From identity to policy

The United States is currently undergoing its largest wave of immigration in history. Included in this (post-1965) wave of immigrants are the U.S.-born and foreign-born "children of immigrants," a group to which one out of every five children in the United States now belongs (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Brazilians immigrants, whose presence has grown significantly in the U.S. during the last few decades, defy easy categorization as a group, due to historic, geographic, and linguistic differences from other Latin American immigrant groups. This research project aims to explore relationships between legal status, personal and social contexts, and future plans of Brazilian immigrant youths living in the greater Boston area, contributing to the gap in literature on the experience of Brazilian immigrant youths as well as the experience of unauthorized immigrant youths. The study consists of two components: a survey and an interview session. The first component is a survey of 163 students to capture the demographic characteristics of my participants and measure various constructs of my conceptual model. The second component of the study is individual interview sessions based on an open-ended interview protocol, with a subgroup of 26 students. The sample exhibits gaps in educational expectations by legal status. There is also evidence of a gendered gap in educational expectations and a gendered "immigrant paradox." These findings align with patterns found in research with other immigrant groups, and are linked by the common theme that multiple variables affect participants' experiences of acculturation in the U.S., from the individual characteristics (such as resilience) that an immigrant might display to the implications of belonging to a particular ethnic group or legal status and the accompanying implications that are outside any individual's locus of control. Future studies should aim to include more U.S.-born Brazilian immigrants, so that more can be known about the impact of generation on acculturation for Brazilian immigrants, and should incorporate a longitudinal design that more appropriately captures and describes the process of acculturation and changes over time in political and economic contexts, such as implications of the new deferred action policy.