Of the estimated 11.1 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, 1.1 million are children. Due to differential treatment in the labor market, teenage undocumented immigrants face low returns to schooling. To measure the effect of legal status on the educational choices of Hispanic teenagers, we compare siblings who differ in their legal status due to their birth country. We find that teenagers who were born in Mexico are 2.7 percentage points more likely to be out of school than their U.S.- born siblings. Alternative explanations, such as differences in prenatal or childhood environment, appear largely unable to explain this result, suggesting that legal status has a significant impact on schooling decisions. After accounting for these alternative explanations to the extent possible and using proxies for legal status in the U.S. Census, our results suggest that being undocumented roughly doubles high school students’ dropout rate relative to their U.S.-born siblings, with substantial wage decreases implied by back-of-the-envelope calculations.

中文翻译：

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法律地位是否对教育选择至关重要？来自移民青少年的证据

在美国估计的1,110万无证移民中，有110万是儿童。由于劳动力市场上的差别待遇，无证件的青少年移民面临的教育收益很低。为了衡量法律地位对西班牙裔青少年教育选择的影响，我们比较了因出生国家而具有不同法律地位的兄弟姐妹。我们发现，在墨西哥出生的青少年比在美国出生的兄弟姐妹失学的可能性高2.7个百分点。替代解释，例如产前或儿童时期环境的差异，似乎在很大程度上无法解释这一结果，这表明法律地位对就学决定具有重大影响。在尽可能解释了这些替代解释并使用了美国人口普查中的法律地位代理之后，