Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals Research Articles

Consequences of deferred action for childhood arrivals for parent health: Applying a social foreground perspective

AbstractObjectiveThis study applies a social foreground perspective to assess whether the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program impacted the self‐rated health of coresident parents of DACA‐eligible individuals.BackgroundDACA status grants a temporary work permit and allows for a stay of deportation for undocumented persons who entered the United States as children. Although research points to the positive health benefits of DACA for its recipients, less is known about whether the program affects the health of family members, including parents.MethodThis study uses data from the National Health Interview Study (2008–2015) on foreign‐born adults and their coresident parents. We applied a difference‐in‐differences design to examine whether the self‐rated health of coresident mothers and fathers changed following the passage of DACA for DACA‐eligible individuals.ResultsIn contrast to expectations, DACA was associated with worse self‐rated health among coresident, partnered parents. These results may be because DACA also decreased the likelihood of coresiding with parents and changed the composition of coresident parents themselves. Following DACA, fewer eligible offspring lived with parents overall, but among those that did, parents tended to be older and less healthy.ConclusionFindings underscore how DACA may be used as a resource to support older parents experiencing health challenges, in particular among older undocumented immigrants, who make up a growing share of the undocumented population in the United States.

“I’m in a Good Position to Advocate Now”: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Recipients’ Deployment of Navigational Capital and Brokerage in the D.C. Metropolitan Region

During its decade-plus of existence, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has concretely changed recipients’ incorporation trajectories and facilitated their transition into adulthood. Because it was established by Executive Order, though, DACA has always had an uncertain future. Since 2017, DACA recipients have endured a rollercoaster of lawsuits and court decisions that have evoked profound psychological distress. Yet during this time, they have also developed strategies for negotiating ongoing uncertainty and promoting immigrants’ collective well-being. We present results from a longitudinal (2016–2021) study of DACA recipients in the D.C. Metropolitan region, which encompasses multiple jurisdictions with different local policies. Applying a community cultural wealth (CCW) framework, we demonstrate that DACA recipients have become adept at leveraging place-based navigational capital into everyday acts of brokerage performed for more legally precarious family and community members. DACA recipients promote collective well-being specifically by brokering access to services, promoting household security, and developing innovative advocacy strategies. Results underscore the importance of policies to address immigrants’ exclusion at multiple levels and to ensure that DACA recipients are able to continue performing these critical acts of brokerage.

The structural violence of DACA and youth resistance.

This study examined how youth who have received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) experience structural violence and their responses to that violence. Participants included 20 Latinx individuals, between the ages of 16 and 29, who migrated to the U.S. before age 16. The majority held DACA status. In-depth qualitative, narrative interviews were conducted with each participant. Narratives revealed multiple ways that DACA youth experience structural violence, including (a) challenges with the application process, (b) the financial burden created by the lack of access to federal financial aid for higher education, and (c) fears surrounding DACA. Youth responded to structural violence via (a) paying it forward, (b) radical hope, (c) social support, and (d) undocumented pride. Narratives demonstrate the ways in which young people experience structural violence despite the benefits of DACA and how some resist this violence. Implications for a legislative pathway to citizenship are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Responding to Alternatives

This Article is the first to comprehensively analyze administrative agencies’ obligation to respond to alternatives to their chosen course of action. The obligation has been around at least since the Supreme Court’s decision in Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Ass’n of the United States, Inc. v. State Farm, and it has mattered in important cases. Most recently, the Supreme Court invoked the obligation as the primary ground on which to invalidate the Trump Administration’s rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The obligation to respond to alternatives is also frequently invoked in the lower courts and in the D.C. Circuit in particular. But courts lack a consistent framework for analyzing the obligation, providing agencies with little guidance regarding which alternatives require analysis as part of their decisionmaking process. And to the extent that the obligation allows courts a backdoor opportunity to flyspeck agencies’ policy analysis, it runs the risk of displacing agencies’ expert judgments for the courts’ own, often informed only by the parties’ briefing. This Article interrogates the obligation to respond to alternatives and proposes a more stable framework for its implementation. After rooting the obligation in agencies’ general obligation to give reasons for their actions and in the values associated with agency reason-giving, the Article turns to two questions. First, to which alternatives must agencies respond? And second, what counts as a response? In answering these questions, the Article draws on broader goals associated with administrative law, which include not only promoting the values associated with reason-giving but also respecting the need for agencies to perform their tasks effectively and within a relatively stable system of judicial review that recognizes their comparative expertise advantage over the courts. In addition, it seeks to develop a framework that fits with and helps to explain the results in most cases invoking the obligation to respond to alternatives. At the same time, the framework allows us to more clearly identify occasions where courts have reached incorrect results or been overbroad in their framing of the obligation to respond to alternatives.

