Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

While a growing body of literature has identified some of the educational and developmental challenges associated with being undocumented and/or living in mixed-status families, few studies have directly examined the relationship between immigration enforcement activities and students’ educational outcomes. Moreover, extant research acknowledges significant limitations of measures of immigration enforcement, with prior work utilizing data on apprehensions from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at broad aggregate levels (Sattin-Bajaj & Kirksey, 2019), rollouts of policies such as the Secure Communities program (Bellows, 2018), and unexpected raids conducted by ICE in migrant communities (Lopez et al., 2018).

This paper examines the educational consequences of immigration enforcement for students in California using a novel measure of immigration enforcement: the number of ICE raids in residential areas of school districts that were documented via local media outlets. It answers the following research questions:

1. What is the relationship between the number of raids conducted by ICE as reported by local media outlets and the academic achievement, absenteeism rates, and socioemotional outcomes of students in the California CORE districts?
2. How do these relationships differ based on student-level characteristics?

Data come from the California CORE districts, which are the eight largest school districts in California including Los Angeles, Long Beach, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Fresno, San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento. Together, these eight districts educate over one million students in 1,600 schools in areas with some of the largest immigrant-origin student populations. These districts participate in a shared data and accountability system that includes student-level information on demographics, educational outcomes, teacher characteristics, school characteristics, and blind identifiers to follow students over time and connect them to each dataset. To examine how reports of ICE arrests relate to student outcomes, we exploited the data’s cross-sectional, longitudinal structure by mapping the varying frequencies and locations of ICE raids to districts in the years when they occurred. This difference-in-differences style of analyses ruled out confounding factors that also affected district outcomes around the same time or in the same schools that witnessed changes in the number of raids that were conducted in the area. Additionally, we supplemented our empirical models with multiple fixed effects to control for all year, school, grade, and student level heterogeneity.

Results suggest that districts experienced moderate increases in rates of absenteeism and decreases in ELA and math achievement in relation to the number of ICE raids that occurred nearby. Specifically, students experienced on average a 2% percentage points increase in likelihood of chronic absenteeism with each ICE raid (moderate effect size of 0.25) and 0.33 more days of missed school (moderate effect size of 0.22). Effect sizes for ELA and math declines were small but meaningful -0.09 and -0.14, respectively. Migrant students, Latino/a students, and students with special needs were disproportionately impacted by these associations. Our study adds to a small, but growing evidence base demonstrating the wide range of impacts that immigration enforcement can have on students.