Does DACA Improve the Occupational Opportunities of Young Undocumented Immigrants?

Chin, Cortes, and Morales (2026) examine whether DACA’s temporary work authorization changed the types and quality of jobs held by young undocumented immigrants. Using American Community Survey data from 2005–2018, occupational injury data, and Current Population Survey information, they employ a difference-in-differences design. Among workers ages 22–24, DACA reduced the likelihood of working in immigrant-concentrated occupations by 2.7 percentage points for men and 6.4 points for women. It also reduced employment in high-injury occupations by 3.6 points for men and 1.9 for women. Government employment increased 2.4 points among younger women, and occupational status improved.

Why This Article Was Selected for The Policy Scientist

This article addresses a broad policy question: whether legal access to employment changes the kinds of jobs available to undocumented young adults. That question remains important because immigration policy affects not only employment rates and earnings, but also occupational mobility, workplace safety, and access to higher-quality jobs. The study is timely given continuing uncertainty surrounding DACA and related work-authorization policies. It contributes to the literature by moving beyond employment and wages to examine occupational outcomes directly. The national datasets are strong, and the difference-in-differences design provides credible causal evidence. The findings are most generalizable to the United States. The article appears in AEA Papers and Proceedings, a prominent economics publication.

Full Citation and Link to Article

Chin, A., Cortes, K. E., & Morales, C. (2026). Unlocking occupational opportunity: The labor market effects of DACA. AEA Papers and Proceedings, 116, 344–350. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20261099

Central Research Question

The study asks whether temporary legal work authorization through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program changed the occupational opportunities of young undocumented immigrants. The central issue is not simply whether DACA increased employment, labor force participation, hours worked, or earnings. Instead, the authors examine whether access to legal work authorization altered the types of jobs that eligible individuals held and, more specifically, whether it allowed workers to move into safer, more visible, higher-paying, and higher-skilled occupations.

The research question is important because undocumented workers may face occupational restrictions that are unrelated to their skills or preferences. Without work authorization, they may be concentrated in a relatively narrow set of occupations that are more dangerous, lower paying, or less likely to involve formal institutions. DACA potentially relaxed these constraints by expanding the set of jobs legally available to eligible individuals. If occupational patterns changed after DACA, that would suggest that legal barriers had previously restricted job choice. If they did not change, it would imply that legal status was less important in determining occupational placement.

The authors therefore focus on several dimensions of occupational opportunity: employment in jobs with unusually high concentrations of noncitizen workers, employment in occupations with high injury rates, employment in government jobs, and an overall occupational status measure reflecting the education and earnings characteristics of particular occupations.

Previous Literature

The study builds on research showing that undocumented immigrants face substantial labor market disadvantages. Borjas and Cassidy (2019) document a wage penalty associated with undocumented status, while Hellerstein and Neumark (2008) examine workplace segregation by race, ethnicity, and skill. Hall and Greenman (2015) show that unauthorized legal status can carry occupational costs, including greater exposure to hazardous jobs. Orrenius and Zavodny (2009) similarly examine whether immigrants are disproportionately employed in riskier occupations.

The article also extends a growing literature specifically examining DACA. Pope (2016) and Amuedo-Dorantes and Antman (2016, 2017) provide evidence that DACA affected employment, labor force participation, hours worked, income, poverty, and schooling. These studies established that temporary work authorization could change conventional labor market outcomes, but they provided more limited evidence about whether DACA changed the specific occupations in which eligible immigrants worked.

Kuka, Shenhav, and Shih (2020) are particularly important to the study’s framework. They find that educational investments responded to the increased labor market returns created by DACA. That work motivates the authors’ expectation that effects may differ according to age when DACA was introduced. Individuals who were still in school when DACA became available had greater opportunity to adjust their education in response to newly available occupations. Older individuals faced higher costs of changing their educational trajectories. The study also draws on Lewis, Liu, and Edwards (2014) regarding immigrant representation in government employment and Ortega and Hsin (2022) regarding occupational barriers arising from a lack of legal status.

Data

The primary data come from the American Community Survey from 2005 through 2018. The ACS provides individual-level information on employment, demographic characteristics, citizenship, place of birth, age, and immigration history. The analysis is restricted to employed Hispanic, foreign-born adults between ages 22 and 30 who entered the United States by age ten and arrived by 2007.