Between Subjects and Beneficiaries. DACA in the horizon of the fight for rights of undocumented migrants in the United States

By positioning the subjects of the political action in the center of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), we aim to return to the Arendtian perplexities of human rights to name a scene in which undocumented migrants dispute the meanings of citizenship and subjectivity of rights in the United States. The article was divided in three movements: the impacts of DACA in the context of being undocumented in the country; the perplexities of human rights; and mobilizing such critique in four framings of citizenship presented by Nicholls to interpret the arrangements in our scenes. We conclude on the multiple and paradoxical effects of this policy, a legal-political temporary fix and an opening for the dispute of meanings.

Crossed wires: Understanding policy feedback in varying policy environments

Abstract Previous scholarship has shown that experience with public policies can affect citizens’ willingness to participate in politics. However, few studies have examined whether the effect of experience with policy is moderated by existing policy environments. We focus on the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and examine how it affects foreign-born Latinos’ political orientation and behavior. We find a relationship between enrollment in DACA and political orientation and that the effect on participation is moderated by the intensity of enforcement in an immigrant’s county of residence.

Voices of fear and uncertainty: Exploring the employment struggles of female DACA recipients

AbstractThis qualitative study explores the employment experiences of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients in the United States during the Trump administration and the COVID‐19 pandemic. Through in‐depth interviews with nine female DACA recipients, this study examines the ways in which the Trump administration and COVID‐19 impacted the employment and sense of security of DACA recipients. The findings suggest that the uncertainty surrounding the future of the DACA program and delayed renewals for DACA recipients work authorizations had significant implications for their employment and livelihood. These findings provide important implications for counselors, future research, and advocacy.

Metaphor analysis meets lexical strings: finetuning the metaphor identification procedure for quantitative semantic analyses.

Recent years have witnessed the development of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP/VU), a step-by-step protocol designed to identify metaphorically-used words in discourse. However, MIP(VU)'s merits notwithstanding, the procedure poses a problem to scholars intending to use its output as the basis for a semantic field analysis involving a quantitative component. Depending on the research question, metaphor analysts may be interested in chunks of language situated above the procedure's standardized level of analysis (i.e., the lexical unit or lexeme), including phrases and sentences. Yet, attempts to decenter the method's exclusive focus on metaphor-related words have been the target of critique, among others on the grounds of their lack of clear unit-formation guidelines and, hence, their inconsistent unit of analysis and measurement. Drawing on data derived from a Spanish-language US-based newspaper's coverage of the migration program known as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), this article describes challenges that analysts can run into when attempting to use a dataset containing atomized metaphor-related words as the input for subsequent quantitative semantic analyses. Its main methodological contribution consists in a proposal and illustration of three possible methods to extend the existing MIP(VU)-protocol in such a way as to allow it to capture metaphorical strings, on top of lexemes, in a reliable and systematic manner. The first two methods are procedural, and entail formulating a-priori grouping-directives based on the research question(s). One departs from semasiological criteria (Method 1) and the other takes an onomasiological approach (Method 2). The third method works bottom-up, involving the ad hoc grouping of lexemes and adding a descriptive parameter meant to keep track of grouping-decisions made by the analyst, thereby safeguarding transparency at all times.

Will DACA Recipients Return to Their Birth Countries If DACA Is Ended?

