“Child Care Services Would Cease to Happen Without Immigrant Child Care Workers”

In the late 1990s, while interning at a Washington, D.C. think tank, Chris Herbst was tasked with studying the impact of newly passed “welfare reforms” on the U.S. child care sector. Then-President Clinton infamously described this bipartisan movement as one that would “end welfare as we know it.” As a result, TANF, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, replaced the long-standing Aid for Dependent Children program. Low-income parents, including those without partners, were now required to work in order to receive cash assistance for their dependent children. This new policy sent a flood of low-income workers into the workforce and raised new questions about what they should do with their children while they worked outside the home.

To meet this growing need, Congress adopted the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) to help the poorest workers find child care. Despite this new stream of funding, Herbst found the cost and availability of child care were persistent, unsolved problems—one that hasn’t changed much in the years since.

“I’ve been mesmerized by child care policy and the child care market because it’s a really complicated market,” Herbst, who is now a professor of public policy at Arizona State University studying child care costs, said in a recent interview with the Better Life Lab. “But also, I would argue, [it’s] one of the most important markets in the economy. I think of child care as the market that has to function well, if the rest of the labor markets [are going to] function at all or if the economy is to grow.”

Recently, Herbst partnered with researchers Umair Ali and Jessica H. Brown to study how an anti-immigrant policy in effect between 2008 and late 2014 impacted U.S. child care. The Secure Communities Act required local police departments to automatically send the fingerprints of people arrested for a crime to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to have their immigration status screened. Suspects who ICE deemed to lack proper documentation were deported.

During the years the Secure Communities Act was in effect, 440,000 people were deported. Ninety percent of them were men. Yet women and others dealt with the fear of possible deportation due to the policy’s “chilling effect”.The very prospect of increased scrutiny and risk of deportation, Herbst and his colleagues found, causes both documented and undocumented people to fear interactions with public institutions beyond law enforcement. Some even changed their routines to avoid them.

The chilling effect was evident in child care usage and labor, too—an influence that likely set the child sector up for major instability by the time the COVID-19 pandemic began. Herbst and his team used a variety of data sources to study what happened to child care in the years the Secure Communities Act was in place and found detrimental effects on the number of available child care providers, the wages of child care workers, and the participation rates of both documented and undocumented children in these programs.

Better Life Lab’s Research and Reporting Fellow Haley Swenson spoke with Herbst to better understand these findings. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Haley Swenson: What got you interested in the impact of immigration on child care?

Chris Herbst: Immigrants are absolutely essential to the functioning of the child care market. Immigrants comprise one out of every five child care workers nationally, so they make up 20 percent of the workforce. This is up from about 5 percent in 1980. And immigrants are much more important to the child care workforce than they are to the labor market generally. They're about 17 percent of the total workforce. And it's not going to surprise you that the immigrant composition of the childcare workforce is much higher in urban areas. So they make up about 44 percent of all New York City's childcare workers, 47 percent of all childcare workers in Los Angeles, and 25 percent of all childcare workers in Chicago.

Immigrant childcare workers are hidden in the sense that we don't have that many conversations about them, but they're so clearly important. The delivery of child care services would cease if it weren't for immigrant child care workers.

Swenson: I wonder if we can break some of these findings down. Let’s start with the labor force impact. You mention most of the deportations were men, but most of the childcare workers are women. So how do you explain this? Did women avoid things like going to work and enrolling their kids in child care, even though they weren’t the main targets of the deportation effort?

Herbst: We hypothesize that this labor supply reduction is working through what's called a “chilling effect,” that immigration enforcement policies create a climate of fear and confusion. People are afraid of local police and ICE. There may be a patchy or inconsistent understanding of how these policies work across individuals. This fear and confusion hold for both immigrant communities and non-immigrant communities. So they cease to undertake many normal daily activities—employment being one of those things. There is evidence from journalists and others suggesting that policies like the Secure Communities Act prevent people from going to work or even leaving their house to go grocery shopping. The sum of all of that fear and confusion, we think, is what's driving the reductions in child care employment.

