Although there is evidence documenting the impacts of Mexican parents’ migration to the United States on the educational attainment of the children they leave behind, the potential role of parents’ legal status in stratifying their children's educational achievement is poorly understood. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, I estimate the educational effects of parents’ documentation status for the children left behind in Mexico. I utilize coarsened exact matching and entropy balancing, alongside community fixed effects, in a counterfactual regression framework to address the endogeneity of parental migration decisions. I find that parental migration's effectiveness as a mechanism for securing educational gains among children left in Mexico differs by parents’ legal status. Documentation allows migrant parents to translate their experiences in the United States into relatively greater educational achievement for their children in Mexico. In the post-1986 period, the non-immigrant children of undocumented parents experienced a significant education penalty. These findings elucidate the effect of US immigration policy on social stratification in Mexican society.

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跨国社会分层？移民父母的法律地位与墨西哥儿童的教育成就

尽管有证据表明墨西哥父母移民到美国对他们留下的孩子的教育程度的影响，但人们对父母的法律地位在其子女教育成就分层中的潜在作用知之甚少。使用来自墨西哥移民项目的数据，我估计了父母的文件身份对留在墨西哥的孩子的教育影响。我在反事实回归框架中利用粗化的精确匹配和熵平衡以及社区固定效应来解决父母迁移决策的内生性。我发现父母移民作为确保留在墨西哥的儿童获得教育收益的机制的有效性因父母的法律地位而异。文件允许移民父母将他们在美国的经历转化为他们在墨西哥的孩子相对更大的教育成就。在 1986 年后时期，无证父母的非移民子女经历了重大的教育惩罚。这些发现阐明了美国移民政策对墨西哥社会社会分层的影响。