ABSTRACT
Consider the lives of one Ecuadorian family in New York City, as reported in the New York Times in April 2009.1 The parents have settled as undocumented immigrants in Queens, a borough in the city. The mother, who had a difficult career as a computer systems analyst in Ecuador now does babysitting. The father, who had a series of low-paid engineering jobs in Ecuador, and had already studied for an unfinished engineering degree in New York in the 1980s, now works as a draftsman for a Chinese immigrant-owned construction company. The father arrived clandestinely via Texas in 2001, while the mother and daughter arrived in New York on tourist visas, but overstayed in the same year. The son was born in Miami and is an American citizen. They are therefore a ‘mixed status family’, where the son is legal and the daughter is undocumented. While the son can travel freely back and forth between Ecuador and the United States, and pursue a formal job in the US, he wishes to return to Ecuador and the family feels that he has taken his citizenship for granted. Meanwhile, the mother has tried to use her son’s citizenship status to obtain a ‘green card’ (meaning a permanent residency card) for herself.
