Long Term Effects of Legal Status/DACA Across Local Ecosystem and Through Changes in Immigration Federalism

• In Event: 2174 - Immigration, Federalism, and Integration in U.S. States and Localities

Abstract

Abstract -- This paper will report findings from a longitudinal study of the long term effects of lacking, having or gaining or losing legal status (especially Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA,) for the life chances of individuals, their families/friends, across what I call legal status and institutional ecosystems. The project compares the trajectories of persons having/lacking legal status over the medium and long term, and identifies how local variation in ecosystems integrates or protects, and/or excludes or exploits them. Analytically, DACA created a population of legal status “category changers” that can help illuminate legal status effects. This research is underway, originally embedded within a larger service-evaluation project. This paper will report findings from our research to date, which is continuing through 2018. Because we have been at work since 2015, we have before and after data on the effects of the new federal administration’s changes in policy, which amount to a renegotiation of immigration federalism, and which have already manifest themselves at the local level.

Author

• Robert Courtney Smith, City University of New York-Baruch College and The Graduate Center