Mexican Immigrant Legalization and Naturalization and Children’s Economic Well-Being

Over the past four decades, Mexican immigration has garnered much of the public and legislative attention devoted to reforming immigration policy in the United States (Bean and Lowell 2004). Part of the reason is that Mexicans have constituted the largest of the country’s recent legal immigrant groups. In 2005, for example, 161,445 Mexicans gained legal permanent residency, or 14.4 percent of the all such persons (Office of Immigration Statistics 2006). But much of the focus falls on Mexicans because they comprise such an overwhelming component of unauthorized migration flows. Roughly 300,000 (net) unauthorized Mexicans established de facto U.S. residency in 2005, bringing the total number of unauthorized Mexicans to 6.2 million, or 56 percent of all unauthorized persons in the country (Passel 2006). These numbers dwarf those from any other nation. Moreover, many observers have long argued that policies to curtail or “regularize” unauthorized migration should be adopted before changes in legal immigration policy are considered, thus ensuring that unauthorized Mexican migration occupies a prominent place in any debate over immigration policy (U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform 1994).