As global unaccompanied minor migration persists, existing studies on unaccompanied minors arriving to the United States and Europe largely focus on apprehended youth in formal institutional settings (see Menjívar and Perreira 2019). In the United States, where this research was conducted, the term "unaccompanied youth" refers to minors (aged under 18) who migrate without a parent or guardian and are apprehended by Customs and Border Protection, including minors separated from family units (Human Rights Watch 2019). Accordingly, researchers tend to trace and analyze the experiences of children moving through formal resettlement channels (e.g., from federal custody to unification with a caregivers) and their integration into K-12 schools (Pierce 2015). Unaccompanied youth resettled with adult caregivers might follow the social incorporation pathways identified in previous research with immigrant youth between the first and second generation. This pathway typically consists of entry into K-12 schools (Bajaj and Suresh 2018), the pursuit of legal protection (Galli 2020), and an eventual entry into formal work (Gonzales and Chavez 2012) alongside caregivers and significant others. Invisible to the state, and still largely understudied by academics, are undocumented immigrant youth who are never apprehended or reunited with families in the United States and therefore grow up distinctly unaccompanied.
The growing up experiences of undocumented migrant youth who leave their family members behind and live independently from parents in the United States and other adult caregivers are distinct. Upon arrival in the United States, they must navigate institutions and adopt adult-like responsibilities to support themselves and left-behind families through remittances. Among these youth are unaccompanied young people from Indigenous communities in Latin America, such as the Guatemalan Maya youth in this research, that are typically identified by shorter stature, darker complexion, and their Indigenous language(s) and cultural practice. Thus, they often faced discrimination in other home countries and experience additional discrimination and precarity in the United States (Blackwell 2017). This paper advances our understanding of immigrant youth, and unaccompanied Latinx youth specifically, by exploring how institutional context, familial obligations across borders, and limited ethnic networks shape youth's social incorporation as they come of age in the United States.
Research on Latin American labor migration to the United States has largely focused on adults and builds from the case of Mexican laborers, demonstrating that migration is strategically deployed to overcome local labor market inefficiencies and recoup economic opportunities lost during periods of economic restructuring and instability (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2016). Typically, adult parents navigate institutions and endure life in the host country on behalf of their left-behind families (Abrego 2014; Schmalzbauer 2005) or school-going children. Despite the common portrayal of adults as workers and children as students, history reveals that Latinx youth have migrated in pursuit of work for several decades (Rosas 2014) and in some cases, without parents. Youth who migrate between 13 and 17—working age in many Latin American countries (International Labour Organization 2002) and 84% of the apprehended unaccompanied minors in 2020 (ACF 2021)—face tension between financial obligations and urgency of work and school enrollment in the United States (Canizales 2019; Diaz-Strong 2020; Martinez 2019). This suggests that a significant proportion of unaccompanied, undocumented Latinx youth migrants can grow up out of schools. Though youth's workplace entry is not new or unexpected to study participants, it is an aberration from our scholarly conceptualization and Western normative, middle-class expectation that children in the United States come of age in schools. This is evinced in that much of the research on undocumented immigrant youth incorporation in the United States tends to rest on the 1.7 million young people who qualify for protective programs, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)1 that rely on age-at-arrival and educational status as markers for qualification (Canizales and Diaz-Strong 2021). This paper advances existing frameworks of immigrant incorporation by centering youth's labor institutional context, family dynamics, and social networks within the secondary labor market and community as understudied facets of their undocumented youth's coming-of-age trajectories.
To theorize the social incorporation of unaccompanied, undocumented youth, I draw on data from 70 in-depth interviews collected across 4 years (2012–2016) with young adults (ages 18–31) who migrated from Central America and Mexico as unaccompanied minors (ages 11–17) between 2007 and 2013 and came of age as workers in Los Angeles, California, thereafter. The data reveal that the pressures of economic obligations to families in the home country and to themselves with limited social and financial resources in the host country, together with their position in low-wage work, operate as distinct forces that maintain the primacy of work in youth's everyday lives as they transition into young adulthood. Work primacy results in a qualitatively different social incorporation experience for undocumented youth coming of age in the United States, as their motivations and responsibilities, patterns of participation and community embeddedness, and their relationships to family are shaped by their labor institutional context and role as workers at young ages. Though not exclusive to this group, this study demonstrates how work primacy shapes unaccompanied, undocumented youth's ability to access resources for mobility and establish and maintain social networks with consequences for their social incorporation prospects as they come of age.
The ongoing trends of unaccompanied Latinx youth migration to the United States (U.S. CBP 2019) prompt the question of how early exposure to work primacy can affect the social incorporation trajectories of newcomer youth as they come of age. Work primacy underscores the sociostructural forces that can produce and sustain social immobility among unaccompanied youth as they come of age in the United States, effectively disqualifying them for immigrant incorporation policies geared toward high-achieving and school-going youth, such as DACA. The salience of these forces increases as globalized neoliberal markets continue to destabilize Latin American nations' political, social, and economic structures, causing a diversification of global migration flows, including labor, refugee, and unaccompanied minor migration.
