published in: Journal of Public Economics, 2024, 233, 105101
Immigrants comprise nearly 20% of the child care workforce in the U.S. This paper studies the impact of a major immigration enforcement policy, Secure Communities (SC), on the structure and functioning of the child care market. Relying on the staggered introduction of SC across counties between 2008 and 2014, we find that the program reduced children's participation in center-based child care programs. The estimated reductions are substantially larger among disadvantaged children, raising questions about the possibility of health and developmental spillovers.
We also find that SC reduced the supply and wages of immigrant and native child care workers in the center-based sector. We provide descriptive evidence that immigrants and natives may not compete for the same jobs: immigrant child care teachers are more highly skilled, and the children assigned to their classrooms differ on some observable characteristics. Therefore, immigrants and natives are likely to be complements to child care service production.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.