Independent Task Force on Immigration and America's Future: The Roadmap

Backgrounder No. 4. This MPI Backgrounder provides data on the foreign born in the United States related to the immigrant selection criteria expected to be part of the points-system proposal. These include age, educational attainment, occupation, English proficiency, and labor force participation -- factors that may be given more emphasis than extended family relationships

State Immigration Enforcement Policies: How They Impact Low-Income Households

Over seven million U.S. children live with at least one noncitizen parent – and 80 percent of these children are US-born citizens. Close to 5 million US-citizen children live with an unauthorized immigrant parent, potentially subject to deportation. Research has shown that the deportation of a parent has serious deleterious effects on families—emotional distress, behavioral issues, and economic hardship for children—and that even the threat of deportation can hurt a family’s well-being by causing fear that restricts mobility, access to jobs, and use of public and private supports in times of need. The election of President Trump, with his plans to increase efforts to identify and deport unauthorized immigrants, has signaled a harsher policy environment for immigrant families than in recent years. In State Immigration Enforcement Policies: How They Impact Low-Income Households , researchers at NCCP, Urban Institute, and Migration Policy Institute looked at how the changing immigration policy environment is likely to affect immigrant families. Specifically, the report examines whether immigrant families living in states that ramped up enforcement of federal policy saw any changes in their material hardship, or how often fear of deportation affected their ability to pay for essentials (such as rent, utilities, or food). The report highlights important connections between immigration policy enforcement and well-being in immigrant households

Immigration Status and Child Well-Being in the United States

Immigration inflows have changed the face of the US child population. Today, almost one-quarter of children in the United States have at least one immigrant parent, and of those, 5.5 million have at least one undocumented immigrant parent. About 1 million children are themselves undocumented immigrants. In this dissertation, I analyze the implications of parents' and children's immigration status for various dimensions of child well-being. I draw mainly on the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A. FANS), a survey representative of Los Angeles County, which contains direct measures of respondents' immigration status, but also on the National Health Interview Survey and Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, to explore children's health insurance coverage, access to healthcare, physical health, mental health, and academic performance in Latino families. I find that access to health insurance and a usual healthcare provider are severely constrained for children in undocumented immigrant families, that is, for children who are themselves undocumented, but that such children still get annual checkups at rates similar to other children. Some evidence suggests they may receive less thorough care than children in native families. Evidence on the health status of children of undocumented immigrants is mixed. Looking at children's behavioral problems, as a measure of children's mental health, I find that children in all immigrant families show greater overall and internalizing behavioral problems than children in native families. But children in undocumented immigrant families, who are themselves undocumented, show the greatest mental health problems, particularly through externalizing behaviors. Children in all types of immigrant families, regardless of legal status, tend to show superior cognitive skills on letter word identification tests compared to children in native Latino families, but show similar scores to children in native families on applied math tests and reading comprehension tests. Taken together, my findings suggest that children in Latino, undocumented immigrant families in Los Angeles face particular threats to their healthy growth and development, while children in mixed-status families appear to share experiences more with children in legal immigrant families than with children in undocumented immigrant families

COVID-19s Effects on U.S. Immigration and Immigrant Communities, Two Years On

More than two years into the COVID-19 era, the United States has seen more than 1 million people die of the virus, and a sharp recession and uneven recovery that have caused hardship for many families. And while the pandemic has touched the lives of all U.S. residents, immigrants have been among the hardest hit. Understanding how the pandemic has reshaped U.S. immigration policies and levels, and how the pandemic and associated economic downturn and recovery have affected immigrant families, can guide better policymaking as the United States grapples with COVID-19's ongoing impacts and faces future public-health crises, natural disasters, and other emergencies.This report takes a look back. It first details immigration policy changes the U.S. government made after the emergence of COVID-19 and the effect these policy changes and visa processing challenges have had on immigration levels to the United States. Next, it describes the essential roles that immigrant workers have played during the pandemic in health care and other fields, and early evidence on the disproportionate impact of the novel coronavirus on immigrants' health. Finally, the report describes the high unemployment rates foreign-born workers experienced during the pandemic, the limited access many noncitizens have had to the safety nets that many citizens have relied upon after losing jobs, and innovative approaches states, localities, and nonprofit organizations have used to support immigrant families

U.S. Government Rush to Evacuate Afghan Allies and Allocate Sufficient Special Visas Comes at Eleventh Hour

Confronting the withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan by the end of August, the U.S. government at the eleventh hour is taking steps to address the fate of Afghans whose assistance during two decades of war has put their lives and those of their families at risk. President Joe Biden in July announced a plan dubbed Operation Allies Refuge to evacuate from the country the Afghans whose visa applications have been stuck in a years-long limbo. And the House, in a rare overwhelmingly bipartisan vote, on July 22 voted to increase the number of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV), a special category of visas created by Congress, to accommodate the arrivals. These actions came just weeks before the U.S. military ends operations in Afghanistan that began shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks orchestrated by al Qaeda, which used the country as its base of operations

What happened to the wages of Mexican immigrants? Trends and interpretations

Over the past several decades the wages earned by Mexican immigrants stagnated relative to those earned by native Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites. In this article we draw on data from the decennial census and American Community Survey to understand why and how this stagnation occurred. We test two competing explanations: a decline in the quality of successive cohorts of Mexican immigrants and a shift in the political economy that increased the number of people lacking full labor rights in the United States while increasing discrimination and exclusion against such people. We present evidence in favor of the latter explanation by showing that observed quality increased rather than decreased and that what happened instead was a systematic decline in the returns to various measures of human capital and a wholesale drop in wages for all immigrants after 2000

A Profile of Current DACA Recipients by Education, Industry, and Occupation

This fact sheet examines predicted DACA expirations, as well as offers estimates for the educational and workforce characteristics of the nearly 690,000 current DACA holders. Among the national and state-level estimates offered: school enrollment and educational attainment, labor force participation, and top industries and occupations of employment