Isabel García-Valdivia uses qualitative and mixed-methods to study immigrant families and their children to inform theories of immigrant incorporation and migrant [il]legality.
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Isabel studies how immigrant families understand and experience incorporation, or not, in their day-to-day lives. Her research falls into two broad categories:
(1) Immigrant Experiences over the Life Course and [Il]legality – How do immigrants’ experiences change across the life course according to their immigration status and immigration policies? Isabel’s earlier work, including her paper Legal Power in Action (see next section), focuses on earlier life transitions for children of immigrants. It shows how the transition to adulthood brings additional brokering responsibilities for adult children of immigrants.
Her current book project focuses on Mexican immigrant men and women at the other end of the spectrum – individuals who have lived in the United States for decades – and their transition into late adulthood. How do immigration policies (and legal status) affect older immigrants’ late adulthood experiences? And how does the experience of illegality change across the life course?
In a recent article in Social Forces (based on the same data from the book), “Life course illegality: how the life course and aging shape the experience of illegality,” she argues that fear of deportation is a function of one’s position in the life course. I propose the conceptual model of life course illegality (LCI) to bridge research on migrant illegality & life course approaches. She emphasizes how their social environment, spatial location, social networks, and individual characteristics shape the experiences of older migrants. She identifies three mechanisms that mitigate older migrants’ fear of deportation: the embodiment of illegality, life transitions, and temporal morality. Here is a summary of the article’s main findings.
(2) Immigration and Family – How does immigration impact families? In her article, “Legal Power in Action: How Latinx Adult Children Mitigate the Effects of Parents’ Legal Status” (Social Problems), Isabel develops the concept of legal power to show how legal adulthood, parents’ immigration status, and adult children’s immigration status impact adult children’s brokering capabilities. The paper analyzes three types of brokering using legal power (securing loans or access to credit, sponsoring immigration petitions, and becoming a legal guardian for siblings) to show that citizen adult children have greater capacity than DACAmented adult children in mixed-status families to exercise legal power when brokering. The linked lives and this intergenerational work are crucial for immigrant families to thrive.
(3) Collaborative Projects – Collaborative projects focus on different intersections of my work or are based on my methodological expertise.
In current collaborative projects, Isabel helps examine:
- (a) the experiences of immigrant graduate students in U.S. higher education (see the Brown ISRP team for more information), and
- (b) their experiences in the workforce after graduation.
In past collaborative research projects, Isabel has shown how young children of native-born Latinas benefit more from economic integration than those of immigrant Latinas using nationally representative samples of kindergartners in the same years, 1998 and 2010, from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (co-authored paper in Educational Reviewer). In addition, she co-authored a chapter on safety nets for racial and ethnic minorities and immigrant families. The chapter reviews the in-kind supports available to racial and ethnic minorities and barriers to program and service participation.