The "sort of Americans:" American children of undocumented migrants

Does a migrant parent’s documentation status affect American offspring’s educational outcomes? To address this question, I exploit the exogenous discontinuity in likelihood of legal status generated by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which stated that any immigrant who could prove continuous residence in the U.S. since January 1, 1982 was eligible for legalization. I find that parents’ documentation status does influence native-born offspring’s outcomes. In particular, in reduced form results using 2000 census data, I find that American fourteen year-olds whose parents were likely IRCA-eligible immigrants are 8.6 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in high school (as opposed to still attending middle school) than peers whose parents were ineligible immigrants.  I address a key identification concern, namely the fact that the IRCA-eligibility cut-off coincides with the 1981-82 recession in the United States. This coincidence raises the following concerns: if children of post-1981 immigrants have worse educational outcomes in 2000, this could be because recession-time immigrants have worse labor market trajectories, or because immigrants self-select differently in recession years. I provide evidence against these possible interpretations with alternative regression specifications and with a falsification test that uses data from 1970s and 1990s recessions in the United States. I also provide evidence that results are not driven by differential return migration selection patterns for IRCA-eligible and -ineligible individuals, nor by IRCA fraud. Finally, I explore potential causal channels, and find that one key channel through which parental legal status seems to affect children’s education is through father’s labor market outcomes.