Swenson: It makes sense if a parent of either gender stops working because of fear they no longer need child care, thus workers remaining in the sector are paid less as demand falls. But despite this, you found there was no change in the number of accredited providers available. Any ideas about why that was the case, even with this reduction in the workforce?

Herbst: This is a question that remains open for research, and there are some limits on what we can say here. We’re looking at county-level counts of the number of accredited providers. We can't say anything about changes in quality within providers. So our evidence shows that this program caused a lot of turnover in child care providers. Immigrant child care providers left, and low and high-skilled U.S.-born child care workers left. That may have had implications for the quality of care delivered by individual providers. We just don't have the data to say anything about that.

Swenson: So it might be that an accredited center stayed open, but because of the reduction in workforce, the lack of available Spanish-speaking workers could possibly impact the quality of care within those centers.

Herbst: Yeah, no doubt about it. We know that having both immigrant and U.S.-born child care workers together within a program is really important for the quality of that program. So if you’re seeing these workers leave child care programs, you would think that these programs are less capable of delivering linguistically and culturally competent services. The educational makeup and the work experience that the remaining teachers have may look a lot different from the teachers who left.

Swenson: Zooming out a bit, what questions or concerns does this raise about kids who were perhaps eligible for and could have benefited from these child care programs from 2008 to 2014 but didn’t attend?

Herbst: There are three big takeaways. First, the preschool population in the U.S. is becoming increasingly diverse. And by that, I mean more immigrant-dense. Twenty-five percent of all kids ages zero to five live with at least one immigrant parent. The loss of immigrant child care workers, who we think are better able to connect with the children of immigrant parents in child care, may have had developmental implications for these kids who are now not attending these high-quality, center-based programs.

Secondly, immigration enforcement policies like Secure Communities may catalyze further instability in an unstable market because of high teacher turnover rates. Many of the individuals who left child care employment were highly skilled. We think that has additional implications for the ability of programs to deliver high-quality services.

Finally, child care participation results suggest that the reductions occurred among the most disadvantaged kids. So not just among immigrant kids but among U.S.-Hispanic kids, low-income kids, and kids of low-education parents. These kids really felt the brunt, and they likely shifted into child care arrangements that were of lower quality. An immigration program like Secure Communities has cascading downstream effects that the creators of the program never thought about.

Swenson: What happened to Secure Communities after 2014?

Herbst: This is a program that has turned on and off, depending on which way the political winds were blowing. The program went away for the first time in late 2014. It was re-instituted when Donald Trump took office, and then it was off once again when Joe Biden took office. When the program went away in late 2014, it was replaced by the Priority Enforcement Program, which instructed ICE to detain only those individuals convicted of a shorter list of high-priority offenses. But it continued to result in large numbers of deportations. There could still be echoes of a Secure Communities effect in the sense that the kids who left child care never came back. Or these really highly skilled teachers, whether they were immigrants or not, never came back. It left a child care workforce that was somewhat hollowed out.

Swenson: We know that three years into the pandemic the child care labor force hasn’t recovered to the levels we had prior to 2020. What kinds of policies do we need to not only regain but, hopefully, build an even more robust, highly skilled, high-quality, diverse workforce?

Herbst: Over the last 10 to 15 years the child care workforce has taken a shellacking in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways. We haven’t fully recovered from the pandemic, whereas the rest of the labor market has. Then, there were policies that were not directly targeting child care, like Secure Communities, but had negative implications for the child care workforce. There’s a lot of recovering to do both in terms of services provided and compensation for workers.

This shines a bright light on policies, like the really robust child care subsidy program that was proposed in Build Back Better, which would invest a lot of public dollars into stabilizing the child care market. That money would be available for providers and families in good economic times and bad, in pandemic times and non-pandemic times, when harsh immigration enforcement policies have been enacted, and when those policies are not. My work suggests the child care market is volatile and rather sensitive to macro-level shocks and that a steady stream of funding that persists across space and time is needed to create more stability.