Falling Through the Cracks? Grade Retention and School Dropout among Children of Likely Unauthorized Immigrants

摘要

In 2009, 23 percent of children under the age of 18 in the United States resided in an immigrant household and 5.1 million of the 17.1 million children of immigrants had at least one unauthorized immigrant parent (Passel and Cohn 2011). Although nearly three-fourths of the children living with undocumented parents are citizens by birth, they often face significant social and economic disadvantages due to a parent's unauthorized status (Passel and Taylor 2010; Debry 2012). For instance, these children experience episodes of family separation when their parents are apprehended, deported, or unable to re-enter the United States. Even if their parents are not detained, children still endure increased fear, stress, anxiety, changes in sleeping and eating patterns, anger, and physical ailments as their families find it necessary to relocate or to start living in the shadows in order to evade apprehension (Chaudry et al. 2010; Lopez 2011). These circumstances can result in difficulties concentrating, disruptive classroom behaviors, and school absences, all of which can have detrimental impacts on the schooling progression of these children (Capps et al. 2007; Chaudry et al. 2010). In this paper, we evaluate how intensified interior immigration enforcement impacts the likelihood that children of unauthorized immigrants will repeat a grade or drop out of school. Using a weighted index of the intensity of interior immigration enforcement at the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level, we find that increased enforcement has the largest impact on younger children ages 6 to 13. The estimates, which account for the nonrandom residential location of children and their families, reveal that the intensification of interior immigration enforcement raises young children's probability of repeating a grade by 6 percent and their likelihood of dropping out of school by 25.2 percent. As the nation considers large-scale immigration reform, awareness of the consequences of current immigration policies on the children of immigrants-most of them US citizens-is critical in informing the policy debate.