Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In the past decade, the focus of U.S. immigration enforcement policy has shifted from the border to the interior and more frequently involved parents with U.S.-citizen children. Immigration enforcement actions are also concentrated almost entirely among Hispanic immigrants: between 2003 and 2013, over 90 percent of deportations were of immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Therefore, immigration enforcement actions have increasingly affected Hispanic children living in the United States.

This paper examines effects of accelerated immigration enforcement actions in the U.S. interior on Hispanic-white educational achievement gaps. In the majority of U.S. school districts, Hispanic students score below white students on English Language Arts (ELA) and math tests. Immigration enforcement actions may increase these gaps, either by affecting families’ socioeconomic status or through other mechanisms, such as stress.

Data and Research Methods

This paper relies on the county-by-county rollout of the Secure Communities program from 2008 to 2013. Secure Communities was a partnership between the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local law enforcement agencies, the stated purpose of which was to reduce crime by removing criminal aliens. Under Secure Communities, law enforcement agencies were required to automatically submit fingerprints of arrested individuals to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT). If an individual was identified, ICE evaluated the case and then could issue a detainer against the individual. Despite its stated purpose, two previous evaluations found no effects of Secure Communities on crime rates in activated jurisdictions. However, the rollout of Secure Communities did impact children, increasing parent-child separations among deportees from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

From ICE, I use the date of Secure Communities activation for every county in the United States, as well as the total number of IDENT matches and removals by county over the course of Secure Communities. I obtain district-level Hispanic-white achievement gaps in ELA and math test scores, as well as additional demographic information on districts, from the Stanford Education Data Archives (SEDA). Information on district-level Hispanic-white achievement gaps is available from 2008-2009 through 2012-2013.

To estimate the effects of increased immigration enforcement on achievement gaps, I use OLS regression models with county and year fixed effects, with my main predictor variable of interest being an indicator variable for whether or not a county was activated for Secure Communities prior to May of the current school year. County and year fixed effects help mitigate any bias from persistent differences between counties or nation-wide policy changes in particular years that might affect Hispanic-white achievement gaps.

Conclusion

To my knowledge, this is the first study to examine the effects of immigration enforcement actions on Hispanic-white achievement gaps. Understanding what role - if any - enforcement actions have in increasing achievement gaps between Hispanic and white children can help inform future immigration enforcement policies and may suggest areas where additional resources could be deployed to address Hispanic-white achievement gaps.