Immigration Enforcement and Child OUtcomes 

Compared to the number of immigrants removed from the U.S. interior in the early 2000s, between 2008 and 2011, nearly twice as many immigrants were removed from the U.S. interior per year. The foundation of my research in this area is the premise that immigration enforcement affects not only immigrants but also their families. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that 5.1 million children living in the U.S. have at least one unauthorized parent, who is potentially a target of immigration enforcement. Although not all children with an unauthorized parent experience a parental removal due to immigration enforcement, the larger group of children with an unauthorized parent likely experience increases in stress and fear as immigration enforcement intensifies.

I use quasi-experimental methods to isolate the effects of immigration enforcement on children's academic outcomes, examining this question in two ways:

  1. To examine the effects of immigration enforcement on county-level outcomes, I use the staggered rollout of Secure Communities, a biometric sharing program ultimately activated in every U.S. county. I match information on Secure Communities with newly available measures of average county achievement from the Stanford Education Data Archives (SEDA). I find that the activation of Secure Communities was associated with decreases in average achievement for Hispanic students in English Language Arts (ELA), as well as black students in ELA and math. Similarly, I find that increases in removals are associated with decreases in achievement for Hispanic and black students. I note that the timing of rollout is potentially correlated with other county trends affecting results. This paper has been published in AERA Open.

  2. To examine the effects of immigration enforcement on individual-level outcomes, I use 2003-2004 through 2012-2013 individual-level student data from North Carolina. As the source of variation, I use applications for 287(g) programs, which are partnerships between local law enforcement and ICE. In North Carolina, nine counties established 287(g) programs, whereas another 15 counties applied to participate. I use a triple difference strategy in which I compare educational outcomes for different groups of students in these two sets of counties before and after activation of 287(g) programs. I find that the activation of 287(g) programs decreases school engagement by decreasing attendance for Hispanic students. This effect is concentrated at the top of the distribution, increasing chronic absenteeism (missing 15 or more days per year). In contrast, I observe no effect of 287(g) programs on achievement. This paper has been published in AERA Open.