progress both directly, due to state policies limiting access for undocumented immigrants, and indirectly through its association with family poverty and diminished expectations for the future. Because undocumented children have a legal right to K-12 education in the United States, children\'s legal status may become most salient as students leave high school and consider college enrollment, as undocumented students\' access to higher education is limited in a many states ([@SOT040C5]). Yet ethnographic work suggests that these barriers might influence earlier decisions about completing high school ([@SOT040C1]; [@SOT040C17]; [@SOT040C45]).

Thus, the transition from high school to college represents a critical juncture at which legal status is likely to exert an important influence on immigrant children\'s educational attainment, as well as the pathways they follow during the transition to adulthood. AsStates primarily to work and who were never enrolled in U.S. schools by limiting our sample to those arriving to the United States before 14 years of age and having completed at least 8 years of schooling.

These criteria should exclude children who dropped out of school prior to migration because students typically complete seventh grade at 13 years of age; thus, an immigrant who arrived at 13 years of age and has completed at least 8 years of schooling would normally have completed at least 1 of these years in the United States. Therefore, the group of immigrant youth we evaluate here follows what is often referred to as the 1.5 generation. The high school-aged sample sizes used in our analysis are 728 for MCA immigrants, 3,177 for Latino natives and 17,917 for