Content area
Full Text
Abstract
This article examines the transition to adulthood among 1.5 -generation undocumented Latino young adults. For them, the transition to adulthood involves exiting the legally protected status of K to 12 students and entering into adult roles that require legal status as the basis for participation. This collision among contexts makes for a turbulent transition and has profound implications for identity formation, friendship patterns, aspirations and expectations, and social and economic mobility. Undocumented children move from protected to unprotected, from inclusion to exclusion, from de facto legal to illegal. In the process, they must learn to be illegal, a transformation that involves the almost complete retooling of daily routines, survival skills, aspirations, and social patterns. These findings have important implications for studies of the 1.5- and second-generations and the specific and complex ways in which legal status intervenes in their coming of age. The article draws on 150 interviews with undocumented 1.5-generation young adult Latinos in Southern California.
Keywords
immigrant incorporation, life course, unauthorized status, Latinos, illegality
During the past 25 years, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has grown substantially, from an estimated 2.5 million in 1987 to 11.1 million today (Passel 2006; Passel and Cohn 2010).1 Scholars contend that this demographic trend is the unintended consequence of policies designed to curb undocumented migration and tighten the U.S.-Mexico border (Nevins 2010), transforming once-circular migratory flows into permanent settlement (Cornelius and Lewis 2006; Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). Making multiple migratory trips back and forth became increasingly costly and dangerous throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, so more unauthorized migrants began creating permanent homes in the United States. And they brought their children with them. According to recent estimates, there are more than 2.1 million undocumented young people in the United States who have been here since childhood. Of these, more than a million are now adults (Batalova and McHugh 2010). Relatively little is known about this vulnerable population of young people, and their unique circumstances challenge assumptions about the incorporation patterns of the children of immigrants and their transitions to adolescence and adulthood.
Building on prior scholarship about immigrant incorporation and the life course, this article offers an up-close examination of the ways in which...