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

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.