The “Dreamer” narrative often portrays undocumented youth as academically successful and awaiting immigration reform, but this overlooks the diversity of their experiences and the challenges of adulthood. In this online UC Migration Series Book Talk, Sofya Aptekar and Amy Hsin discuss how undocumented young adults' opportunities and choices are shaped not only by legal status but also by race, gender, class, family resources, sexuality, education, and community.

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM (Pacific Time)

Register here!

The typical image of a Dreamer is an undocumented Latinx youth—brought to the U.S. through no choice of their own—who excels academically and aspires to contribute to the U.S. economy. This image has engendered political good will and helped push through the executive order that created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, but it is limited. It fails to account for the full spectrum of diversity among undocumented youth. It also leaves the Dreamer figure stuck in a stage of youth and innocence waiting for immigration reform to allow them to finally transition to adulthood. There is little room in the Dreamer narrative for navigating complex family obligations, employment, entering adult relationships, or other markers of adulthood. In Beyond Dreamers, sociologists Sofya Aptekar and Amy Hsin examine how undocumented young adults navigate the transition to adulthood.

Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with a racially and ethnically diverse group of undocumented college students in New York City, with and without DACA authorization, Aptekar and Hsin show that there is no single undocumented experience. They find that while legal status matters enormously, its impacts are influenced by race, national origin, gender, class, sexuality, family resources, educational institutions, neighborhood contexts, and access to local and transnational co-ethnic communities and labor markets. These forces not only shape the kinds of opportunities available to undocumented young adults, but how they choose to approach disclosing their undocumented status and interact with family, peers, employers, professors, and police.

Aptekar and Hsin pay particular attention to the effect of one’s mode of entry into the United States, highlighting the distinction between visa overstayers and those who entered the country without inspection. This highly consequential divide shapes early experiences of illegality, labor market options, exposure to surveillance and precarity, and the possibility of adjusting status. Individuals who overstay their visas have more avenues to adjust their undocumented status, including family sponsorship and marriage to U.S. citizens. Opportunities for legalization are much more restricted for those who made unauthorized border crossings. If these immigrant youth want to adjust their status, they are required to leave the country and remain abroad for at least ten years to do so. Other methods of adjusting their status, such as claiming extreme hardship on their American families or trying to obtain visas for victims of crime or parental abuse or neglect are extremely difficult to obtain, costly, and can lead to division in families, making legalization all but impossible and, therefore, limiting youths’ opportunities. Thus, mode of entry strongly influences how some young adults imagine their future lives in the U.S. and beyond.

Beyond Dreamers deftly underscores how deeply legal uncertainty continues to structure the lives of undocumented young adults. 

Sofya Aptekar is Professor of Urban Studies at the City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies. In addition to Beyond Dreamers: Transitions to Adulthood in an Uncertain Age, co-authored with Amy Hsin, she has two sole-authored books: Green Card Soldier: Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat (MIT Press), and The Road to Citizenship: What Naturalization Means for Immigrants and the United States (Rutgers University Press). She is a co-author of Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities. Sofya has published widely on immigration-related topics, including framings of immigrants in the US military as well as their experience of military labor, deported veterans, the effect of the mode of entry on migrant trajectories, illegality on college campuses, the US migrant justice movement, Chinese asylum cases, mandatory medical screenings, migration from the Baltic countries, naturalization ceremonies and inequities in the naturalization process, and racialization of South Asian immigrants.

Amy Hsin is a sociologist and demographer whose research examines immigration, social inequality, education, and public policy, with particular attention to Asian Americans and undocumented young adults. She is Professor of Migration at the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights, Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame, having previously chaired the Sociology Department at Queens College, CUNY. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA and has published widely in journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Demography, and Social Forces, with her work featured in the New York Times, NPR, and The Economist. Her forthcoming book, Beyond Dreamers: Transitions to Adulthood in an Uncertain Age (Russell Sage Foundation Press), co-authored with Sofya Aptekar, examines how undocumented young people navigate education and life prospects in the city. She has also contributed amicus briefs to major immigration cases before the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court.

The book talk discussant, Veronica Terriquez, is the Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and a Professor in the Departments of Urban Planning and Chicana/o and Central American Studies. Her recent book, Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities (Russell Sage Foundation, 2026) examines how adolescents acquire the capacities to exercise political power. 

Kim Mc Nelly
kmcnelly@international.ucla.edu

Download file: _Beyond-Dreamers-cf-jfs.pdf

Sponsor(s): Center for Study of International Migration, Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative at UC Berkeley, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego, Global Migration Center at UC Davis, Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA