Immigration Enforcement Policies Research Articles

Secure communities as immigration enforcement: How secure is the child care market?

Immigrants comprise nearly 20% of the child care workforce in the U.S. This paper studies the impact of a major immigration enforcement policy, Secure Communities (SC), on the structure and functioning of the child care market. Relying on the staggered introduction of SC across counties between 2008 and 2014, we find that the program reduced children’s participation in center-based child care programs. The estimated reductions are substantially larger among advantaged children and in jurisdictions with a greater fraction of undocumented individuals. We also find that SC reduced the equilibrium supply and wages of immigrant and native workers in the center-based sector as well as the number of center-based facilities. There is no compensating increase in the home-based or private household sectors. Our findings suggest that immigrants and natives are likely to be complements in child care service production.

Affective control: the emotional life of (en)forcing mobility control in Europe

ABSTRACT Current outcomes of immigration enforcement policies and apparatuses call for rethinking the ethics behind our understanding of community belonging, human rights and just society. The ethics at work are often presented as emotions creating particular affective atmosphere that permit the ongoing implementation of enforcing migration. This Special Issue tackles emotions as processes of organizing that are mobilized in support of certain ethics. In the context of immigration enforcement, these emotions are not self-explanatory, but they can justify the potential for violence and even deem it necessary. The emotions or affects of enforcers (as opposed to migrants) have been less addressed, and this Special Issue aims to be a novel collection. The articles pay particular attention to racism and to the understanding of institutional racism within state structures. They reveal the ways in which emotions are instrumental to the operations of state bureaucracy within the repressive migration apparatus and point to the ethics that allows individuals to conform state structures of oppression.

"I Can Never Feel Safe": Latinx Youth Voices on Psychosocial Impacts of 287(g) in Georgia.

Increasingly, immigration policies are understood as structural determinants, rooted in racism, nativism, and ethnocentrism, which raise serious public health concerns for Latinx adolescents' mental health. Our objective was to examine how immigration policy enforcement affects mental health of Latinx youth raised in a county with an aggressive interior immigration enforcement program. From 2009 to 2021, Gwinnett County, GA, led the nation in deportations under the 287(g) program as a "universal enforcement model," where local law enforcement were deputized to detain undocumented immigrants, primarily through traffic violations. From June to July 2022, we followed a participatory action research approach with two groups of Latinx youth who grew up in Gwinnett County. In total, 10 youth took photos related to the research question, and engaged in facilitated dialogue using photovoice guide SHOWED/VENCER for four, 2-hour sessions that were audio-recorded and transcribed. Transcripts were analyzed following grounded theory principles to arrive at a conceptual model codeveloped and validated by youth. Youth described how 287(g) led to policing and deportation in their communities, fueling stereotypes, and discrimination that criminalized Latinx immigrants. Youth linked immigration enforcement policies like 287(g) to exclusionary systems that contributed to fear, marginalization, and loss in their communities, bringing experiences of sadness, grief, isolation, hopelessness, and low self-worth. From youth-driven research, we identified mental health implications of the 287(g) program among Latinx youth. The cascading harms of immigration enforcement policies highlight the need to address these policies and identify immediate strategies to promote Latinx youth mental health.

The Labor Market Effects of Immigration Enforcement

This paper examines the effects of reducing the supply of low-skilled immigrant workers on the labor market outcomes of domestic workers. We use temporal and geographic variation in the introduction of Secure Communities (SC), a county-based immigration enforcement policy, combined with data over 2005-2014 from the American Community Survey to estimate a difference-in-difference model with geographic and time fixed effects. We find evidence that SC had a negative impact on the employment of low-skilled non-citizen workers, who are likely to be directly affected by the policy. Importantly, we also find that SC negatively impacted the employment of citizens working in middle to high-skill occupations. This is the first paper to provide quasi- experimental evidence on the labor market effects of immigration enforcement policies on citizens across the occupational skill distribution, which is of paramount importance given the current immigration policy debates.

