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Suppressed Potential: Undocumented Status and Child Arrivals’ Socioeconomic Development throughout the Life Course

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Abstract

Undocumented child arrivals in the U.S. experience a “transition into illegality” in adolescence, but limited work has examined the long-term consequence of this transition on a national level due to data constraints. This article is the first to infer the legal status of individuals in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and follows the cohort from adolescence to mid-adulthood. Undocumented children have comparable high school GPA as their peers at age 14–18, showing full potential for future socioeconomic development. They have a lower college enrollment rate at age 18–26 than their documented peers, but this disadvantage is mainly due to contextual and family background factors that selected individuals into undocumented status in the first place. In contrast, undocumented status begins to play an independent role in individuals’ socioeconomic development by age 24–32 and is associated with a 56% reduction in the odds of college completion, net of selection factors. As the cohort reaches age 33–43, undocumented status continues to suppress individuals’ development and is associated with a 30% reduction in labor force earnings. These findings establish that legal exclusion increasingly suppresses child arrivals’ socioeconomic development throughout the life course, resulting in a great loss of potential.

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Notes

  1. As a check for the applicability of my findings to non-DACA recipients, I ran all analyses for just the subset of respondents born before mid-year 1981 and findings remain similar.

  2. Undocumented immigrants may also gain permanent residency through marriage, but this pathway would require the individual to first leave the U.S. and apply for a visa abroad; they may also be barred from reentering the U.S. for ten years (Cianciarulo 2014). Therefore, the pathway through marriage is essentially only open for those who entered the country lawfully.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Cullen Cohane, Michal Engelman, Jason Fletcher, Jenna Nobles, Alberto Palloni, Stephanie Robert, Fumiya Uchikoshi, Christian Michael Smith, Josefina Flores-Morales, two anonymous reviewers, and the PRPR editorial team for helpful feedback on this paper.

Funding

This work was supported by the Center for Demography and Ecology (UW-Madison) under NIA Center Grant (P2CHD047873) and the Center for Demography of Health and Aging (UW-Madison) under NIA Center Grant (P30AG017266).

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Unit 17100, 17th Floor, 700 University Ave., Toronto, ON, M5G 1Z5, Canada

    Leafia Zi Ye

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Appendix

Appendix

(See Tables

Table 7 Sample size by documentation status, original vs. retained at each wave
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7 and 

Table 8 Earnings for individuals from native-born families (by race) vs. undocumented individuals
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8).

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Ye, L.Z. Suppressed Potential: Undocumented Status and Child Arrivals’ Socioeconomic Development throughout the Life Course. Popul Res Policy Rev 44, 13 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-025-09940-8

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