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Title: Does Legal Status Affect Educational Attainment in Immigrant Families?

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: Of the estimated 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., 1.1 million are chil- dren. Due to differential treatment in the labor market, teenage undocumented immigrants face low returns to schooling. To measure the effect of legal status on the educational choices of Hispanic teenagers, we compare siblings who differ in their legal status due to their birth country. We find teenagers who were born in Mexico are 2.6 percentage points more likely to be out of school than their U.S. born siblings. Alternative explanations, such as differences in prenatal or childhood environment, appear largely unable to explain this result, suggesting that legal status has a significant impact on schooling decisions. Ac- counting for these alternative explanations to the extent possible and using proxies for legal status in U.S. census, we show that being undocumented reduces the number of years of high school by between 0.13 and 0.17 years. Back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that providing legal status increases an undocumented worker’s lifetime wages by $8,455 and his lifetime net government fiscal contribution by $4,257, with estimated aggregate impact across all undocumented Hispanics over 75 years of $20 billion in increased earnings and $9 billion in increased fiscal contribution.

Url: https://ntanet.org/wp-content/uploads/proceedings/2017/NTA2017-362.pdf

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Authors: Liscow, Zachary; William , Woolston, G

Publisher: Yale Law School

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Education, Migration and Immigration, Work, Family, and Time

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