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Each year, approximately 1,500 youth migrate alone and clandestinely from China to the United States. If apprehended and placed in removal proceedings, these individuals and their legal advocates often prioritize specific narratives of family and age to qualify for legal relief. Such narratives are not new, of course. Shaped and arguably demanded by the law and broader ideologies of race, childhood, and citizenship, in many ways these accounts reflect both the intent and the constraints of an earlier subset of migrants, the Chinese “paper sons” who purchased family stories and identity papers to circumvent the Chinese Exclusion Act. Yet, as this article demonstrates, a meaningful divergence exists—one chiefly dependent on contemporary migrants’ status as “children.” For Chinese youth designated Unaccompanied Alien Children, establishing the vulnerability worthy of protection largely relies on a complex tale of cultural obligation and coercive, exploitative parents. As a result, instead of selecting one family over another as a century ago, today a specific and considerably more damaging image of the migrant’s family is put forth. Moving between the “paper sons” at the start of the 20th century and those daughters and sons at the end, this article critically explores the role that relatedness, either fictitious or filtered, plays in establishing legal relief in the United States. It likewise examines the unsettling of valued ties that occurs when actual, intimate relationships are silenced or diminished in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a theoretical framework and an empirical example of the relationship between the civic stratification of immigrants in the United States, and their access to healthcare. We use the 2007 Pew Hispanic Center/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Hispanic Healthcare Survey, a nationally representative survey of U.S. Latinos (N = 2,783 foreign-born respondents) and find that immigrants who are not citizens or legal permanent residents are significantly more likely to be excluded from care in both the United States and across borders. Legal-status differences in cross-border care utilization persisted after controlling for health status, insurance coverage, and other potential demographic and socioeconomic predictors of care. Exclusion from care on both sides of the border was associated with reduced rates of receiving timely preventive services. Civic stratification, and political determinants broadly speaking, should be considered alongside social determinants of population health and health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research compares several national-origin groups in terms of how parents' entry, legalization and naturalization ( i.e., membership) statuses relate to their children's educational attainment. In the case of Asian groups, the members of which predominantly come to the United States as permanent legal migrants, we hypothesize (1) that father's and mother's statuses will be relatively homogenous and few in number and (2) that these will exert minimal net effects on second-generation attainment. For Mexicans, many of whom initially come as temporary unauthorized migrants, we hypothesize (1) that parental status combinations will be heterogeneous and greater in number and (2) that marginal membership statuses will exert negative net effects on education in the second generation. To assess these ideas, we analyze unique intergenerational data from Los Angeles on the young adult members of second-generation national-origin groups and their parents. The findings show that Asian immigrant groups almost universally exhibit similar father-mother migration statuses and high educational attainment among children. By contrast, Mexicans manifest more numerous discrepant father-mother combinations, with those in which the mother remains unauthorized carrying negative implications for children's schooling. The paper discusses the theoretical and policy implications of the delays in incorporation that result from Mexican Americans needing extra time and resources compared to the members of other groups to overcome their handicap of marginal membership status ( i.e., being more likely to enter and remain unauthorized). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a framework for estimating previous illegal experience among annual cohorts of new legal immigrants to the United States – using public-use administrative microdata alone, survey data alone, and the two jointly – and provides estimates for the FY 1996 cohort of new immigrants, based on both administrative and survey data. Our procedures enable assessment of type of illegal experience, including entry without inspection, visa overstay, and unauthorized employment. We compare our estimates of previous illegal experience to estimates that would be obtained using administrative data alone; examine the extent of previous illegal experience by country of birth, immigrant class of admission, religion, and geographic residence in the United States; and estimate multivariate models of the probability of having previous illegal experience. To further assess origins and destinations, we carry out two kinds of contrasts, comparing formerly illegal new legal immigrants both to fellow immigrants who do not have previous illegal experience and also to the broader unauthorized population, the latter using estimates developed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2002 ), Passel (2002 ), and Costanzo et al. (2002 ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]