BETWEEN TWO HOMES As the world economy deteriorates, migrants who left home in search of prosperity now find they may have to uproot themselves once again. This woman, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador, may have to leave New York.

The daughter of Ecuadorean immigrants has an American college degree, but still cannot work legally in New York.

By DAVID GONZALEZ


FOR THE FATHER, the choice was obvious: An engineer with several jobs yet little money, he saw no future for his daughter and son in their struggling country, Ecuador. Eight years ago, he paid traffickers to smuggle him into Texas, then headed to New York, where his wife and children flew in as tourists, and stayed.

But the consequences of that decision have been anything but simple.

The daughter excelled in her Queens high school and graduated from college with honors, but at 22 is still living in the United States illegally. She does accounting for a small immigrant-run business, fears venturing outside the city and cannot get a driver’s license in the country she has come to love.

Meanwhile, her 17-year-old brother, who was born in the United States during an earlier stay and is thus an American citizen, enjoys privileges his family cannot, like summers in Ecuador with his cousins.

But bored and alone most afternoons, he declared last fall that he wanted to move back to the old country.

“How can he even think that?”said his mother, stunned.“We’re sacrificing our-selves so he can get a better education and a better job. After giving up everything to come here, he - the only one with papers - wants to go back?”

These four - who declined to be identified, for fear of being deported - are part of a growing group of what are often called mixed-status families. Nearly 2.3 million undocumented families, about three-quarters of those who are here illegally, have at least one child who is a United States citizen, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

This Queens family illustrates how the growing disparities within immigrant homes are pulling their members in opposite directions and complicating efforts to plan a common future.

The mother, 47, who gave up her fledgling career in Ecuador as a computer systems analyst and now babysits for money, has not had anywhere near the same opportunities in this country as the father, also 47, who found rewarding work as a draftsman.

The parents are among a rising proportion of illegal immigrants with higher educations - at least one in every four are believed to have had some college.

The father first came to New York in 1986, after graduating at the top of his class from the polytechnic university in Quito. He came legally, on a student visa, for graduate studies in engineering at City College, intending to return home to his wife.

But when the couple learned she was pregnant with their first child, he dropped out and took a factory job - violating the terms of his visa - then arranged to have his wife and baby daughter smuggled into Texas and then to New York, where he felt he could best provide for them.

“I knew I was passing into illegality,”said the father, a trim, youthful man.“It was a very difficult decision to make. But I had to support them.”

They moved to Miami and had the son, born an American citizen. But their hopes of a prosperous American life eluded them, and in 1992 they returned to Ambato, the agricultural hub in Ecuador where the father had grown up.

But as their daughter raced through school there, outpacing her classmates, the father worried about the quality of schooling in Ecuador. He resolved to give her, and her brother, the American education he never completed.

They arrived back in New York in 2001. The father found work with a Queens construction company , taking precise measurements at work sites and turning them into computerized drawings. He makes more than he would in Ecuador.

The mother, meanwhile, cares for children in cramped apartments not nearly as nice as the rambling, modern house she grew up in.

The discrepancies between their lives frayed an already strained relationship; they separated four years ago. The children spend most weekdays with their father, in the narrow attic of a dark house in Elmhurst, Queens.

On weekends, they take the subway and a bus to the apartment their mother rents in another Queens neighborhood, Bayside. Luckily for the daughter, she lives in New York, one of 10 states that allow illegal immigrants to pay resident tuition rates at public universities. She attended a highly ranked college in the City University of New York. But she still lacked the Social Security number needed just to file an application for a job or summer internship. So as her friends found $70,000-ayear jobs, she scoured college bulletin boards for a small business willing to risk hiring her for half that.

“Sometimes I felt like crying or screaming,”she said.

She and her boyfriend - a college student from Mexico who is also in the country illegally - spend their free time volunteering with the New York State Youth Leadership Council, an immigrant group pushing Congress to pass the Dream Act, which would grant legal status to high school graduates who were brought to the United States by their parents.

Her mother prefers a quicker solution: Dump the boyfriend and marry an American.

The son is tightly tied to Ecuador. As the only family member who can travel freely, he has spent three summers there, playing soccer and going to amusement parks with cousins.

He seems far less emotionally connected to Queens. But the family insists he stay in the United States.“As a citizen, all doors are open for him,”the mother said.“He knows there is a difference, that he can do what we cannot.”