Waters, coauthor of Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age Theoretically rich, beautifully written, and cogently argued, this brilliant book is a landmark study of the human costs of American policy failures." Gonzales puts a human face on the many victims of America’s broken immigration system. Through his careful attention to the ways in which these young people navigate these contradictory processes, Roberto G. " Lives in Limbo vividly documents the experiences of belonging and exclusion that mark the everyday lives of undocumented youth as they transition to adulthood. Hirokazu Yoshikawa, author of Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Young Children The moving and heartbreaking narratives of struggle, support, and heroism in this book should be read by every American." " Lives in Limbo is one of the most important books in immigration studies of the past decade. Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor. This vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures. Over two million of the nation’s eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. And I can’t do anything about it.” –Esperanza I have grown up but I feel like I’m moving backward.
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