Executive Summary Will recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) leave the United States if a legal challenge succeeds in ending this important program? The fate of over 600,000 current DACA recipients may depend on answers to this question in one expert report and one online survey question, which a Texas District Court found to show “a quantifiable percentage” would leave. Had the District Court in its DACA ruling not credited these sources, Texas’ lawsuit could have collapsed, and DACA would persist. The issue of whether DACA recipients will leave if DACA is ended will matter as this case is litigated, most likely to be decided by the Supreme Court. Drawing on research on immigrant return, DACA recipients, survey questions, priming, and intention-behavior gap, this paper argues that this expert report and the single online survey question used by the District Court cannot support the inferences regarding the return of DACA recipients to their birth countries. Rather, relevant research points toward DACA recipients staying in the United States, even if DACA were terminated. The paper recommends offering DACA recipients and long term undocumented residents a short path to legal status and citizenship, reassessing whether these two sources can support the conclusions drawn by the District Court; and analyzing the benefits accruing from DACA to Texas and all Texans, including US citizen children of DACA recipients, in assessing the claimed injury to the state.

Anti-immigration policy and mental health: Risk of distress and trauma among deferred action for childhood arrivals recipients in the United States.

This study examined the association between immigration legal status and distress from the announcement of the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program among individuals affected by this potentially traumatic event (PTE), along with identifying relevant risk factors. Participants (N = 233) affected by the termination announcement provided cross-sectional self-reports on distress from the announcement that was measured using the Impact of Events Scale-Revised. Of the participants, 40.7% met the clinical cutoff for distress from the PTE indicative of posttraumatic stress disorder. DACA recipients had significantly higher levels of distress from the PTE compared with non-DACA undocumented immigrants and documented counterparts, χ²(2, N = 233) = 23.25, p < .001. After controlling for covariates, being a DACA recipient (OR = 4.11, 95% confidence interval [1.99, 8.50], p < .001), being male (OR = 2.06, [1.05, 4.03], p = .035), and having lower financial security (OR = .54, [.38, .75], p < .001) were significantly associated with distress. The future of DACA recipients is uncertain, which can be trauma inducing. The field of psychology needs to make space for this kind of experience as potentially traumatic. Advocacy efforts to shift immigration policies can be strengthened to alter the negative effects of the potential termination of DACA on those affected by it. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The impact of COVID-19 and anti-immigration policy on an undocumented student in the United States: a qualitative case study

Background The change of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has significantly impacted DACA students’ mental health in the United States. The study aimed to conduct a qualitative case study for understanding the effects of DACA program on one undocumented college student’s life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We conducted a two-component qualitative case study, the online survey and the subsequent in-depth interview, with a DACA college student, Leah (pseudonym), in California who was in an ongoing fear of deportation before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We used Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) and General Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) in the online survey to measure her level of depression and anxiety. QSR NVivo was used to analyze the verbatim transcription. Results Leah’s anxiety and depression level just before the Supreme Court’s decision to the DACA termination in June 2020 was higher than during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. Leah’s concern still remained due to the uncertain legal status in the United States even after the presidential election. Conclusions During 2020-2022, the anti-immigration policy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the presidential election has impacted a DACA student’s mental health status. However, because of the unstable legal status and fear of deportation in the United States, our participant’s anxiety and depression level maintained high. From our participant’s standpoint, more policy support is needed to sustain her legal status, financial stability, and mental health during the pandemic.

Institutional agents’ perspectives of institutional support for undocumented and DACA community college students

AbstractGiven that community colleges enroll most of the undocumented and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) students across the nation, there is an economic and moral imperative to understand how the sociopolitical environment has shifted educational opportunities for undocumented and DACA students. This paper unveils how institutional agents use their agency to shape the college community college experiences of undocumented and DACA students. Findings include institutional agents’ perspectives on navigating challenges, resistance, and virtues in the current sociopolitical climate. Recommendations are discussed to enhance humanizing and holistic institutional support for DACA and undocumented college students, as well as a proposed undocuservingness framework.Practical Takeaways It is important for insititutional agents to use legal and racial consciouness to better serve undocumented and DACA students. Hispanic Serving Community Colleges need to unpack servingness within the context of supporting undocumented and DACA students

Labor market impacts of state-level occupational licensing of undocumented immigrants

Since 2015, several U.S. states have begun granting professional or occupational licenses to recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. In this study, we examine the differences in the issuance of such licenses at the state level to estimate their effect on the labor market outcomes of DACA recipients. Using data from the Current Population Survey spanning the period from 2012 to 2020, we find that granting access to occupational licensing has had a significant positive impact on the wages of DACA recipients, raising them by 12.5 percent. We also observe that this wage premium is greater for male recipients than for female ones. Furthermore, we find that the wage premium and increased hours of work resulting from access to licenses are most pronounced for recipients over 24 years of age who have completed their formal education and have already established their careers. These findings suggest that access to occupational licenses can improve the labor market outcomes of Dreamers. Therefore, expanding access to public benefits, such as licensing, can substantially benefit DACA recipients in states where such access has been broadened.

