similar brands of economic restructuring have been posited to drive the shifts in origins and destinations. In this paper, we describe how old and new migrant networks have combined to fuel the well-documented geographic expansion of Mexican migration. We use data from the 2006 Mexican National Survey of Population Dynamics, a nationally representative survey that for the first time collected information on U.S. state of destination for all household members who had been to the U.S. during the 5 years prior to the survey. We find that the growth in immigration to southern and eastern states is disproportionately fueled by undocumented migration from non-traditional origin regions located in Central and Southeastern Mexico and from rural areas in particular. We argue that economic restructuring in the U.S. and Mexico had profound consequences not only for the magnitude but also for the geography of Mexican migration, opening up new region-to-region flows.     

Increasing College Access and Retention Rates of Youth in Foster Care: An Analysis of the Impact of 22 State Tuition Waiver Programs

Youth in foster care face educational disparities in terms of college access, retention, and graduation. To address this, 22 states have implemented tuition waiver programs targeting current and former foster youth. A comparative analysis was conducted of all 22 programs implemented since 2014. Similarities include student eligibility based on youth’s age upon foster care entry, university admission and time in care requirements. Differences include type of expenses covered, time limits on use, program oversight, and funding availability. No differences were found based on political party control, gubernatorial power, and state population composition. Recommendations for policy and practice reform are offered.     

When Do Papers Matter? An Institutional Analysis of Undocumented Life in the United States

This article assesses how two key institutions differentially shape immigrants’ relationship to their rights in American society. We draw on over 200 in‐depth interviews to argue that there is a stark difference between how schools encourage undocumented youth to view themselves as equal members of US society and how undocumented workers are marginalized in the workplace. We find that even as schools track and stratify students, they also foster a culture of meritocracy between documented and undocumented youth. Schools ultimately render immigration status irrelevant as undocumented youth learn to navigate the primary institution of this stage of their lives. Conversely, immigration status is central to the experience of undocumented workers, who develop a particular set of survival skills that help them live and work successfully in the United States without being detected while also erecting a barrier between themselves and any additional rights they may be afforded.     

Opposition to Pro‐Immigrant Public Policy: Symbolic Racism and Group Threat

This study examines the relationship between symbolic racism and native‐born citizens’ policy opinions toward legal and undocumented immigration. With data from the 1994 General Social Survey and the NPR/Kaiser Foundation/Kennedy School of Government 2004 Immigration Survey, the results from logit regression models indicate that symbolic racism significantly predicts opposition to legal immigration, immigrant access to federal aid, and standard costs for college, citizenship for U.S.‐born children, and work permits for undocumented immigrants. The effects are independent of group threat and other factors. Symbolic racism explained more variation in policy opinions toward government assistance, while group threat explained more variation toward immigration levels and citizenship status. Depending on the issue, native‐born citizens likely derive their immigration policy opinions from moral ideologies in addition to intergroup competition.     

Are Immigrant Youth Faring Better in U.S. Schools?1

In spite of the growing numbers and geographic dispersion of foreign‐born children, the school outcomes of foreign‐born teens improved during the 1990s. Analysis of Decennial Census data reveals that fewer immigrant youth dropped out of school and their English language proficiency improved. Some of the improvement is due to compositional change in the foreign‐born teen population. Levels of parental education increased over the decade. Poverty among foreign‐born adolescents declined. Other youth background characteristics did not change in a favorable direction. Multivariate analysis reveals that there was a large decline in the likelihood of immigrant teens dropping out of school above and beyond the demographic changes over the decade. For example, the likelihood that a Mexican‐born teen educated in U.S. schools drops out of school declined by an estimated 43 percent over the 1990s. There is little evidence, however, that U.S. schools have improved in their English language instruction over the decade.     

“The Politics of the HealthCare Reform Debate: Public Support of Including Undocumented Immigrants and Their Children in Reform Efforts in the U.S.”