A central data limitation is that the ACS does not directly identify undocumented status. The authors therefore use citizenship status as a proxy. Hispanic noncitizens who meet DACA’s age and arrival requirements constitute the treatment group, while Hispanic foreign-born U.S. citizens satisfying the same age and arrival criteria form the comparison group. The groups therefore have similar childhood exposure to U.S. institutions but differ in their eligibility for DACA.

The authors supplement the ACS with occupational injury information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses. Occupations are classified as risky when their pre-DACA injury rates fall within the highest quartile of the occupational injury distribution. The analysis also uses occupational information from IPUMS and information from the Current Population Survey.

Several outcome measures are constructed. “Immigrant jobs” are occupations in the highest quartile of the distribution for the share of noncitizen workers, including many occupations in agriculture, construction, and food services. Government jobs include employment at the federal, state, or local level. The occupational status score summarizes the earnings and educational characteristics associated with an occupation and serves as a broader measure of occupational quality and prestige.

Methods

The authors use a difference-in-differences design to estimate the causal effect of DACA eligibility on occupational outcomes. The basic strategy compares changes over time for Hispanic noncitizens who were eligible for DACA with changes for otherwise comparable Hispanic foreign-born citizens who were not eligible.

The post-treatment period begins in 2012, when DACA was announced and implemented. The statistical models include controls for individual characteristics such as gender, race, and region of birth. They also incorporate state-by-year fixed effects, which account for changing economic and policy conditions within states, and age-by-year fixed effects, which help account for differences across age cohorts. Standard errors are clustered by state.

The authors estimate models separately by sex and by age at exposure to DACA. Younger workers ages 22–24 were still of school-going age when DACA was introduced, whereas workers ages 25–30 had less opportunity to alter their educational investments before entering or progressing through the labor market.

The credibility of the difference-in-differences design depends heavily on the parallel-trends assumption. The authors examine this through an event-study analysis using 2011 as the pre-DACA reference year. They find no evidence that treatment and comparison groups were following systematically different occupational trends before DACA. This strengthens the interpretation of the post-2012 differences as causal effects of DACA eligibility.

Findings/Size Effects

The principal finding is that DACA changed occupational outcomes primarily among younger workers who had been school aged when the program was introduced. Effects for workers ages 25–30 are generally small and statistically insignificant.

Among employed individuals ages 22–24, DACA eligibility reduced the probability of working in occupations with high concentrations of noncitizen workers by 2.7 percentage points for men and 6.4 percentage points for women. Relative to pre-DACA means, these changes represented reductions of approximately 4.5 percent for men and 16.4 percent for women. The findings suggest that expanded work authorization enabled younger workers, particularly women, to move away from occupations in which noncitizen immigrants were heavily concentrated.

DACA also reduced employment in high-injury occupations. Among younger men, eligibility reduced the probability of working in a risky occupation by 3.6 percentage points, equivalent to approximately 8 percent of the pre-DACA mean. Among younger women, the decline was 1.9 percentage points, approximately 15.8 percent of the baseline mean.

The results for government employment are concentrated among younger women. DACA increased their probability of working in federal, state, or local government employment by 2.4 percentage points. Given their relatively low pre-DACA rate of government employment, this represents an increase of approximately 34.3 percent relative to the baseline mean. The corresponding effects for younger men and for older workers are not statistically meaningful.

The broader occupational status measure produces a similar pattern. Among workers ages 22–24, DACA increased the occupational status score by about 2.6 points for men and 4.4 points for women. These results indicate movement toward occupations characterized by higher average education and earnings. No comparable improvement appears among workers ages 25–30.

Conclusion

The study concludes that temporary work authorization through DACA altered the occupational choices available to young undocumented immigrants, particularly those who were still young enough to adjust their educational investments when the program began. Eligible younger workers moved away from occupations heavily concentrated among noncitizen immigrants and from jobs with relatively high injury rates. Some also gained greater access to government employment and occupations associated with higher earnings and education.

The age pattern is central to the interpretation of the findings. DACA produced little measurable occupational change among older workers, while younger workers experienced substantial shifts. The authors argue that this pattern is consistent with younger individuals responding to expanded labor market opportunities by changing their educational investments and subsequently entering different occupations.

More broadly, the findings indicate that legal work restrictions can influence occupational allocation rather than merely whether individuals work. By expanding the set of legally accessible jobs, DACA appears to have improved the match between workers and occupations. The evidence therefore suggests that employment authorization can affect job safety, occupational status, and longer-term career opportunities in addition to conventional outcomes such as employment and earnings.