The co-author of the paper said immigration enforcement impacts grades and behavior for Spanish-speaking students who are both U.S. and foreign born.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Does immigration enforcement affect students? A study looking at Florida schools suggests that it does.
The paper published on Nov. 2025 was titled “The Effects of Immigration Enforcement on Student Outcomes in a New Era of Immigration Policy in the United States” and argues that it found “evidence that immigration enforcement reduced test scores for both U.S.-born and foreign-born Spanish-speaking students while also reducing the likelihood that these students are involved in disciplinary incidents in schools.”
The paper adds that the effects were more pronounced among middle and high school students.
10 Tampa Bay News interviewed co-author David Figlia, a professor of economics at the University of Rochester in the state of New York to better understand the process that led to these conclusions.
Figlia said that the research for the paper
Q: How were you able to establish this correlation?
“We would go one step further. We think that we’re establishing causal effects… There have been other studies that have investigated previous rounds of interior immigration enforcement in the United States, but ours is the first to study the effects of this increase that took place starting in 2025”
“The recent immigration enforcement efforts beginning in 2025 had a different flavor and cadence than previous immigration enforcement.”
“How did we go about doing this? Well, you know, this increase in immigration enforcement is pervasive… A reasonable person could immediately start thinking, ‘well, we’re seeing that certain kids are doing worse in school in 2025; is that because of the increase in immigration enforcement or any number of other types of things going on.'”
“So that’s the first concern that a skeptical person can and should have. So we approached this in the following way: We had the insight as of the first half of the year, really up through January through April, which is what we were studying the time before the May exam. Between January and April of 2025, immigration enforcement was not equal across all countries of origin in the United States.”
“So there were some groups of immigrants, for example, especially immigrants from Central America… who had dramatically higher rates of apprehensions than, say, people from Mexico, who themselves had dramatically higher rates of apprehensions than, say, people from the Dominican Republic.”
“This is a community effect that we are picking up. Then students who are in communities with larger numbers of people from Guatemala or Nicaragua, for example, might be feeling more of the effect of immigration enforcement than students in communities with more people from, say, Mexico.”
“We looked at the foreign born population of every school in one large Florida School District that’s unnamed. We identified what we’re calling the ‘effective apprehension rate’ or ‘enforcement rate…’ With both of them having the same fraction of foreign-born students, or Latino students, for example, or students whose home language is Spanish… We found that the school that educates more students from Central America was the school where we saw the biggest declines in test scores relative to the school with equal numbers of foreign-born students.”
“There are dozens of different countries of origin. This is just an example.”
“Then the next thing people might be concerned about is, well, maybe these schools were just trending in different ways.”
“Well, we were able to look at several years of data before January 2025, and we saw that there was no evidence that they were trending in different directions.”
“The diversion took place as soon as January 2025 occurred, and we saw the increase in immigration enforcement, and the schools that educate more students for more affected immigrant communities were the schools where we saw the biggest declines in test scores.”
“Somebody may be asking, Okay, well, ‘how can you be so sure, David, that this is where you’re picking up some type of community effect, as opposed to, things happening to individual students themselves?’ The answer we have for that is we can’t be 100% sure, but there’s a very strong piece of evidence.”
“That is, the effects on test scores were the same for U.S.-born students who speak Spanish at home, as they were for foreign-born students who speak Spanish at home.”
“We are finding the same negative test score effects for U.S. citizens as we were finding for foreign-born students.”
“The fact that we find that these two groups of students have the same estimated declines of test scores makes me think that there’s something kind of in the air in these communities that have larger numbers of people from more affected countries of origin.”
“This was before the massive, the massive immigration enforcement action in Chicago, for example.”
Q: Even when there are no immigration enforcement actions within school grounds, are you seeing those effects?
“Yeah. I don’t know the locations of the immigration actions during this period of time, because the data that was available to me was just the country of origin and the state. These were from Freedom of Information Act request published on deportationdata.org.”
“Remember, this was January through April of 2025. I would call them more standard issue, immigration enforcement actions in the community.”
“Extremely few of these were taking place on school grounds. The fact that we are finding similar results for U.S.-born students as for foreign-born students suggests that this is more, that this is just something affecting communities in general. This was not about school actions,
Q: Was there a reason why the data were specifically from Florida schools for this paper?
I have long standing trust relationships with with Florida school districts. I’ve carried out research in Florida for a quarter of a century. Florida is one of only a handful of states that test students multiple times per year. In the 2024-2025 academic year, for example Florida administered two standardized test scores before the inauguration and then one after. You can follow the same kids from from from summer to fall, then to spring, right? you can make much more credible assessments about things like test scores in an environment where you have multiple tests over the course of a year.
Florida was also attractive, because, you know, Florida has, is one of the states in the country with with the largest and most diverse immigrant communities.
Florida has, has very large and rich numbers of many different Latino communities. So compare Florida, say, to to California or Texas, right? in Texas, the Latino community is overwhelmingly Mexican, of Mexican origin
there’s this extraordinary diversity in the Latino community in Florida
Q: so from what I got reading your paper, it states that two things have happened with students in Florida due to immigration enforcement. Right? One is academic performance is affected, and behavior is affected, particularly among Spanish speaking students, or from, you know, countries of origin that are, you know, as you’re saying, Latin America.
the simplest way I can explain our results are
Some neighborhoods have, by virtue of which groups of people live there, some neighborhoods appear to have been, have been more affected by ice and immigration enforcement than other neighborhoods. Students who attend schools in the neighborhoods that have been relatively relative that that have been relatively more affected by the recent surge in immigration enforcement. Seem to be suffering academically.
they score worse on test scores. They score worse on standardized tests. And although, interestingly enough, we didn’t find any meaningful reductions in in attendance, which it comes in contrast to some other places in there have been a couple of recent studies in California and Rhode Island in Connecticut that that showed that when there were immigration raids. In those states, there was knock on effect of attendance. We didn’t find reductions in attendance. We did find some modest improvements in behavior. I don’t know the I don’t know the reason behind that. It could very well be that that that students, students in these affected schools were were, you know, were choosing to or had been told by their parents be sure to to be on your best behavior. Or it could also be that teachers and school administrators were more likely to look the other way when if kids were engaging in the ordinary student misbehavior.
We think that this is community really. We think that this is community related because, because we we see that that these negative effects on test scores are present, not only for the students who are likely to be most personally affected by immigration enforcement that is foreign born students, but also students who are US born, but are Spanish speaking, and so that’s that’s that we view that as some evidence that that this isn’t just about direct impacts of immigration enforcement on families, but rather on communities
the fact that we see, that for students from in Spanish speaking households, it doesn’t matter, it’s the the effects are just as Strong for US citizens, as they are for non citizens, that’s a that’s a that’s a that’s a big deal as far as I’m concerned. And I think that’s a finding that that that deserves to be deserves to be highlighted.
Latino communities are not a monolith