This edition was written by Tara Watson and Sasha Snyder.
💡 New from us: The effects of immigration restrictions on families and talent, and how to improve community college students’ workforce outcomes
About 400,000 immigrants have been detained during the Trump administration, many leaving behind children without caregivers. CESO Director Tara Watson, in collaboration with Maria Cancian, Nissi Cantu, Lanikque Howard, and Eileen Powell, published an interactive tool that allows users to estimate the number of children affected by parental detention under different enforcement scenarios and assumptions. Estimates of how many children will be left with one or no parents and how many will interact with the child welfare system are especially valuable in the absence of reliable government data. In their accompanying analysis, the authors highlight their key findings: over 200,000 children have likely been affected by parental detention since the administration began, and about 145,000 of them are likely citizens. An estimated 22,000 citizen children have faced detention of all their co-resident parents.
Tara Watson, Matt Wich, and Johnny Willing examine the talent pipeline for high-skill immigration and the recent policy changes enacted by the Trump administration that threaten it. They project that issuances of student visas (F-1) have declined by 29%, and they approximate the size of the green card backlog to be roughly 1.2 million people. They warn that restrictions on high-skill immigration to the U.S. carry real economic costs; the U.S. has long benefited from being an attractive destination for international talent, but the Trump administration's policies put this position in jeopardy.
In a new report, Harry J. Holzer and Amy Feygin analyze how educators and policymakers can improve workforce outcomes for community college students. They emphasize the importance of connecting students with employers, specifically by aligning college program offerings with job availability. They also highlight outcomes-based funding for community colleges, high-quality advising, and technical assistance to support employer involvement as avenues for policymakers to improve the efficacy of community college workforce development.
📖 What we’re reading
How do phone pouches affect student well-being over time?Hunt Allcott, E. Jason Baron, Thomas Dee, and others use national administrative data, GPS activity, and large-scale surveys to study the impact of lockable phone pouches on U.S. middle and high school students. They find that the adoption of lockable pouches led to a large and persistent decline in in-school phone activity, but that the implementation of phone pouches typically caused a short-term disruption to the school environment—in the first year of adoption, disciplinary incidents increased by about 16% and student subjective well-being fell. High schools saw modest positive effects on math scores, while middle schools saw small negative effects.
Do sudden health crises cause low-income individuals to lose their housing or become homeless?Kacie Dragan uses high-frequency administrative data on residential location and health among Medicaid enrollees in New York City. She finds that health shocks, defined as sudden hospitalizations after two hospital-free years, immediately increase residential mobility (21–35% relative increase) and the probability of living in shelters or on the street (6–10% relative increase). Her findings suggest that policymakers should prioritize expanding subsidized housing, which was found to virtually eliminate health-induced housing loss, and health systems should provide more targeted discharge planning.
Has the position of college graduates worsened?Matt Bruenig weighs in on the ongoingdebate over why college-educated Americans—particularly younger cohorts—have shifted left on economic issues. At the center of this discussion is a fundamental question: what does a college degree deliver in today's economy? Bruenig argues that much of the debate has overlooked changes in the relative socioeconomic position of college graduates. These shifts, he contends, suggest that “college-educated Americans are objectively tumbling down the class hierarchy of America.”
📊 Top chart: How has ICE activity affected local employment?
This month’s top chart comes from a new Brookings report by Marcela Escobari, Ian Seyal, and Paul Beach, who investigate the employment effects of ICE enforcement in U.S. cities. Despite the fact that the enforcement campaign has been promoted by the current administration as labor market policy on behalf of American workers, the authors find that it has cost 668,000 jobs—51,000 to 297,000 of which would have been held by American-born workers. Across cities with the greatest increase in ICE arrests, employment fell 0.73% below what would have been seen absent the enforcement surge.
➡️ Worth a click
Check out this interactive map by the American Immigration Council to get comprehensive state and local immigration data.
About the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at Brookings
The Center for Economic Security and Opportunity (CESO) produces data-driven, nonpartisan analysis to address the United States’ most challenging social policy questions. In a noisy and polarized world, the Center is a trustworthy source for the information and tools policymakers need to build an economy that works for everyone.
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