Objective:The objective of this study is to examine how citizen young adults with undocumented parents manage parental illegality. Background: These citizen young adults are part of mixed-status families, which consist of members with different immigration statuses and often include U.S. citizen and undocumented immigrant family members. With 16 million people in mixed-status families, scholars are beginning to capture their unique experiences, but little is known about the adult-age citizen children in these families. Method: Data for this study include interviews with 34 Latino/a citizen young adults ages 18 to 28. Interviews were analyzed by using the sociological concepts of legal violence and multigenerational punishment. Results: The findings demonstrate that young adults are somewhat shielded from parental deportation concerns because of less sustained contact with parents and because of the perception that parents are cautious. Young adults also manage illegality when they apply for federal college financial aid and navigate the possibility of sponsoring their immigrant parents for legalization. Young adults' legal access to wage labor also entails distinct responsibilities to participate in family breadwinning. Conclusion:This research demonstrates how parental undocumented status shapes family negotiations and state-produced punishments for adult citizen children previously unaccounted for in immigration and family scholarship. These findings point to the distinct challenges of citizen young adults-experiences that differ from undocumented peers, the children of lawfully present parents, and minor children in mixed-status families.

Mexican mixed‐status families have been front and center in embroiled national debates about the place of undocumented immigrants and their citizen family members in this country. These families face unique obstacles, including possible family fragmentation caused by deportation, challenges to birthright citizenship, and they are often targeted by anti‐immigrant elected officials and political pundits that perpetuate a racialized discourse that casts even citizen children in these families as an abomination of US citizenship. Therefore, “illegality” may be a familial experience that can be endured by citizens and non‐citizens alike. Despite their unique vulnerabilities, researchers know very little about how mixed‐status families experience belonging in the country while managing possible tensions and inequalities shaped by immigration status. In this article, I review the research on punitive immigration enforcement and the scholarship on social policies and discourse targeting mixed‐status families. I conclude by reviewing new directions in sociological research and suggest avenues for research that may examine mixed‐status families' subjectivities, belonging, and negotiations of family relationships.

In a seemingly post-racial moment in 2010, Arizona’s Senate Bill (SB) 1070 was under fire and challenged as racially discriminatory. While the 2010 immigration bill was popular among white Arizonians, critics charged that SB 1070 could facilitate the racial profiling of all Latinos/as in state law enforcement officers’ efforts to check the legal status of those they suspect are undocumented. Analyzing 70 recordings from the Arizona house floor, press conferences, and television interviews during 2009–2012, I investigate how public officials discuss their support for this contested legislation. Proponents of the bill largely used color-blind maneuvers in response to questions concerning racial profiling but simultaneously constructed racialized undocumented immigrants as criminals and economic burdens. Consequently, political supporters of SB 1070 engaged in a racial discourse evoking an implicit white injury ideology that positioned whites as injured by the presence of racialized immigrants, while all Latinos/as were constructed as outside the (white, injured) citizenry.

In this paper, we investigate controlling images of Latinx immigrants in the US press. Our paper expands theory within this literature in two new directions. First, we look at the controlling image of the "illegal" as well as the conventional controlling images of the immigrant described in the literature. Second, we investigate whether controlling images of Latinx immigrants remain prevalent outside of newspapers aimed at a predominantly White audience by comparing controlling images of immigrants in Atlanta's mainstream press to the city's Black press. We find that controlling images of immigrants are prevalent in the mainstream press but seldom appear in the Black news media. We also find that the "illegal" represents the predominant controlling image of immigrants in both. Few controlling images are explicitly gendered. We argue that the lack of gendering in the controlling images of immigrants may serve to dehumanize all immigrants, complicating and expanding extant research.

This article compares the discourse on immigration found in Atlanta's African‐American press (Atlanta Daily World) to that found in Atlanta's mainstream press (Atlanta Journal‐Constitution). The Daily World's black counterdiscourse situates immigration within a racial frame, discussing Latinos and immigrants interchangeably and casting African Americans as deserving yet excluded citizens. Immigrants appear in the Daily World as either allies in the struggle for civil rights or as competitors for jobs. Although the Daily World crime frames focus on concerns about racial profiling, the Journal‐Constitution often depicts immigrants as criminals or discusses immigration in terms of legal status and policy.