Immigration Reform Research Articles

Health and Mental Health Effects of Local Immigration Enforcement

We study the effect of two local immigration enforcement policies — Section 287(g) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Secure Communities Program (SC) — on the health and mental health outcomes of Latino immigrants living in the United States. We use the restricted-use National Health Interview Survey for 2000–2012 and adopt a difference-in-difference research design. Estimates suggest that SC increased the proportion of Latino immigrants with mental health distress by 2.2 percentage points (14.7%), Task Force Enforcement under Section 287(g) worsened their mental health distress scores by 15 percent (0.08 standard deviation), and Jail Enforcement under Section 287(g) increased the proportion of Latino immigrants reporting fair or poor health by 1 percentage point (11.1%) and lowered the proportion reporting very good or excellent health by 4.8 to 7.0 percentage points (7.8% to 10.9%). These findings are robust to various sensitivity checks and have long-term implications for population health, public health expenditure, and immigrant integration.

Immigrants Pay More In Private Insurance Premiums Than They Receive In Benefits.

As US policy makers tackle immigration reform, knowing whether immigrants are a burden on the nation's health care system can inform the debate. Previous studies have indicated that immigrants contribute more to Medicare than they receive in benefits but have not examined whether the roughly 50percent of immigrants with private coverage provide a similar subsidy or even drain health care resources. Using nationally representative data, we found that immigrants accounted for 12.6percent of premiums paid to private insurers in 2014, but only 9.1percent of insurer expenditures. Immigrants' annual premiums exceeded their care expenditures by $1,123 per enrollee (for a total of $24.7billion), which offsets a deficit of $163 per US-born enrollee. Their net subsidy persisted even after ten years of US residence. In 2008-14, the surplus premiums of immigrants totaled $174.4billion. These findings suggest that policies curtailing immigration could reduce the numbers of "actuarially desirable" people with private insurance, thereby weakening the risk pool.

Lessons About the Future of Immigration Law from the Rise and Fall of DACA

Observers spanning the political spectrum have characterized the American immigration system as “broken.” Unfortunately, Congress for many years has been unable to forge agreement on the appropriate set of reforms, including a path for regularizing the legal status of the approximately eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Congress also has been unable to change the immigration laws in ways that measurably reduce the undocumented population, which has more than doubled over the last three decades. In no small part due to the prolonged stalemate in Congress combined with a sizable and stable undocumented population spread across the United States, immigration has become nothing less than a high-profile political battleground. Contemporary immigration touches on some of the most contentious divisions in modern American politics, including race, class, and national identity. Taking an enforcement-oriented approach to immigration unparalleled in modern American history, Donald Trump successfully ran for President by making immigration a central plank of his campaign. In so doing, Trump forcefully criticized the Obama administration’s immigration record. Consequently, to place President Trump’s immigration agenda into proper perspective, we must consider his target — the immigration record of President Barack Obama. With immigration reform efforts proving fruitless, President Obama sought through executive action to make improvements at the margins. Created by the Obama administration in 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) over a period of five years shielded from removal hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Through an exercise of executive authority rather than a direct act of Congress, President Obama readily admitted that DACA necessarily was a limited, temporary, and incomplete form of relief for one component of the undocumented immigrant population. It was not intended to extend permanent legal status to undocumented immigrants or to address the many policy problems commonly associated with the contemporary immigration system. At the same time, DACA provided a valuable form of relief, including the authorization to work, to a sub-group of the total undocumented immigrant population. Claiming that DACA infringed on the power of Congress to designate the immigrants to be targeted for removal from the United States, the Trump administration provoked considerable controversy and debate in announcing the end of the program. DACA’s rescission posed critically important questions to the entire nation: what would become of the former DACA recipients? Was their removal a possibility? Might Congress provide them relief? In the political uproar following the attempted rescission, DACA became virtually synonymous with the political movement to reform the immigration laws and their enforcement. Part I of this essay initially considers President Obama’s immigration record, which saw a record number of removals, Congress’s failure to enact immigration reform, and the Executive Branch’s response through adoption of deferred action policies providing limited relief to a sub-set of the undocumented immigrant population. Exhibiting a devotion to aggressive immigration enforcement like no other president in modern American history, President Trump has focused on immigration enforcement above all other immigration goals and escalated enforcement efforts in new and different directions. With this background in mind, Part II sketches possible future directions for immigration reform in the wake of the rise and fall of DACA.

