The Educational and Health Care Outcomes of the Binational Population of Children of Immigrants in Mexico and the United States
11:00am -12:00pm
Friday, November 14th, 2025
Social Science Centre 5220
A lecture by Erin R Hamilton
Abstract
Child migration is common, reflects a unique process of migration, and has important implications for child and family wellbeing across the life course. We combine Mexican and U.S. census data from 2019 and 2020 to analyze the educational outcomes and health insurance coverage of five generations of Mexican-origin children: the 0.5 generation, who is born in the United States but resides in Mexico; the 1.5 generation, who is born in Mexico but resides in the United States, in comparison to the “0 generation” of Mexican-born children who reside in Mexico; the 2nd generation of U.S.-born children of at least one Mexican-born parent; and the 3rd+ generation of U.S.-born children of U.S.-born parent(s) of Mexican ethnicity. We uncover a unique disadvantage for the 0.5 generation of U.S.-born children in Mexico. For education, there is a disadvantage associated with residence in Mexico, with lower levels of school attendance and higher rates of educational lag for both the 0 and the 0.5 generations. But rates of uninsurance were higher for the two groups of child immigrants in the binational population, the 0.5, U.S.-born in Mexico, and the 1.5, Mexican-born in the United States. We find that disparities persist after adjusting for parental education, suggesting that institutional context specific to the place of residence, rather than individual characteristics, drive binational, generational disparities in child wellbeing.
The Sociology Colloquium Series, brought to you by the Department of Sociology and the Social Science Student Donation Fund, is open to the public, students and scholars of any discipline.
