My body of basic research, using mixed-methodological strategies, focuses on elucidating the child, adolescent, and young adult experience of immigration. How is their development shaped by immigration and how are they changed by the process? I have considered a wide variety of processes including identity formation, family separations, gendered patterns, civic engagement, and most recently the unauthorized experience. A focus on school settings has been an essential and enduring theme in my basic research agenda as schools are a first contact point between the immigrant child and her family and the new society. Further, education is a critical predictor of current as well as future wellbeing and socio-economic mobility for the most rapidly growing sector of the U.S. youth population
