Immigration Enforcement Effects and the Role of School Social Workers Supporting Immigrant Students

Abstract

This mixed-methods study examines school social workers’ perceptions of immigration enforcement on the lives of immigrant students. The article builds upon previous sociological and education research about how the contexts of reception impact immigrant mobility, immigration enforcement, and the role of school-based personnel support for immigrant students. The paper examines the relationship between 517 school social workers’ perception of the effects of immigration enforcement and their actions to improve equity for immigrant students. Relationships are compared using multiple regression analysis with and without state fixed effects. Findings reveal significant differences across some of the key constructs and relationships. Implications are discussed for school social workers in U.S. schools as they continue to promote equity for immigrant students.

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Acknowledgment

We acknowledge Leticia Villarreal Sosa, Tifanee McCaskill, and Courtney Douglass for various support during qualitative data collection. We also thank the Spencer Foundation for sponsoring this research. We are deeply grateful for the social workers in this study who shared their experiences amidst a global pandemic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Table 1. Descriptive statistics of school social worker sample.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 OLS regression requires a reference group for each variable. Thus, to explore how perceptions of midwest and suburban social workers compared to those from other regions and locales, respectively, we employed the baseline model again to include a grand weighted mean of the outcome for each region and locale. This is equivalent to centering coefficients around the mean. We found that midwest social workers were less likely to report taking action and observe impacts from immigration enforcement compared to social workers in all other regions. We did not find differences based on urbanicity.