International Migration Review
Integration or Exclusion? The Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Composition of US Schools Attended by Mexican-Origin Youth
2025-07-31
This study examines the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic composition of schools attended by US Mexican-origin youth. On average, Mexican-origin students are double-segregated in high-minority, high-poverty schools, but the prior literature does not consider how markers of immigrant and residential integration shape differences in school compositional characteristics between Mexican-origin and non-Latino/a white students or how these factors are related to intragroup heterogeneity in Mexican-origin schooling contexts. Using the restricted-use High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), we analyze two school compositional characteristics of Mexican-origin ninth-graders: School percent white and school average peer socioeconomic status (SES). We investigate the extent to which observable factors related to immigrant integration explain school compositional differences between Mexican-origin and non-Latino/a white students, and show how school compositional characteristics differ within the Mexican-origin student group by these markers of integration. We find that several observable factors, including household SES, parental race/ethnicity, and school type and location explain around three-quarters of differences in school percent white and school SES levels between Mexican-origin and white students. School percent white and SES levels increase among Mexican-origin students whose households exhibit indicators of integration. One exception to these patterns is for parental nativity, which does not play an important role in explaining school compositional differences between Mexican-origin and white youth, or contribute to intragroup heterogeneity in Mexican-origin school composition patterns, once other markers of integration are considered. In sum, Mexican-origin students whose families exhibit socioeconomic integration, parental racial/ethnic mixing, engagement in school choice, and geographic dispersion attend less minority-concentrated and higher-SES schools.