UC Irvine

The United States has undergone an unprecedented increase in interior immigration enforcement in the past two decades, an increase that may have adversely impacted the US-born children of undocumented immigrants. Current estimates suggest that more than six million US-born children (minors) live in households with at least one unauthorized parent—that number increases when accounting for young adults—and that these children are personally connected to the struggles of their parents. The pervasive fear of removal and the experiences of detention and deportation that some families endure may yield significant negative consequences for U.S.-citizen children in mixed-immigration-status families. This dissertation explores how punitive immigration policy and enforcement activity influence the upward mobility prospects for the second-generation. Combining 35 semi-structured interviews with over 150 hours of fieldwork I conducted with youth and members of mixed-status families, I examine how parental legal status vulnerability impacts the entire family, what it looks like on a daily basis, and how communities respond to the deportation regime. Through this analysis, I find that immigration policy influences U.S. citizens’ unique contextual experiences and disrupts the social mobility and integration processes of the second-generation and the Latino community writ large. The intellectual contribution of this dissertation is to understand how the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants manage and negotiate the legal and social paradox of being afforded legal protections by the same entities that have the power to deny their parents basic human rights, and to explain how immigration policy shapes this group’s consciousness, sense of belonging, and legal mobilization. Using a qualitative research design, this study provides insight into how immigration law functions as a mechanism through which social inequality is maintained and reproduced onto citizen members of mixed- status families.