Institutional isomorphism in corporate Twitter discourse on citizenship and immigration in India and the United States

AbstractHigh net‐worth individuals (HNIs) play important roles in influencing policy through their voices. Technology‐mediated means of addressing issues, such as social media activism, have become a central part of such policy advocacy. We examined the Twitter engagement of the 50 wealthiest individuals and their ‘networks’ in India and the United States, specifically their engagement with citizens' movements and policy issues related to citizenship and immigration, with a focus on debates triggered by the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), respectively. We quantified the level of engagement of ‘HNI networks’ with these debates through a textual analysis of their tweets using computational methods combined with manual annotation, followed by qualitative analysis and comparison of subjective meanings attached by actors to key terms. We found that American HNIs leveraged their social media presence to advocate for inclusive immigration and naturalisation policies, their model of advocacy characterised by confrontation, collective action and ownership by key actors, thus exhibiting mimetic isomorphism. Indian HNIs' tweets on CAA were few and far between, with no call for change and no evidence of either collective action or individual ownership, and a hesitation to challenge the central government, thus exhibiting coercive isomorphism.

DACA legal services: One federal policy, different local implementation approaches

AbstractIn the United States, the absence of federal funding and coordination for immigration legal services often means that local resources determine immigrants' access to justice. Many of these resources go toward supporting immigrants caught in the detention and deportation system. Yet local support is also critical for implementing federal benefits programs such as the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. In this article, we draw on 146 interviews with representatives of legal services providers and their nonprofit collaborators in three immigrant‐dense metropolitan areas—the Greater Houston Area, the New York City Metro Area, and the San Francisco Bay Area—to analyze the distinct, place‐specific service and collaboration models that have emerged over the last decade to meet demand for DACA implementation support. Specifically, we examine how local context shapes the types of actors that immigrants can turn to for immigration legal services, and how they have coordinated on the ground in distinct ways during a time of increasing uncertainty.

Mechanism mapping: A qualitative study of how different forms of instability mediate the relationship between legal status and immigrant mental well-being

Scholarship on undocumented immigrants has linked irregular forms of legal status to depressed mental health experiences and outcomes. The children of undocumented immigrants have also been shown to report mental health issues. More regular forms of legal status, like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), have been shown to improve psychological outcomes for migrants and their children. Though the relationship between legal status and mental well-being has appeared again and again in the literature, less work has explored the mechanisms through which legal status impacts mental well-being. This paper aims to help detail this link by drawing on 50 in-depth interviews with DACA-recipient and undocumented (DACA-ineligible) immigrants conducted from 2017 to 2018 (pre- and post-DACA rescindment). Thematic analysis identified three forms of instability (nation-state, residential and household) that mediate the influence of legal status on the mental well-being of immigrants and their families. Coping with nation-state, residential and household changes depleted immigrant's mental and emotional resources, hurting their mental well-being. More regular forms of legal status (like DACA) suppressed the occurrence of instability, bolstering the mental well-being reports of DACA-recipients compared to their undocumented counterparts. Yet the program's rescission in September 2017, spiked the threat of future instability for DACA-respondents leading their negative mental well-being reports to echo those of undocumented respondents. We propose that experiencing or even expecting these forms of instability to occur mediates the influence of legal status on mental well-being. Findings shed light on how legal status influences mental well-being and contribute to the immigrant mental health literature.