U.S. Sanctuary Policies and Mexicans’ Migration Preferences: A Conjoint-Experimental Study

The debate on immigration policy and enforcement in the United States often revolves around the phenomenon of sanctuary cities. While past research accounts for Americans’ attitudes toward sanctuary cities and the effects of sanctuary policies on immigrant and Latino communities, less is known about how potential migrants factor sanctuary status into moving choices. We implement a conjoint survey experiment in Mexico, in which we ask respondents to rate the attractiveness of hypothetical localities in the United States described in terms of several attributes, including immigration enforcement policies. Results show that sanctuary status increases the attractiveness of potential immigration destinations in the United States. However, its effect is overshadowed by preferences for localities with many jobs and low crime rates, as well as ones that voted for Biden in 2020. Despite emphasis on sanctuary cities in U.S. political rhetoric, sanctuary policies only modestly increase the attractiveness of destinations for potential migrants.

Immigrants’ Enforcement Experiences and Concern about Accessing Public Benefits or Services

Although exclusionary immigration policies are associated with fear of deportation and avoidance of public benefits, relationships between immigration enforcement policy and public charge policies are largely unknown. Using a California population-based survey of 1103 Asian and Latinx immigrants in 2018, we tested the relationship between immigrants’ experiences with law enforcement and their concern about public charge. Direct encounters with various forms of law enforcement, including being asked to show proof of citizenship by law enforcement, staying inside to avoid police or immigration officials, and having known someone who had been deported, were associated with immigrants’ avoidance of public benefits due to public charge concerns. Latinx immigrants were more likely to be concerns about public charge than Asians. Intersections among immigration policies deserve further consideration. There is a need to provide accurate and reliable information to immigrant communities about public benefits and advocate for inclusive immigration policies.

Cumulative Experiences of Immigration Enforcement Policy and the Physical and Mental Health Outcomes of Asian and Latinx Immigrants in the United States

Immigration enforcement policies in the United States and other nations have long been enacted and implemented as intentional tools of racial control. There is mounting evidence that immigration raids, arrests, and deportations in the United States are associated with poor immigrant health outcomes, but this research has primarily focused on associations between health and single, specific enforcement actions or experiences that may not capture the entirety of immigrants’ experiences with racialized exclusion. Further, there has been little examination of Asian immigrants’ experiences with enforcement in the United States. This article assesses the relationship between Asian and Latinx immigrants’ physical and mental health and their cumulative experiences of immigration enforcement. We analyze responses to a 2018 population-based telephone survey of 1,103 Asian and Latin American immigrants in California. Participants were asked about seven distinct exclusionary immigration and local law enforcement experiences and their self-rated health (SRH) and psychological distress. We tested the association between each enforcement experience and SRH and psychological distress, controlling for covariates. After creating a cumulative measure of exclusion by summing participants’ total number of enforcement experiences, we examined the association between cumulative enforcement experiences and SRH and psychological distress and tested interactions by ethnicity and citizenship. While a greater proportion of Latinx than Asian participants reported enforcement experiences, each additional enforcement experience was associated with poorer self-rated health and greater psychological distress for both groups. This article suggests that the overall immigration enforcement system, from surveillance to deportation, is associated with worse health outcomes for immigrants.

Apprehension and educational outcomes among Hispanic students in the United States: The impact of Secure Communities.

Prior research suggests that disruptive events, such as shocks induced by family instability, neighborhood violence, or relocation, tend to be detrimental for children’s educational outcomes, but findings are heterogeneous depending on the type of event. Limited evidence is available on how shocks resulting from immigration enforcement impact educational outcomes among targeted minority groups. This study contributes to the literature by assessing how a policy implementation in the US–Secure Communities–is related to the school district level achievement of Hispanic students. The Secure Communities program is a national level immigration enforcement policy that was rolled out on a county-by-county basis. The program has increased the risk of deportation and led to rising apprehension and insecurity among undocumented migrants and the wider Hispanic community. Using detailed information on the implementation of Secure Communities, data from the Stanford Education Data Archive, and the Current Population Survey, this study estimates dynamic difference in differences exploiting regional variation in the timing of the policy change to assess its impact on educational outcomes. Results show that the activation of Secure Communities is negatively associated with Hispanic students’ subsequent English language arts achievement, while white and black students’ achievement does not change. Findings further suggest that Hispanic students living in the South, rural areas, and areas with high proportions of likely undocumented migrants are disproportionately impacted by the program’s activation. Whereas, Hispanic students in sanctuary jurisdictions, which reduce the likelihood of deportation, are not impacted. These findings indicate that immigration enforcement can have negative consequences for educational and social inequalities in the United States.

