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IZA Discussion Paper No. 15821
December 2022
Secure Communities as Immigration Enforcement: How Secure Is the Child Care Market?

published in: Journal of Public Economics, 2024, 233, 105101

Immigrants comprise nearly 20% of the child care workforce in the U.S. This paper studies the impact of a major immigration enforcement policy, Secure Communities (SC), on the structure and functioning of the child care market. Relying on the staggered introduction of SC across counties between 2008 and 2014, we find that the program reduced children's participation in center-based child care programs. The estimated reductions are substantially larger among disadvantaged children, raising questions about the possibility of health and developmental spillovers. We also find that SC reduced the supply and wages of immigrant and native child care workers in the center-based sector. We provide descriptive evidence that immigrants and natives may not compete for the same jobs: immigrant child care teachers are more highly skilled, and the children assigned to their classrooms differ on some observable characteristics. Therefore, immigrants and natives are likely to be complements to child care service production.

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Mark Fallak
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Olga Nottmeyer
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+352 585-855-501
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The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

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