| Sumario: | Research shows the children of educationally-select immigrant groups benefit from a cultural advantage that allows them to realise higher educational outcomes than scholars would predict based on their parental education level alone. Among native-born families, childrearing practices, such as participation in youth extracurricular activities outside of school and home, have been shown to guide youth educational outcomes. But scholars have not fully explained how these cultural practices matter for the children of immigrants. Based on comparative ethnographic research, I examine how Armenian immigrant parents of divergent education levels converge in their desire to cultivate ethnic identification among their children by enrolling them in youth extracurricular activities found in ethnic community organisations. I argue that although working-class immigrants bring their children to these organisations to cultivate their children's ethnic identification, they also unknowingly expose them to the organisationally embedded cultural capital offered at these sites that youth later draw on for their educational mobility. I conclude that cultivating ethnic identification among educationally-select immigrants functions as a protective social factor because it extends unanticipated material gains to the children of working class coethnics, a phenomenon I call protective ethnicity.
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