How Pathways to Legal Status and Citizenship Relate to Economic Attainment Among the Children of Mexican Immigrants

Immigration reform in the United States has constituted an important legislative focus for nearly half a century. However, it has seldom pre-occupied policymakers to the degree that it has recently, moving this year to front-and-center stage among U.S. public policy issues, at least for a while. Because of worries about both increasing numbers of Mexican migrants and proposals to legalize unauthorized entrants (most of whom are Mexican), the question of Mexican migration has dominated much of the debate (Bean and Lowell 2004). Mexicans are by far the largest of the recent immigrant groups, in the cases of both legal and unauthorized migration. In 2005, for example, 161,445 persons from Mexico became "legal permanent residents" (14.4 percent of the total) (Office of Immigration Statistics 2006). In addition, 300,000 unauthorized Mexicans also established de facto residency in 2005, bringing the total number of unauthorized Mexicans to 6.2 million (or 56 percent of all unauthorized persons) (Passel 2006). These numbers dwarf those from any other country. The second largest number of legal entrants in 2005 came from India (84,681 persons, or 7.5 percent of all legal permanent residents), while the second largest number of unauthorized persons living in the country came from elsewhere in Latin America (2.5 million, or 22 percent of the estimated unauthorized total).