The Great Repudiator and Immigration Reform: Ronald Reagan and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986

Abstract:In 1981, Ronald Reagan created a task force intended to gain the initiative on immigration reform. But immigration reform presented obstacles to his political stance in repudiation of his Democratic predecessors. After four years of wrangling, internally as well as with Congress, many on the Reagan team viewed the immigration task force as having shackled the president to an unwinnable issue. Frustrated politically, Reagan aides shifted focus to an emerging presidential tactic—the signing statement. This allowed the president to sign the Immigration Reform and Control Act while setting important precedents for his larger conservative agenda. The trajectory from presidential task force to presidential signing statement on immigration reform reveals the challenges Reagan faced on policy issues outside his core priorities, and also the development of a tactic to maneuver through the challenges. Immigration reform became less about immigration than about serving the administration’s larger core priorities.

Who drove the discourse? News coverage and policy framing of immigrants and refugees in the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Abstract Migration was one of the most important issues in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. While Hillary Clinton promised an immigration reform that would create a path to citizenship, Donald Trump said he would deport illegal aliens, build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and suspend immigration from countries with a history of terrorism, capitalizing on some of the public’s fears through his rhetoric. We examine the ways mainstream national and regional press covered this issue from the Republican National Convention through Election Day. This content analysis of 12 news outlets finds that political themes drove the coverage more than anything else, with Donald Trump or a member of his team most often serving as theme sponsor. Though about half of the stories were neutral or balanced in tone, negative stories were sponsored either by the Trump team or other actors.

From IIRIRA to Trump: Connecting the Dots to the Current US Immigration Policy Crisis

When signing into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA, or “the Act”), 1 President William J. Clinton asserted that the legislation strengthened “the rule of law by cracking down on illegal immigration at the border, in the workplace, and in the criminal justice system — without punishing those living in the United States legally” ( Clinton 1996 ). In fact, the Act has severely punished US citizens and noncitizens of all statuses. It has also eroded the rule of law by eliminating due process from the overwhelming majority of removal cases, curtailing equitable relief from removal, mandating detention (without individualized custody determinations) for broad swaths of those facing deportation, and erecting insurmountable, technical roadblocks to asylum. In addition, it created new immigration-related crimes and established “the concept of ‘criminal alienhood,’” which has “slowly, but purposefully” conflated criminality and lack of immigration status ( Abrego et al. 2017 , 695). It also conditioned family reunification on income, divided mixed-status families, and consigned other families to marginal and insecure lives in the United States ( Lopez 2017 , 246). Finally, it created the 287(g) program that enlists state and local law enforcement agencies in immigration enforcement and drives a wedge between police and immigrant communities. The trend of “cracking down” on immigrants did not begin with IIRIRA. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, and the 1990 Immigration Act, for example, expanded deportable offenses ( Abrego et al. 2017 , 697; Macías-Rojas 2018 , 3–4). IIRIRA, however, significantly “ratchet[ed] up” the “punitive aspects of US immigration law already in place” ( Abrego et al. 2017 , 702), and erected much of the legal and operational infrastructure that underlies the Trump administration’s plan to remove millions of undocumented residents and their families, to terrify others into leaving “voluntarily,” and to slash legal immigration. In 2016, the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) issued a call for papers to examine IIRIRA’s multifaceted consequences. 2 Between March 2017 and January 2018, CMS published eight papers from this collection in its Journal on Migration and Human Security ( JMHS). The papers cover the political conditions that gave rise to IIRIRA, and the Act’s impact on immigrants, families, communities, and the US immigration system. This article draws on these papers — as well as sources closer to IIRIRA’s passage and implementation — to describe how the Act transformed US immigration policies and laid the groundwork for the Trump administration’s policies. 3 After a brief discussion of IIRIRA’s origins, the article discusses the law's effects and subsequent policies related to the growth of the US immigration enforcement apparatus, removal, asylum, detention, the criminal prosecution of immigrants, the treatment of immigrant families, and joint federal-state enforcement activities.

Temporary Protected Status and Immigration to the United States

Although immigration reform has proved elusive for more than forty years, presidents from both parties have issued crucial executive actions that regulate inflows of new immigrants and the status of those already in the US. We focus on a particular class of executive actions, those related to granting immigrants Temporary Protected Status (TPS), exploiting the fact that immigrants who hold TPS receive access to the formal US labor market regardless of their legal status. Harnessing the New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM), we hypothesize that granting TPS to immigrants increases remittances to crisis-affected countries, decreasing the demand for both legal and illegal entry into the United States. We find robust statistical support for this hypothesis, and we also use synthetic control methods to evaluate TPS as a policy lever in prominent TPS-eligible countries. Our findings shed light on potentially unintended consequences that flow from providing labor market access to immigrants in the United States.

