Dreams Achieved and Denied
U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City have achieved perhaps the biggest single jump in mobility in American immigration history. In 2020, 42 percent of second-generation U.S.-born Mexican men and 49 percent of U.S.-born Mexican women in the city had graduated from college–versus a 13-14-percent second-generation college graduation rate for most other places in recent decades. How did this happen? In Dreams Achieved and Denied, sociologist Robert Courtney Smith (Graduate Center, City University of New York) examines the laws, policies, and individual and family practices that promoted–and inhibited–their social mobility.
For over twenty years, Smith followed the lives and mobility of nearly one hundred children of Mexican immigrants in New York City. Immigrant-inclusive and mobility-promoting measures here include enabling undocumented people to attend public colleges at in-state tuition rates and the city’s subway and school choice systems, which enabled students to attend better schools or take opportunities outside their neighborhoods.
Smith finds that keeping the immigrant bargain – whereby children of immigrants redeem their parents’ sacrifice by doing well in school, helping their parents and siblings, and becoming “good” people (in their parents’ words) – helped them achieve better adult outcomes and lives. Having mentors, picking academically strong schools and friends, and using second chance mechanisms also promoted mobility. However, lacking legal status blocked mobility, by preventing others from benefiting from these same mobility-promoting policies.
Dreams Achieved and Denied deeply analyzes the historic upward mobility of U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City.
ROBERT COURTNEY SMITH is a professor of sociology, immigration studies and public affairs at the CUNY Graduate Center