Although U.S. immigration and health care policies appear to be highly correlated, scholarship has yet to gauge the public's views toward providing undocumented immigrants with health coverage at the state level. We analyze support for including undocumented immigrants in health care reform in New Mexico. Utilizing an original public opinion survey of New Mexico adults, we find that individuals are more supportive of the state providing health care to the children of undocumented immigrant than to their parents. Multivariate logistic regression analyses suggest that factors such as liberal ideology and perceptions of commonalities with Latinos increase support levels. Despite a lack of support among a majority of respondents, the influence of perceived commonalities with immigrants suggests that reform advocates and political elites who mobilize along ethnic or human solidarity may be successful in creating conditions for the inclusion of undocumented immigrants in the public provision of health care at the state level.     

Experiencing ‘Illegality’ as a Family? Immigration Enforcement,Social Policies,and Discourses Targeting Mexican Mixed‐Status Families

Mexican mixed‐status families have been front and center in embroiled national debates about the place of undocumented immigrants and their citizen family members in this country. These families face unique obstacles, including possible family fragmentation caused by deportation, challenges to birthright citizenship, and they are often targeted by anti‐immigrant elected officials and political pundits that perpetuate a racialized discourse that casts even citizen children in these families as an abomination of US citizenship. Therefore, “illegality” may be a familial experience that can be endured by citizens and non‐citizens alike. Despite their unique vulnerabilities, researchers know very little about how mixed‐status families experience belonging in the country while managing possible tensions and inequalities shaped by immigration status. In this article, I review the research on punitive immigration enforcement and the scholarship on social policies and discourse targeting mixed‐status families. I conclude by reviewing new directions in sociological research and suggest avenues for research that may examine mixed‐status families' subjectivities, belonging, and negotiations of family relationships.     

Undocumented Migration to the United States and the Wages of Mexican Immigrants

Prior work has documented the remarkable decline in the real wages of Mexican immigrant workers in the U.S. over the past several decades. Although some of this trend might be attributable to the changing characteristics of the migrants themselves, we argue that a more important change was the circumstances under within Mexican immigrants competed for jobs in the U.S. After 1986 a growing share of Mexican immigrants was undocumented, discrimination against them was mandated by federal law, and enforcement efforts rose in intensity. We combined data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) with independent estimates of the percentage undocumented among Mexicans living in the U.S. to estimate a series of regression models to test this hypothesis. Controlling for individual characteristics helps to explain the decline in the wages of immigrants, but does not eliminate the trend, which is only explained fully when the percentage undocumented is added to the model. A key date is 1986, confirmed by a Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition analysis, when undocumented hiring was criminalized and undocumented migration revived after IRCA's legalization programs ended. As the percentage undocumented rose to new heights in the face of employer sanctions, immigrant wages fell below what we would have observed under the former policy regime. Using newly available data from Warren and Warren (2013), we examined how variation in the percentage undocumented by state and year from 1990 through 2009 affected immigrant wages and confirmed a strong negative effect, but the addition of an interaction term to the model indicated that the negative effect was confined largely to undocumented migrants, whose wage penalty rose from 8 to 18 percent as the percentage undocumented rose from its observed minimum to maximum.     

“No One Will Speak for Us”: Empowering Undocumented Immigrant Women Through Policy Advocacy

This article draws on data from an exploratory study involving an organized group of Mexican immigrant mothers engaged in community-based policy advocacy in the Pacific Northwest. Participants in the project lobbied state legislators on bills expanding the rights of undocumented immigrants—most notably, bills granting access to in-state tuition and driver’s licenses. In-depth interviews (n=12) reveal that through this process, participants came to see themselves as political subjects, despite their unauthorized legal status. Findings reveal that participants’ engagement in the policy process is centered on the idea of expressing needs and reflects their interest in improving individual, family, and community well-being. In this sense, their participation in politics flows from their roles as mothers and caregivers. By illuminating the experiences of a group—undocumented immigrant women—often overlooked in research on immigration policy and practice, this case offers a counter-narrative to the dominant portrayal of immigrant women and suggests ways to integrate community organizing and collective action into policy practice.     

