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Transnational Social Stratification? Legal Status of Immigrant Parents and the Educational Achievements of Mexican Children

Although there is evidence documenting the impacts of Mexican parents’ migration to the United States on the educational attainment of the children they leave behind, the potential role of parents’ legal status in stratifying their children's educational achievement is poorly understood. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, I estimate the educational effects of parents’ documentation status for the children left behind in Mexico. I utilize coarsened exact matching and entropy balancing, alongside community fixed effects, in a counterfactual regression framework to address the endogeneity of parental migration decisions. I find that parental migration's effectiveness as a mechanism for securing educational gains among children left in Mexico differs by parents’ legal status. Documentation allows migrant parents to translate their experiences in the United States into relatively greater educational achievement for their children in Mexico. In the post-1986 period, the non-immigrant children of undocumented parents experienced a significant education penalty. These findings elucidate the effect of US immigration policy on social stratification in Mexican society.