State-Scale Immigration Enforcement and Latino Interstate Migration in the United States

Abstract

In the late 2000s, several U.S. states and local governments enacted legislation to make work and life difficult for unauthorized immigrants within their jurisdictions. We investigate how these devolved immigration enforcement laws affected the migration of Latinos to these states. We find that after these hostile policies came into effect, noncitizen and naturalized Latinos from states without such policies were much less likely to move to states with them than in the 1990s. U.S.-born Latinos exhibit migration aversion to hostile states, albeit at a weaker level. Fear of discrimination and the blending of Latinos with different legal status within families might account for this broad Latino group migration response. Hostile policies produced no significant change in the interstate migration patterns of a control group of U.S.-born whites. A counterfactual analysis indicates that absent these enforcement regimes, the migratory redistribution of Latinos to hostile states from other states in the late 2000s would have continued the dispersive pattern of the late 1990s. We draw parallels between our research and state policy effects on U.S. internal migration for other groups.