Current Projects

While 7 percent of U.S. children live with an unauthorized immigrant parent, researchers and practitioners alike have little insight into how these children and their families process the phenomenon of “illegality.” Existing research highlights the role of external messages in the family’s communication practices, like school and media messages. The literature on ethnic-racial socialization suggests caregiver approaches to communicating with their children about how to cope with such messages can play an inhibiting or protective role in youths’ development. However, for mixed-status immigrant family members, processes of belonging across all contexts and relationships in their lives are embedded in the constantly-changing sociopolitical construct of “illegality”. For parents, navigating immigration policy may be cognitively challenging and further complicated by the responsibility to protect and educate their children.

The focus of this NSF-funded study is to unpack family-level socialization processes, referred to as immigration socialization, to generate foundation knowledge that helps us understand how anti-immigrant rhetoric shapes children’s learning through caregiver/parent mechanisms. We need a more nuanced understanding of how mixed-status immigrant families, living under the threat of immigration policy and striving to survive day-to-day, engage in socialization in the face of immigration threat.