Isabel García Valdivia uses qualitative methods to study immigrants and their families to inform theories of immigrant incorporation and migrant [il]legality across the life course.
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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? Isabel’s earlier work, including her article 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 research, Becoming Invisible: Aging and Stratification for Older Immigrants in the United States and Mexico, shines a spotlight on Mexican immigrant men and women at the other end of the spectrum – people who have lived in the United States for decades – and their transition into late adulthood. How do they navigate poverty and declining health that often comes with aging, given their legal status? This work has implications for public policy as well as for academic theories of immigration and integration, and the life course.
(2) Legal Status and Family – How does legal status 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 impacts adult children’s brokering capabilities. The article 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 – 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 article 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 support available to racial and ethnic minorities and barriers to program and service participation.