Tied farmworkers in free markets: congressional hearing debates on the roles of market and state from 1995 to 2012

ABSTRACTWithin the larger immigration reform debate in the U.S., the nature of guestworker policies and the fate of undocumented farmworkers have occupied Congressional attention for over two decades. Farm employers have repeatedly come before Congress to seek change in the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program; actors also debate the conditions or existence of a path to legalization for undocumented farmworkers. This article analyses transcripts of hearings in the U.S. Congress on these issues and connections between frames speakers utilize and the role of the state in labour supply and demand in the agriculture sector. Policy actors deploy free market frames to advance policies that actually reflect state roles in constructing markets rather than interference-free competition. Their discourse reveals that, as H-2A and immigration enforcement affects labour supply, policy changes expectations of employers and some Members of Congress for the labour market. They seek policies to respond not only to “labor shortages,” but to specific worker characteristics they seek in a labour force. This constructed labour demand is reflected in themes of ties to work, who will or will not take and perform well in farm jobs, and experience.

Introduction to a Special Issue on the Impact of Immigrant Legalization Initiatives: International Perspectives on Immigration and the World of Work

This article is the third in a series to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ILR Review. The series features articles that analyze the state of research and future directions for important themes the journal has featured over its many years of publication. In this issue, we also feature a special cluster of articles and book reviews on one of the most critical labor market issues across the globe—the legalization and integration of immigrants into national labor markets. Despite the urgent need for immigration reform in the United States, there is a paucity of US research that looks at the impact of a shift from unauthorized to legal immigrant status in the workplace. The US immigration literature has also paid little attention to immigrant legalization policies outside of the United States, despite the fact that other countries have implemented such policies with far more regularity. The articles in this special issue draw on studies of legalization initiatives in major immigrant destinations: Canada, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Together they underscore the importance of cross-national perspectives for understanding the range of legalization programs and their impact on immigrant workers, the workplace, and the labor market. These findings contribute to key questions in migration scholarship and inform the global policy debate surrounding the integration and well-being of immigrants.

Campus Administrators’ Responses to Donald Trump’s Immigration Policy: Leadership During Times of Uncertainty

Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States in November 2016, after more than a year of campaigning on many major issues. Among the key issues presented during then-candidate Trump’s campaign was immigration reform. While Latinos make up the largest ethnic group of non-citizens in the U.S., most of these individuals have resided in the U.S. for a long period of time, have strong family ties, and have children who are lawful U.S. citizens (Baum, 2010; Almeida, Johnson, McNamara, & Gupta, 2011; Sharpless, 2017). The Trump administration’s early days involved a flurry of executive orders and other measures aimed at increasing the enforcement of immigration laws and blocking admission to the U.S. by individuals from specific countries. The purpose of this exploratory research study was to interview principals who lead Hispanic-majority elementary, middle, and high schools to determine how students and school communities are reacting to President Trump’s current policy and rhetoric regarding immigration, and how these principals are responding to the students and communities they serve.

Immigration Reform: Keeping up the Pressure

Immigration Reform: Keeping up the Pressure

Comprehensive Immigration Reform in the Jim Crow Era: Chinese Exclusion and the McCreary Act of 1893

This paper discusses the first immigration amnesty, the McCreary Act of 1893, which regularized the status of tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants to the United States. The Chinese migrants became deportable because they failed to register as required by the Geary Act, based on advice of counsel that the law, applicable on racial grounds, was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, in an era in which racial discrimination was more intense than it is now, and in which Congress had determined that Chinese immigration should end, Congress agreed to let those here remain, on conditions, rather than taking the opportunity to rid the country of Chinese.

“I Saw the Shame on His Face”

This article examines the public essays of the immigrant activist Jose Antonio Vargas. It situates his 2011 New York Times Magazine essay “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” and his 2012 Time magazine essay “Not Legal, Not Leaving” in the larger historical context of the undocumented youth movement in the United States. More specifically, this article identifies how the national comprehensive immigration reform movement created a political genre known as the Dreamer narrative that undocumented youth were trained to produce. By examining the ways Vargas performs these genre expectations, with a particular interest in revising their affective dimensions, the article exposes Vargas’s approach to political engagement, one that derives from the emotional work undocumented migrants undertake to narrate themselves into hostile and vitriolic discourses of belonging.

Foreign-researcher figures stress need for immigration reform before Brexit.