Immigrant Youth in the Secondary Labor Market
Immigrants' incorporation outcomes differ based on age and life stage at arrival (Oropesa and Landale 1997; Rumbaut 2004) and institutional context (Gleeson and Gonzales 2012), among other characteristics. Though immigrant youth incorporation research typically investigates youth's educational experiences, transitions from school to work (Perreira, Harris and Lee 2007; Staff and Mortimer 2003), and experiences in balancing these in teenage years (Gonzales and Chavez 2012), the school-to-work trajectory is unavailable to those who migrate at young ages, without families, and may therefore never enroll in K-12 schools (Canizales 2021). Immigrant youth workers may lack the human and social capital shared by parents, extended family members, and community ties (Kasinitz et al. 2008; Zhou and Bankston 1997) while also being disconnected from K-12 education and supportive school-based figures (Gonzales 2015). Those who arrive in the United States in their teen years—members of the 1.25 generation—are among the most likely to experience direct entry into the workplace rather than schools and thus have a "comparatively more problematic adaptation" relative to their younger immigrant counterparts (Rumbaut 2004).
The frames of adult and family migration have buttressed important immigrant incorporation research that focuses on adults as workers whose lives are organized by the workplace and children as students whose lives are organized by school (Gleeson and Gonzales 2012). The secondary labor market—the segment of the dual US labor market associated with low wages, job instability, and poor work conditions—has historically employed first-time, unmarried, young adult male Latinx migrants as seasonal farm workers and later expanded to include jobs in construction, food processing, and textile manufacturing, among others. Men's labor migration was followed by the feminization of migration and migration as a family reunification strategy (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). In the 1980s and 1990s, with tightening immigration policy and political, economic, and social insecurity in Central America and Mexico, families became more likely to migrate together. Today, unaccompanied, undocumented youth workers arrive to the United States at young ages, without their families, and in an era of border enforcement that denies the ability of return (Massey, Durand and Pren 2016).
The effects of secondary labor market entry for newcomer migrants' long-term incorporation are debated. Some scholars adopt a comparative frame to argue that low-wage labor in the United States offers opportunities for those with low English-language proficiency and knowledge about the United States to find work otherwise unavailable to them (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). Through their social networks, immigrants find housing, jobs, and learn skills to advance to better jobs (Hagan, Hernandez-Leon and Demonsant 2015; Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001) and the accumulation of capital that prompts mobility for subsequent generations (Agius Vallejo 2012). Others argue that the characteristics that enable employability in the secondary labor market, such as lack of English-language fluency, undocumented status, limited knowledge about work opportunities, and exploitative work conditions, can represent major occupational mobility barriers in the United States (Feliciano 2005; Menjívar 2013; Waldinger 2001). As employers' monopolistic power over immigrant employees reduces their bargaining power, undocumented workers endure lost wages, worse conditions, and fewer benefits relative to their counterparts with work authorization (Gleeson 2012). Disillusionment with mobility prospects requires low-wage migrant laborers work multiple jobs for longer hours to meet their own needs as well as those of their transnational families (Mahler 1995, 98). Relegation to the low-wage labor market breeds isolation or ethnic community fragmentation as impoverishment contributes to coethnic opportunism and exploitation. Indigenous workers and women may experience intersectional ethnoracial (Hagan 1994) and gendered (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Menjívar 2001) disadvantages within their coethnic community and society at large (Canizales 2019; Rosales 2020). These conditions are shared by undocumented youth workers in the United States but exacerbated when compounded by their status as unaccompanied with few, if any, social ties in the United States and little human capital.
Central American and Mexican minors migrate to the United States alone to pursue employment, opportunity, and adventure, as well as to flee war, famine, natural disasters, and separation from family members (Hernández-León 1999; Ressler, , Boothby and Steinbock 1988). These young people arrive with prior work experiences after having worked alone or alongside their parents or adult caretakers in their home country and thus anticipate entering full-time employment (Woodhead 1998) in manufacturing and service occupations (Canizales 2015). Their growing up as workers contrasts Western notions of childhood that are idealized in the United States, such as school-going, delayed workplace entry, and dependence on an adult caregiver alongside sentimentalization in the family and community (Zelizer 1985). Youth's work is motivated by empathy for parents' sacrifices and a sense of responsibility (Estrada 2019) that continues in adulthood (Agius Vallejo 2012). Unlike immigrant youth portrayed in existing literature as working under adult supervision to supplement parents' earnings or for spending money (Orellana 2009), unaccompanied, undocumented youth must also work to secure their "sobrevivencia (survival)" (Canizales 2021).
Unaccompanied, Undocumented Youth Coming of Age through Work
In this study, youth are conceptualized as agentic economic actors and labor migrants who act on their personal and familial best interest. Labor migration can be motivated by ideas of individualism and self-responsibility (Portes 1992), which are reinforced in the United States as abstract liberalism superimposes notions of meritocracy on an unequal and racist society (Bonilla-Silva 2005) that stratify access to opportunity and mobility. Labor migration may also be motivated by familism, or familial loyalty and reciprocity, and collectivism (Burawoy 1976). Cultural sociologists show that individualism and collectivism are not contradictory ideologies (Lichterman 1995) but can work together to motivate self-responsibility and greater community good (Canizales 2015). Labor migration may alleviate financial pressures on left-behind parents who struggle to provide for other family members. Youth's individual and familial obligations and the urgency of their financial need not only prompt their labor migration but also their entry into and relegation to the exploitative occupations that make up the secondary labor market. These forces shape unaccompanied, undocumented youth workers' social incorporation as they navigate competing financial pressures in the home and host countries within the structural constraints to mobility imposed by the secondary labor market and their minoritized and precarious statuses within institutions and society at large. The outcome of these pressures is what I term work primacy.
Work primacy refers to the centrality of work in the economic and noneconomic lives of undocumented immigrant youth who are employed by and come of age within the secondary labor market.