The structural impacts of enforcement policy on Latino immigrant health.

As evidence of the negative health impact of immigration enforcement policy continues to mount, public health research has focused primarily on the psychosocial health mechanisms, such as fear and stress, by which immigration enforcement may harm health. We build on this research using structural vulnerability theory to investigate the structural processes by which enforcement policy may shape Latino immigrants' health. We conducted qualitative analysis of testimonios from a purposive sample of Latino immigrants (n=14) living in Southern California in 2015, a period of significant federal, state, and local enforcement policy change. Testimonios are a narrative methodology used across the social sciences and humanities to center the voices of marginalized people. Through unstructured testimonio interviews, we sought to understand Latino immigrants' experiences with immigration enforcement and identify specific structural factors by which those experiences may influence health. Respondents' narratives revealed that singular enforcement experiences were not viewed as the sole manifestation of enforcement, but as part of a system of intersecting physical, legal, institutional, and economic exclusions which shaped the social and economic conditions that influence health. These exclusions reinforced respondents' marginalization, produced instability about the future, and generated a sense of individual responsibility and blame. We discuss how physical, legal, institutional, and economic processes may influence health and propose a framework to inform population health research on intersecting structural health mechanisms.

Acceptability, feasibility, and ethics of saliva collection in community-based research with Mexican-origin mixed-status families during high immigration enforcement

BackgroundThere are concerns about the representation of vulnerable and underrepresented racial-ethnic minorities in biomedical and public health research, particularly when the research requires the collection of biospecimens. The current paper reports on the acceptability, feasibility, and ethics of saliva collection in a study examining the relationship between chronic stressors among mostly mixed-status, Latinx families (N = 30) during high immigration enforcement.MethodsData for this study included anthropometric measures and salivary biospecimens from each family member (N = 110) and a household survey. Data for this analysis are from ethnographic field notes, which were analyzed using a bricolage of critical ethnography and case study analysis techniques.ResultsWe discuss the feasibility, aversions, acceptability, and ethical implications of integrating salivary biomarkers with Mexican-origin mixed-status families living in an area with restrictive immigration enforcement policies. We present the recruitment and data collection strategies used by the research team to gain participants’ trust, retain families, and maintain confidentiality.ConclusionWe recommend that researchers who obtain biospecimens from Latinx, Mexican-origin, and/or immigrant populations answer the participants’ questions honestly and without fear that they will not understand the science to obtain voluntary assent and consent. We recommend that researchers be knowledgeable of the sociopolitical context that the Latinx, immigrant, and in particular, mixed-status families inhabit so that they are prepared to provide informational resources. Finally, we think it is imperative that the study team in the field be bilingual, multicultural Latinx persons who identify with the community.

The Racialized Dimensions of Contemporary Immigration and Border Enforcement Policies and Practices

AbstractImmigration policies in the United States have not been explicitly race‐based since the mid‐20th Century. Nevertheless, the effects of contemporary US immigration enforcement practices are highly racialized. The further development of a “race conscious” approach in public policy and administration will help expand our understanding of the racialized dimensions of these policies and practices. Specifically, I call attention to how current approaches to immigration control disproportionately negatively affect non‐White immigrants from the so‐called “Global South,” contribute to racialization processes, and perpetuate racial inequality in the United States. Examples include the ways that undocumented immigration status is leading to the emergence of a new “underclass” in the United States, the separation and dissolution of Latino families through mass deportation, and the systematic criminalization of non‐White undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Does immigration enforcement affect where less‐educated US natives and Hispanic immigrants live?

AbstractPrevious research shows that unauthorized Hispanic immigrants are less likely to live in areas that implement tough immigration enforcement policies. Less is known about whether such policies affect where US citizens live. We examine whether implementation of employment‐ and police‐based enforcement measures affected less‐educated US citizens' and unauthorized Hispanic immigrants' interstate mobility during 2006–2018. The results indicate that Hispanic US citizens are repelled from states with police‐based enforcement, with the impact on inflows versus outflows depending on whether they are married to an unauthorized immigrant. White and Black US natives' mobility tends to respond less to enforcement measures. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OpenICPSR at https://doi.org/10.3886/E158681V1. These data were derived from the following resources available in the public domain: IPUMS USA at https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V11.0.