EU researchers would overwhelm existing visa system and should retain special access to the United Kingdom, say science organizations. EU researchers would overwhelm existing visa system and should retain special access to the United Kingdom, say science organizations.

Consequences of the American States’ Legislative Action on Immigration

Over the past decade, US states have responded to federal inaction on comprehensive immigration reform by increasing their output of immigrant policies, both beneficial and restrictive. Although there is a growing empirical literature focused on predicting such activity by states, less is known, especially on a broad scale, about the state-level consequences associated with the policy tone states adopt toward immigrants. To better understand the consequences of restrictive immigrant policies, we created a restrictive score for each state year between 2005 and 2014 and employed linear regression with panel-corrected standard errors to investigate effects on immigrant-related demographics, economic factors, and political participation. We found that states with higher restrictive policy tones do experience reductions in the number of foreign-born residents, including Hispanics and those with limited English proficiency, a goal of many state legislators who favor restrictive policies. States with restrictive policy tones showed reductions in unemployment and poverty rates as well, which are also professed goals for restrictive policy activity. Mediation analyses suggested that the effects of restrictive policy scores on economic conditions are indirect, being exerted through the percentage of a state’s population that is foreign born. Finally, though much attention is focused on the expected increase in Latino political clout, restrictive policy tone was not predictive of increased voter registration or voting in states that pass these types of policies. If anti-immigrant policies are inducing those who oppose these policies to mobilize politically, it must be in an arena outside of voting.

“Putting Band‐Aids on Things That Need Stitches”: Immigration and the Landscape of Care in Rural America

ABSTRACTGrowing numbers of immigrants work and live in rural, geographically isolated areas throughout the United States, places without previously settled immigrant populations. Rapid immigration to such areas already struggling with poverty, weak public infrastructures, and high concentrations of uninsured residents has given way to an increasingly precarious landscape of care. The neoliberal logics of American health care and contentious debates over immigration reform shape this landscape and condition relations among providers, immigrants, and others. Through what I call “band‐aid” care and the informal transactions that characterize it, such as rationing, bartering, hoarding, willful noncompliance, and goodwill, providers and immigrants counter these logics of exclusion and inequality by participating in the dynamic improvisation of care considered illicit and often prohibited under the market‐based economic rationale of health‐care provision. Social obligations and moral legitimacy benefit otherwise marginalized providers who engage in this landscape of care, while vulnerable immigrants gain entry and access to vital resources within this landscape through sociality and interdependence, which engender opportunities (however fraught) for living. Yet providers and immigrants understand band‐aid care to be necessary, just, moral, and legitimate in response to precarity characterized by geographical isolation, economic scarcity, civic inequality, market‐based health care, and exclusionary policies. [immigration, health care, exclusion, social inequality, United States]

Immigration Reform and Farm Labor Markets

AbstractFarmers throughout the United States report a shortage of workers. At the same time, there are proposals to strengthen the enforcement of existing immigration laws. In this paper, we develop an equilibrium approach to examine the impact of removing undocumented workers from the California agricultural labor market, and to infer whether there is evidence of shortages using individual‐worker data. We find evidence that is consistent with a persistent shortage in some sub‐sectors of the California farm labor market. Further, we conduct counter‐factual policy simulations over a range of possible policy alternatives, and find that removing 50% all undocumented farm workers from the state would lead to an increase in wages of over 22%.

Immigration, Employment Opportunities, and Criminal Behavior

We take advantage of provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which granted legal resident status to long-time unauthorized residents but created new obstacles to employment for more recent immigrants, to explore how employment opportunities affect criminal behavior. Exploiting administrative data on the criminal justice involvement of individuals in San Antonio, Texas and using a triple-differences strategy, we find evidence of an increase in felony charges filed against residents most likely to be negatively affected by IRCA's employment regulations. Our results suggest a strong relationship between access to legal jobs and criminal behavior. (JEL J15, J18, J61, K37, K42, R23)

H-2A Program and Immigration Reform in the United States

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952 authorized a nonimmigrant visa category, known as H-2, for foreign agricultural and nonagricultural workers to come to the United States and perform temporary services. To protect against disruptions in the farm labor supply, many growers are turning to the H-2A program to import foreign guest workers. This 5-page fact sheet written by Berdikul Qushim, Zhengfei Guan, and Fritz M. Roka and published by the UF/IFAS Food and Resource Economics Department explains the H-2A program and briefly discusses immigration reform. http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fe1029

Chapter 8 – Media reporting of migrants and migration

Chapter 8 – Media reporting of migrants and migration