Family Legal Vulnerability
Understanding and documenting the many ways in which immigration policy and its enforcement shapes the lives of California’s Latino college students has been the focus of a decade-long research project led by UC Irvine Chicano/Latino studies professor Laura E. Enriquez and UC counterparts.
Beginning in 2015 with the Undocumented Student Equity Project, and continuing through the 2019 launch of the UC Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives-funded UC Collaborative to Promote Immigrant and Student Equity (UC PromISE), Enriquez and her many collaborators have worked to shed light on the successes and struggles of California’s undocumented student population. This resulted in a number of published papers and reports to inform policies and practices that will advance equity and inclusion for undocumented and immigrant-origin students and their families.
Their work is now the focus of a new book, Family Legal Vulnerability: How Immigration Policy Shapes the Lives of Latino College Students (NYU Press), in which they detail how immigration status of students and their families impacts educational experiences, social mobility, health, political engagement and more. In addition to Enriquez, coauthors include Zulema Valdez, sociology professor, UC Merced; Annie Ro, public health professor, UC Irvine; Cecilia Ayón, public policy professor, and Jennifer R. Nájera, ethnic studies professor, UC Riverside.
Below, Enriquez shares what drew the team to examine immigration through the lens of family, how the concept of “family legal vulnerability” emerged, what it helps illuminate, and why understanding students within the context of their families is essential to creating more equitable policies and support systems.
Q: What originally drew you to study immigration through the lens of family, and what was the central question you were trying to answer when you began this project? Was there a moment, story, or gap in research that made you realize we were missing something about students’ experiences?
A: I’ve been drawn to studying immigration through the lens of family because I have experienced and witnessed the deep reach of immigration policy into this most intimate and personal part of people’s lives.
My first book, Of Love and Papers: How Immigration Policy Shapes Romance and Family, focused on dating, marriage, and parenting among undocumented young adults. One of the key findings was how the young U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants experience multigenerational punishment because they are also harmed by immigration policies that compromise their financial and emotional security. So when I started designing this next project, I knew that I needed to not only look at undocumented college student experiences but also those of their U.S. citizen peers who have undocumented parents and family members.
We designed the study to try to understand how immigration policies were shaping the college experiences and opportunities of these two student groups.
Q: Your book introduces the concept of “family legal vulnerability.” How did you come to develop this framework, and what did your research reveal about how students experience immigration policy not just individually, but collectively through their families?
A: The concept of family legal vulnerability emerged from trying to capture something that existing frameworks weren't fully explaining. Prior research on immigrant illegality focused primarily on the individual — how undocumented status constrains that person's life. But what we kept seeing, both in our data and in the stories students shared with us, was that immigration policy doesn't stop at the individual. It radiates outward through the family.
Students who had different individual legal statuses were navigating remarkably similar struggles. They were managing financial precarity rooted in a parent's undocumented status. Both were living with the fear of family separation. Their individual positions relative to the law were different, but their family experiences were deeply shared.
That's what family legal vulnerability tries to capture: the collective risk that all members of undocumented and mixed-status families face — regardless of their own immigration status — because of exclusionary immigration laws and policies. We identified three primary dimensions through which this plays out: deportability, economic insecurity, and social exclusion. These aren't experienced in isolation — they reinforce one another, and they're felt across the whole family unit.
What our research revealed is that this collective experience then cascades into students' individual lives. Fearing a parent’s deportation becomes a student's chronic anxiety. A parent's restricted employment becomes a student's financial strain and informs their decision to work multiple jobs instead of studying. Family legal vulnerability doesn't just shape the backdrop of students' lives — it permeates their day-to-day academic experiences, their mental health, and their political engagement.
Q: A lot of conversations about higher education equity focus on finances or academic preparation. What does the idea of family legal vulnerability help us see that those approaches miss, and why is that distinction so important right now?
A: Family legal vulnerability helps us look beyond the individual student to see how their needs are shaped by their families.
Current financial aid frameworks miss this collective dimension. Students aren't just managing their own individual economic circumstances — they're embedded in family economies that are themselves constrained by immigration policy. The academic preparation framework has a similar blind spot. It tends to locate the problem in the student — in what they arrived knowing. But our research shows that students who are perfectly capable academically are seeing their performance compromised by anxiety and the sheer cognitive load of managing family legal vulnerability alongside coursework. The issue isn't just financial need or preparation. It's also what students are being asked to carry while they learn.
This distinction feels especially urgent right now, as intensified immigration enforcement makes family legal vulnerability — and its effects on students — more acute. Equity frameworks need to account for the collective family context in order to effectively support student success.
Q: Your findings show both harm and resilience - students facing cascading consequences but also demonstrating agency. How do you think about the relationship between those two things, and what's the risk of focusing too much on one without the other?
A: Our team was committed from the beginning to highlighting students’ resilience alongside their struggles to advance a more holistic picture of their lives. What is tricky here is the risk of treating resilience as a substitute for structural support. Yes, the students in our study demonstrate remarkable agency — they lean on social networks, develop coping strategies, find ways to keep moving forward despite enormous obstacles. But resilience is not the same as equity. When we celebrate how hard these students are working to overcome barriers without addressing the barriers themselves, we're essentially asking students to carry a weight that institutions should be helping to lift.
Q: After someone finishes this book — whether they’re a scholar, educator, policymaker, or community member — what do you hope they do differently?
A: One thing our research makes clear is that undocumented students and U.S. citizen students with undocumented parents are unique groups but share many similar experiences because they are situated within undocumented and mixed-status families. With this in mind, we need to stop designing support as though students exist in isolation from their families. At an institutional level, this means that financial aid calculations, mental health services, and academic support all need to account for the family context students are embedded in. We also need to recognize that immigration enforcement is an educational issue, not just a policy issue happening somewhere else. When enforcement intensifies outside campus walls, it shows up inside classrooms, in students' concentration, in their attendance, in their grades.
We hope this book inspires readers to ask what concrete changes they can make within their own sphere of influence — whether that's a syllabus, a support program, a policy, or simply how they show up for the students in front of them.
The students in this book are navigating an extraordinarily difficult policy moment, and they deserve institutions that meet them where they are.