The Undocumented Status of Mexican Immigrants and Their Children's Educational Attainment

• In Event: 30.055 - Undocumented Latina/o Students Navigating Higher Education

Abstract

Research has shown that undocumented status of parents lowers the educational attainment of the 1.5 and second generation. We extend these findings by examining the impact of parental status on teenage migrants and non-migrant children with data on approximately 29 thousand children in the Mexican Migration Project. We find that across all three groups of children, those with both parents documented attain more education than children with non-migrant parents and children with a father who migrated without the mother and without documents. The magnitude of these findings indicates that the inability of Mexican parents to migrate together with papers has devastating effects on the education of their children.

Authors

• Pat Rubio Goldsmith, Texas A&M University - College Station

• Nadia Flores