Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

For immigrant students lacking documentation of U.S. citizenship, daily school attendance can be risky. From immigration enforcement that occurs at bus stops to the general exposure via commuting to school, undocumented students and their families face risks of apprehension (and therefore deportation) just by attending school. This means their daily choice to attend school does not simply involve the costs and benefits to education, but also the risk of apprehension. Using an unique educational panel where I am able to identify individual students who lack documentation, I compare the differential attendance choices of undocumented-Hispanic and documented-Hispanic to other non-Hispanic students. I then match these attendance records to a decade of daily Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) apprehension records in the same county of this school district. While I currently do not see differential attendance behavior of students in the face of objective deportation risk (actual numbers of day to day apprehensions by ICE), I present evidence that the perception of such risks could be a real driver for differential behavior. Using a combination of Google Trends, local Spanish-language newspaper archival records, and legislative events, I show that differential attendance choices seem to occur only on the days perceived to be the most hostile. Namely, the days when the state's anti-immigration works its way through the courts. I present unique evidence of this behavior, though it occurs less than popular consensus might suggest, due to the complex administrative factors these populations face.