Giving Compass' Take:

• Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova at Migration Policy Institute report on how many unauthorized immigrants have graduated from U.S. high schools in the wake of the border crisis.  

• What can this data tell us about the truth regarding unauthorized immigrant families? 

• Here are policy recommendations for supporting child immigrants. 

Since 2001, Congress has debated legislation that would offer a pathway to legal status for eligible unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the United States as children. And in 2012, President Barack Obama launched the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that offers work authorization and relief from deportation for some such immigrants. A core provision in these bills and the DACA program has been that unauthorized-immigrant youth must earn a high school diploma or its equivalent to qualify.

The Trump administration’s 2017 decision to rescind the DACA program—and subsequent court orders that have kept it alive only for DACA beneficiaries renewing their participation, not for new applicants—leave new unauthorized-immigrant graduates with an uncertain future.

Debates on potential legislative solutions for these youth have long had to rely on an earlier estimate of the number of unauthorized immigrants who graduate from U.S. high schools each year, based on 2000­–02 data. The size and characteristics of the young unauthorized population have changed considerably since then. This fact sheet provides the most up-to-date estimates of this population for the United States overall and for top states, drawing upon a unique MPI methodology that assigns legal status in U.S. Census Bureau data.

Read the full article about immigrants graduating from U.S. high schools by Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova at Migration Policy Institute.