The Impact of DACA on Juvenile Crime and School Safety

• In Event: Youth Interventions and Crime

Abstract

Juvenile crime and student misbehavior continues to be a challenge for schools to address, which makes policies aimed at decreasing these negative outcomes immensely important. Despite not being its main focus, one such policy that may lead to a decrease in juvenile delinquency is DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. This program provides temporary protection from deportation and work authorization for eligible undocumented individuals who arrived in the United States prior to the age of 16. To be eligible, an individual must meet several criteria surrounding age and residency, as well as two specific ones that form the basis of this research: they must not have committed crimes, and they must be either in school or graduated from high school. Along with the age requirements, these criteria represent a shift in incentives for young, undocumented students – one that may change their behaviors by deterring crime and misbehavior. Thus, that is the focus of this research: did the criteria laid out by DACA lead to less juvenile crime and student misbehavior (measured by school disciplinary outcomes like suspensions and expulsions)? Using a difference-in-difference framework and the restricted access, student-level data housed at the Texas Education Research Center (ERC), I attempt to determine if, after the announcement of DACA, likely undocumented students exhibited behavioral changes. Outside of Gunadi (2021), there has not been a lot of work directly trying to determine the deterrence impacts of DACA, and for good reason – proxying for undocumented status is challenging. The Texas ERC data, however, allows for me to proxy for undocumented status much more accurately than the past literature – as they maintain several immigrant and migratory worker flags within their student data. While these flags are not directly tied to documented status, they do serve as a strong proxy for which population of students would most be affected by DACA. Using these flags to determine the treatment and control groups, I leverage variation in the age of the student when DACA was announced to determine whether younger students, specifically those who were too young to apply to DACA due to the age restrictions, exhibit lower levels of criminal and disciplinary outcomes than students who became of age to apply shortly after DACA was announced, or were already of age when the program started. The goal in comparing these two groups is to test whether the announcement of DACA, and the subsequent restrictions on getting this benefit, led to behavioral changes in students – i.e., if the program deterred juvenile crime and misbehavior. I will receive access to the data within a week of the abstract submission deadline and will be excited to share the results of this analysis by the conference in November.

Author

• Barbara Lundebjerg, Tulane University
  Presenting Author