Dreams achieved and denied : Mexican intergenerational mobility

"In Dreams Achieved and Denied, Robert Courtney Smith follows Mexican immigrant children in New York City over time, collecting and analyzing extensive data on them and their families. Smith finds that U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City have experienced strong and even exceptional single generation mobility, made more impressive by the relatively low income and educational levels of their immigrant parents. Study participants and their families who all had legal status or were born in the United States became upwardly mobile through specific family and individual strategies, whose efficacy was increased by specific policies, practices, and conditions in New York City and New York State, which treat immigrants and their families as fellow New Yorkers-as "us," not "them." Smith also finds that the lives and mobility of "long-term undocumented Americans"- those who were brought to the United States as children but have been unable to legalize their status by adulthood-are blocked by their lack of legal status, even when engaging in the same strategies and practices as their upwardly mobile, U.S. citizen peers. Moreover, the help their U.S.-born peers received from many mobility-promoting New York City and New York State policies and practices was blocked by their lack of legal status. These divergent trajectories underline the reality that structural inclusion or exclusion of immigrants and their children-having or lacking legal status, respectively-has become an enduring feature of American life that affects intergenerational mobility and well-being."