The Impact of U.S. Immigration Policy on Parenting

This chapter offers an interdisciplinary synthesis of critical issues that emerge as immigrants navigate immigration status and parenting, focusing on undocumented parents and those with liminal statuses that do not provide pathways to citizenship. While grappling with the harmful impacts of restrictive immigration policies, our chapter also offers suggestions for improving immigrant parents’ lives and opportunities. Through an overview of existing literature, we highlight the exclusionary experiences that result from approaching immigration status as a barrier that makes parenting, an already challenging job, more complicated and complex. The chapter also emphasizes immigrant parents’ efforts to resist the harms done by immigration policy through everyday intergenerational developmental mechanisms, parenting practices, local institutional supports, and familial relationships.