Breaking Down the Wall: The Effect of Immigration Enforcement and Nonprofit Services on Undocumented Student Academic Performance

Abstract Much of public administration and nonprofit research centers on issues of race and gender, but citizenship remains underdeveloped for a variety of reasons, especially due to a lack of data on the undocumented community. The first research aim of this study is to identify how immigration enforcement affects undocumented student performance. The second contribution is to understand the effect of how legal service provision by immigrant-serving nonprofits comes into play. Theoretically, these services work toward helping buffer the negative implications of community arrests and deportations on student performance. We test our theoretical arguments using a unique dataset comprised of student-level performance metrics of 2 million Latino students – including nearly 225,000 undocumented students – in Texas public schools. These data are merged with county and district-level data that reflect the level of immigrant deportations and the presence of immigrant-serving nonprofits (ISOs) in their communities. This research finds that immigration enforcement negatively impacts undocumented student performance. Furthermore, ISOs can help limit these effects and improve educational performance.