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ChatChat - Claudia Cragg


Mar 14, 2016

Over 2 million of the United States' 11 million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with the author of Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales, Assistant Professor of Education at Harvard University.

Twitter: @RGGonzales1

In this work, Gonzales introduces the reader  to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and those who make an early exit, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations.

Gonzales' vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor.