Why Do Immigrant Youths Who Never Enroll in U.S. Schools Matter? School Enrollment Among Mexicans and Non-Hispanic Whites

Abstract

Using data from the 2000 Public Use Sample of the U.S. Census, this research examines how estimates of school enrollment and school-work patterns among Mexican-origin adolescents are affected by including or excluding young immigrants who never enrolled in U.S. schools. The analysis demonstrates that a non-trivial share of adolescents who were born in Mexico almost certainly never enrolled in U.S. schools; these youth most likely migrated to the United States for work. Excluding these adolescents from analyses substantially reduces gaps in school enrollment between Mexicans and Whites and between native and foreign-born Mexicans. Excluding never-enrolled immigrant youth also changes the relationship between duration of U.S. residence and idleness among Mexican immigrant youth, revealing that additional years of residence in the United States increase the likelihood of being out of school and not working compared to in school and not working. Overall, inferences about the level of school enrollment and intra-ethnic differences in school enrollment by duration of residence depend on how those who are likely to have never enrolled in U.S. schools are treated. Inferences about interethnic differences also are affected, although they are somewhat less sensitive to this issue.

Mexican-American Educational Stagnation

“…Spatial variation is taken into account with a binary variable distinguishing adolescents who were living in a state along the Mexican border (i.e., California, Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas). Oropesa and Landale's (2009) results suggest that Mexican-origin youth residing in this group of states are more likely to be enrolled in high school than peers residing in other regions of the country. The disparity might be related to the Southwest's status as a traditional destination for Mexican immigrants.…”

“…Of a migrant group's first three generations in the United States, the immigrant optimism hypothesis predicts that the second will have lowest overall dropout rate because members possess the dual advantages of learning English from birth and having access to optimistic parents, unlike the first and third, respectively (Kao and Tienda 1995). Empirical corroboration of Kao and Tienda's argument is growing (Driscoll 1999;Perreira, Harris, and Lee 2006;Oropesa and Landale 2009). For instance, Driscoll (1999) finds that second-generation Hispanic youth are only around half as likely to drop out of high school as third-generation counterparts after controlling for a host of variables measuring family composition and socioeconomic resources.…”

“…demographic group into broader US society. Much research on this topic focuses on patterns of educational attainment, particularly high school completion (Landale, Oropesa, and Llanes 1998;Grogger and Trejo 2002;Fry 2003; President's Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans 2003;Reed et al 2005;Oropesa and Landale 2009;Park and Myers 2010;Bachmeier and Bean 2011). Consistent with the large numbers of manual laborers in the Mexico-to-US migration stream, this work demonstrates that Mexican-American youth drop out of high school at significantly higher rates than non-Hispanic whites.…”

“…Familism is a value orientation commonly attributed to traditional Mexican culture that assigns greater weight to kin roles and needs than to the interests of the individual and, as a result, encourages marriage and fertility (Landale and Oropesa 2007). Much work in this area proposes that familistic outlooks underlie the relatively high marriage and fertility rates observed in the general Mexican-origin population and, conversely, that declines in nuptiality and childbearing across Mexican immigrant generations stem from attenuation in familism accompanying the assimilation process (Oropesa and Landale 2004;Landale, Schoen, and Daniels 2010). In contrast, structural theories focus on differences in socioeconomic constraints in explaining the distinctive family patterns of Mexican Americans (Raley, Durden, and Wildsmith 2004;Frank and Heuveline 2005).…”

How states can reduce the dropout rate for undocumented immigrant youth: The effects of in-state resident tuition policies

“… 9 Some researchers suggest using an even narrower age range (15–17; Fischer 2010; Oropesa and Landale 2009). The sample size was too small to run on this group, but I did run additional labor migrant checks.…”