DACA Recipient Health Care Workers' Barriers to Professionalization and Deployment of Navigational Capital in Pursuit of Health Equity for Immigrants.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare entrenched health inequalities in the U.S. health care system faced by structurally marginalized immigrant communities. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients are well suited to address these social and political determinants of health due to their large presence in service positions and skill sets. Yet their potential in health-related careers is limited by unique barriers related to uncertainty about their status and training and licensure processes. We report findings from a mixed-method (interview and questionnaire) study of 30 DACA recipients in Maryland. Nearly half of participants (14; 47%) worked in health care and social service fields. The longitudinal design featured three research phases conducted between 2016 and 2021, which enabled us to observe participants' evolving career trajectories and capture their experiences during a tumultuous period (due to the DACA rescission and COVID-19 pandemic). Using a community cultural wealth (CCW) framework, we present three case studies that demonstrate challenges recipients encountered as they embarked on health-related careers, including protracted educational journeys, concerns about program completion/licensure, and uncertainty about future employment. Yet participants' experiences also revealed valuable forms of CCW they deploy, including building on social networks/collective knowledge, forging navigational capital and sharing experiential knowledge, and leveraging identity to devise innovative strategies. Results highlight the critical value of DACA recipients' CCW that renders them particularly apt brokers and advocates in promoting health equity. Yet they also reveal the urgent need for comprehensive immigration and state-licensure reform to promote DACA recipients' inclusion in the health care workforce.

Dreaming of leaving the nest? Immigration status and the living arrangements of DACAmented

This study investigates the effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on the living arrangements and housing behavior of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Using an event-study approach and difference-in-differences (DID) estimates, we compared immigrants above and below eligibility cutoffs and demonstrated that, after the adoption of the policy in June 2012, DACA-eligible immigrants were less likely to live with their parents or in multigenerational households (−12.5%) and more likely to live independently (＋15.5%). We also revealed that DACA-eligible immigrants were less likely to live in the same house (−2%) and more likely to quit ethnic enclaves (＋8%). Notably, these patterns are not explained by the known effects of DACA on income and employment outcomes. Lower rental costs (−3%) may have facilitated this transition into adulthood and the observed trends in living arrangements. The DACA also led to a decline in marriage rates among DACA-eligible individuals, although we found no evidence of significant effects on cohabitation, divorce, and intermarriage. We also found no evidence of a clear impact on fertility.

Heterogeneous Effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on Undocumented College Students’ Educational Outcomes

We investigate why prior studies examining the effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on undocumented youth's college outcomes in the United States have yielded mixed findings. We draw on unique administrative data from the City University of New York at the time of DACA's implementation and utilize difference-in-difference estimation to examine DACA's effects on undocumented students’ college GPA and interruptions to their college progress. We find that DACA's effects on the educational outcomes of undocumented students enrolled in college were heterogeneous: It had a negative effect on those who, prior to the policy, were academically high performing and taking on a heavy courseload, while it had no significant impact on low academic performers and those maintaining a light courseload. We offer a plausible explanation for this finding: DACA's newfound legal employment opportunities may have incentivized undocumented youth who were previously focused on schooling to seek out employment. In contrast, DACA may have had little impact on low achievers because they were more likely to be already working. While our study is unable to directly identify employment status, our finding that academically achieving students were negatively affected by DACA suggests that the liminal legality experienced by undocumented 1.5-generation youth has a substantive impact on their educational integration and assimilation trajectories. We contend that stopgap programs like DACA that offer contingent rights do not result in unalloyed positive benefits because they do not address undocumented youth's underlying legal precarity.

Exclusion by design: The undocumented 1.5 generation in the U.S.

This article focuses on Mexican individuals who grew up in the U.S. (1.5 generation) without documents and were not able to benefit from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or who were unable to renew their DACA. A 2012 Executive Action by former president Obama, DACA gave some undocumented youth relief from deportation and a 2-year renewable work permit provided they met certain criteria. Undocumented individuals DACA failed to reach have generally been overlooked in immigration research in favor of examining how DACA recipients' lives have been transformed by DACA. This project helps fill this gap by examining life outside of DACA, and how the program acted as an internal U.S. border of exclusion for many. This research also aids in understanding the impacts of changing government policies on vulnerable populations, especially those who are in some respects made even more vulnerable by their faith in the government, fear of the government, or are actively excluded from government programs. This investigation is part of a study that compares 20 DACA beneficiaries to 20 individuals without DACA. Through ethnographic methodologies and one-on-one interviews, this article examines the 20 research participants who fall outside DACA. It investigates why people who qualified for DACA did not apply, barriers to applying/renewing, and how members of the 1.5 generation were excluded from the program by restrictions such as date of arrival requirements. The article discusses what it means for research participants to live outside of DACA, and how they see their lives because they do not have DACA while others do. For example, what does it mean to age out of qualifying for DACA? What actions did individuals then take regarding their lack of legal status?