Review: The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants, by Adam Goodman

Review: The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants, by Adam Goodman

Preparedness and Experiences of Novice Teachers in the Sociopolitical Context of Heightened Immigration Enforcement: Evidence From a Survey of California Teachers

For teachers of immigrant-origin students and their peers, emerging research notes the challenge of facilitating a high-quality education for students subject to traumatic events related to harsh immigration enforcement policies. This study examines whether new teachers from seven teacher preparation programs experienced the impacts of immigration enforcement and felt prepared to support students who were impacted. I surveyed new teachers in preservice and after 1 year of teaching ( N = 473) using survey instruments developed by Cohen and colleagues along with additional constructs developed via pilot testing. New teachers reported that immigration enforcement negatively impacted their students and their job satisfaction. Teachers exposed to discussion of immigration policy and teachers who reported engaging with immigrant families in preservice were more likely to view themselves as prepared to support students. I discuss differences for teachers in urban, Title I, and elementary settings.

Did Secure Communities Lead to Safer Communities? Immigration Enforcement, Crime Deterrence, and Geographical Externalities

Abstract Secure Communities is a recently introduced immigration enforcement policy in the United States, intended to improve public safety by making it easier to identify and deport criminal immigrants and immigration violators. In this article, we examine the effect of Secure Communities on crime by utilizing the variation in its timing of activation across counties. We extend previous research by exploring potential crime spillovers associated with Secure Communities, in which its activation in one jurisdiction affects crime rates in a neighboring jurisdiction. Estimation results suggest that the activation of Secure Communities influenced crime rates in both the activated area and neighboring areas in important ways. We find that Secure Communities led to a significant crime reduction in the activated area if it is also activated in neighboring areas, but no significant local crime reduction is observed if not activated in neighboring areas. Likewise, its activation is often associated with significant crime spillovers into neighboring areas, but this displacement effect is often completely eliminated if Secure Communities is activated in the neighboring areas as well.

Why Physical Barriers Backfire: How Immigration Enforcement Deters Return and Increases Asylum Applications

What, if any, effect do physical barriers have on cross-border population movements? The foundational claim that barriers reduce migration flows remains unsupported. We conceptualize barriers as a tool of immigration enforcement, which we contend is one form of state repression. State repression could reduce mobilization (reduce immigration), have no effect on mobilization (barriers as symbolic political tools), or increase mobilization (backfire). We evaluate the relationship between barriers and cross-border population movements using a global directed dyad-year dataset for the 1990–2016 time period of all contiguous dyads and nearby non-contiguous dyads. Using instrumental variables, we find that physical barriers actually increase refugee flows, consistent with the “backfire effect” identified in research on United States immigration enforcement policies on its Mexican border. Furthermore, we find that state repression (immigration enforcement) creates this “backfire effect” via a “sunk costs” problem that reduces movements of people and increases movement of status from migrant to refugee.

An Expanded Analytical Gaze on Penal Power: Border Criminology and Punitiveness

Border criminology authors have recently called for an expansion of criminological conceptions on penal power to include migration law enforcement devices. An amplified analytical gaze on penality is critical to challenge mainstream notions of punitiveness—an academic effort that is particularly relevant because incarceration rates are declining in many Global North jurisdictions. This paper explores various implications of this border criminology contribution to academic debates on punitiveness by investigating the interrelation of incarceration rate changes with detention and deportation data. In so doing, it contributes to the burgeoning theoretical debate on the impact of immigration enforcement policies on current penal changes.

The unintended consequences of US immigration enforcement policies

US immigration enforcement policy seeks to change the behaviors and views of not only individuals in the United States but also those of prospective migrants outside the United States. Yet we still know relatively little about the behavioral and attitudinal effects of US enforcement policy on the population abroad. This study uses a randomized experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey that was administered in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico to analyze the effects of US deterrence policies on individuals' migration intentions and their attitudes toward the US immigration system. The two policies that the current study examines are immigration detention and nonjudicial removals. The survey results provide no evidence that a heightened awareness of these US immigration enforcement policies affects individuals' intentions to migrate to the United States. But heightened awareness about the widespread use of immigration detention in the United States does negatively impact individuals' assessments about the procedural and outcome fairness of the US immigration system. These findings suggest that immigration detention may foster delegitimating beliefs about the US legal system without producing the intended deterrent effect.