Parenting Strain Among Mexican‐Origin Mothers: Differences by Parental Legal Status and Neighborhood

Despite increasing recognition of the critical importance of legal status for understanding the well‐being of immigrants and their families, there has been scant research on this topic. Using Wave 1 of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (2000–2002) and the 2000 decennial census, the authors investigated how parenting strain among Mexican‐origin mothers varies by legal status and neighborhood context. They found significant differences in parenting strain by nativity and legal status, with undocumented mothers reporting the lowest level. Results from multilevel models with cross‐level interactions reveal that the influence of neighborhood immigrant concentration differs by legal status. Percent foreign born in the neighborhood is associated with reduced parenting strain for documented Mexican‐origin mothers, whereas it is associated with heightened parenting strain for undocumented Mexican‐origin mothers. The findings provide empirical support for the need to recognize legal status distinctions in studies of the well‐being of immigrants and their families.     

Interests Aren’t Everything: An Exploration of Economic Explanations of Immigration Policy in a New Destination

Current debates around US immigration policy are playing out against a backdrop that has changed significantly in the past 20 years: immigrants have increasingly gravitated towards “new destinations”; a large and growing portion of immigrants are undocumented; and the federal vacuum in responding to the promise and problems of these new immigration trends has devolved policy to the states. As a result, we have seen innovation on the state level as policymakers seek to accommodate, welcome or resist immigration, with varying degrees of success. In this paper, we explore the case of Utah as a new immigration destination, seeking to understand its transformation from a state with very inclusive immigrant policies as late as 1999 to one currently adopting highly restrictive immigrant policies. To explain this trajectory, we test three prominent materialist theories of public policy: instrumentalism, structuralism and strategic-relational approaches. We draw on a decade’s worth of primary data – including data on state-level legislation, key economic indicators, public statements concerning immigration from the private business sector and the LDS Church, and the editorial content of the state’s two major newspapers regarding immigration – to examine the policy explanations that grow out of interest-based theories of the state. Whereas these theories provide robust explanations for a large and diverse array of public policies, we find that they fall short in explaining immigration policy. While conventional wisdom – and extensive scholarly research – suggests that economic interests drive policy, we find that the policies around immigrants challenge this economic reductionism, suggesting the need for more complex and ideational accounts of this important phenomenon.     

The Second Generation in Chile: Negotiating Identities,Rights, and Public Policy

This article presents the first study of children born in Chile to at least one migrant parent – the “second‐generation”. Based on a mixed methods and child‐centred approach, this article discusses institutional and experiential aspects of boundary and identity‐making in Chile regarding race and nationality. We first review quantitative data from the state regarding the second‐generation. Building on insights from comparative research on European states’ second‐generation integration policies, we suggest how gathering targeted Census data in Chile can inform the long‐term evaluation of state policies and programs for socio‐cultural inclusion in education and labour. We also present qualitative data from interviews with ten second‐generation children between ages eight to thirteen, born to parents from Peru and Ecuador. We attend to how they negotiate being perceived as “foreign” and/or “Chilean”. Their position in‐between the two categories is an important starting point for policies and discourse to expand notions of citizenship and belonging.     

Mobility of the Foreign‐Born Population in the United States, 1995–2000: The Role of Gateway States

This study uses the 2000 PUMS to examine mobility among the foreign‐born population and the role of the gateway states. Between 1995 and 2000, net domestic migration of the foreign‐born population to gateway states was negative. Yet the rate of out‐migration from gateway states was lower than that from non‐gateway states. Overall, the findings do not support the idea that gateway states are “losing their hold” on their foreign‐born population. Yet trends in international and domestic migration are increasing the foreign‐born population of non‐gateway states relative to gateway states, and reducing differences in their characteristics.