Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children
large number of children per worker on average in agriculture gave these two sectors the highest ratio of children overall per working adult (89%). Almost two-thirds (63%) of children with undocumented parents working in manufacturing were U.S.-born citizens. Citizen shares of children were similar across all the other major industries except for agriculture where only 43% of children were citizens. Children of undocumented parents working in manufacturing and agriculture were slightly older on average than children of parents in other industries, and the children whose parents worked in construction were slightly younger. The manufacturing jobs taken by undocumented immigrants tend to be stable, wellpaying jobs, at least in contrast to agricultural and service-sector jobs. As a result, as it appears from the 2005 data, undocumented immigrants in manufacturing are more likely than workers in other sectors to have families, and these families are well-established with high shares of U.S.-citizen children as well as older children. Based on the national data, we would expect more than half of undocumented workers in our study sites to have children and for the ratio of children to adults to exceed 80%. Variations in the number of children by geographic region of the United States. The sites selected for the study were located in three of the nation’s four major Census geographic regions: the West, Midwest, and Northeast. The West, with its proximity to the southwestern border with Mexico, has the largest and most well-established undocumented immigrant populations. Undocumented communities in other regions of the country tend to be newer and less well established. The Northeast is the region farthest from the border and has the lowest number of undocumented immigrants, who tend to be more recent arrivals to the region.46 Thus, one would expect ICE enforcement activities in the West to affect more children, and those in the Northeast to affect fewer children. Across the three study regions, undocumented immigrants in the West were the most likely to have children in 2005 (56%), followed by those in the Midwest (46%) and those in the Northeast (42%). The West also had the largest average number of children per worker (1.2) and per family (2.2). The ratio of children to undocumented working-age adults was far higher in the West (65%) than in the other regions. The Northeast had the lowest ratio (41%). In both the Midwest and West, two-thirds of children with undocumented parents were U.S.-born citizens, compared with 56% in the Northeast. Based on these data, we would expect that the workers arrested at the Northeast study site (New Bedford) would have fewer children on average than those arrested in the West and Midwest sites (Greeley and Grand Island).
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