Police trust and domestic violence among immigrants: evidence from VAWA self-petitions

AbstractDomestic violence is a serious under-reported crime in the United States, especially among immigrant women. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was an attempt to partially address this problem by allowing battered immigrants to petition for legal status without relying on the sponsorship of an abusive U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident spouse. The tougher immigration policy climate may have made immigrant women more vulnerable to domestic violence, as well as more reluctant to report domestic violence to law enforcement. Sanctuary policies, which limit local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities, may counteract these effects. After exploiting the temporal and geographic variation in the adoption of interior immigration enforcement and sanctuary policies, we can successfully identify the impact of sanctuary policies, which help boost the rate of VAWA self-petitions. Additionally, we provide suggestive evidence of the channel through which this impact is likely taking place—namely through victims’ increased willingness to report cases and leave their abusers. Understanding survivors’ responses to immigration policy is crucial given growing police mistrust and immigrants’ vulnerability to crime.

The Call for the Progressive Prosecutor to End the Deportation Pipeline

“Progressive prosecutors” seek to redefine the role of the prosecutor and question the purpose of the criminal legal system, ushering in the need to reexamine the scope and substance of their duties toward all, but particularly immigrant defendants, seeing as they suffer outsized punishment for most criminal offenses. Ten years ago, Padilla v. Kentucky broke ground in finally recognizing that defense counsel is constitutionally obligated to advise immigrants of the clear risks of deportation associated with a plea. Nevertheless, immigrants ensnared in the criminal legal system have since faced deportation at ever-increasing rates. Given the entwinement of immigration and criminal law, organizers and scholars have recognized that local prosecutors serve as gatekeepers to the federal criminal removal system. Yet, prosecutors around the country wildly differ in their treatment of immigrant defendants, at times ignoring or misusing this gatekeeping role. In the last decade, new prosecutorial goals — ensuring fairness and equity, promoting community integrity, tackling disproportionate treatment of Black and brown communities in policing and incarceration, addressing root causes of crime — have gained increasing popularity, by some. Decriminalization and decarceration have been tools utilized to meet these goals. The specific goals strived for by self-described progressive prosecutors require an examination of their treatment of non-citizens given the prosecutor’s outsized role in determining immigration consequences and application of an immigrant’s rights lens to current practices. Their policies toward immigrant defendants to date have been tepid and at times, harmful. Yet, careful study reveals “progressive prosecutors” have expansive obligations to immigrant defendants — rooted in the progressive prosecution movement’s own rhetoric about the appropriate role of the prosecutor and the underlying purposes of the criminal legal system, prosecutorial ethical and professional standards, and Supreme Court jurisprudence. The progressive prosecutor’s duty is simple — to utilize their powers to avoid the double punishment of criminal sentence and deportation. This means ensuring that policy choices that purport to support communities of color and poor communities do not neglect immigrant defendants, thereby creating disproportionate consequences for this population. Due to the immigration consequences that might flow from any contact with the criminal legal system, progressive prosecutors need not only look at their role in plea negotiations, but beyond. A progressive prosecutor’s work then is to first, understand her role as gatekeeper to the federal deportation machine and second, act to stop feeding it. This Article proposes a series of guidelines and policy recommendations prosecutors can institute toward these ends, including institutional changes as well as the adoption of specific practices that consider immigration consequences at all stages of criminal proceedings – arrest, conviction, sentencing and beyond. This might include the creation of an immigrant integrity unit to audit and revamp all areas of practice to establish policies like the expanded use of declination, the encouragement of pre-arrest diversion and a prohibition on information sharing with ICE. “Progressive federalism” suggests that by taking these kinds of actions, progressive prosecutors will move closer to securing proportionate outcomes for immigrants in the criminal legal system. While federal immigration reform remains stymied, adoption of a robust immigration agenda by the local prosecutor will simultaneously begin to disentangle the criminal and immigration systems and influence immigration enforcement policy on a national level.