Immigration enforcement, crime, and demography

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12498
• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Author: Aaron Chalfin,Monica Deza
• Date: 01 May 2020

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133.12498

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AND CRIME

Immigration enforcement, crime, and demography

Evidence from the Legal Arizona Workers Act

Aaron Chalfin1Monica Deza2

1University of Pennsylvania

2CUNY, Hunter College

Correspondence

AaronChalfin, Depar tment of Criminology,

558McNeil Building, University of Pennsyl-

vania,3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA

19104.

Email:achalfin@sas.upenn.edu

Research Summary: This research leveragesa remarkable

natural experiment created by recent legislation in Arizona

to study the impact of labor market immigration enforce-

ment on crime. We show that Arizona’s Mexican immi-

grant population decreased by as much as 20% in the wake

of the passage of a broad-based “E-Verify” law requiring

employers to verify the immigration status of new employ-

ees. In contrast to previous literature that studied traditional

law enforcement-basedimmig ration enforcementprograms

such as “Secure Communities,” we find evidence that labor

market-based immigration enforcement led to a decline in

some types of crime– particularly property crimes.

Policy Implications: It is critical to note that the crime

reduction we observe is driven by an unprecedented decline

in the share of the immigrant population that is young and

male. As such, the effects are purely compositional, sug-

gesting that young immigrant men are no more likely to

commit crimes relative to young native men. Given that

young immigrant men have high labor market participa-

tion and contribute disproportionately to economic output,

this research highlights the promise, but also the potentially

high costs, of labor market immigration enforcement.

KEYWORDS

crime, immigration enforcement

During the past 30 years, crime rates in cities across the United States have plummeted, in many cases,

reaching 50-year lows (Zimring et al., 2006). At the same time, the share of the foreign born among

the U.S. population has increased rapidly, with the foreign-born Mexican share of the population, in

Criminology & Public Policy. 2020;19:515–562. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp © 2020 American Society of Criminology 515

516 CHALFIN AND DEZA

particular, quadrupling since 1980. Empirical research suggests that immigration has either played

no role in this historic decline in crime (Butcher & Piehl, 1998a; Chalfin, 2013; Feldmeyer &

Steffensmeier, 2009; Harris & Feldmeyer,2013; Light & Miller, 2018; Reid, Weiss, Adelman, & Jaret,

2005) or that it has exerted downward pressure on crime (Butcher & Piehl, 1998b; Chalfin, 2015;

MacDonald, Hipp, & Gill, 2013; Martinez, Stowell, & Lee, 2010; Ousey & Kubrin, 2009; Wadsworth,

2010).1Although the majority of the literature supports the view that increases in immigration may

have had a protective effect on crime, public opinion has generally reached the opposite conclusion,

with a majority of U.S. natives indicating a belief that immigration leads to increases in criminal

activity in the United States (Muste, 2013).2

Reflecting, in part, what is plausibly described in Massey, Pren, and Durand (2016) as a “moral

panic” regarding undocumented immigration, funding for border security has increased rapidly over

the last two decades, rising nearly four-fold since 2000. Despite the fact that border patrol agents

apprehended more than five million undocumented immigrants at the border over this time period,

the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States continued to increase rapidly before

finally leveling off in the last few years (Warren, 2016).3When viewed in tandem, these time series

suggest that border enforcement has not been a particularly effectivemeans of reducing t he size of the

undocumented population in the United States, a finding that may be explained by inverse relation-

ship between return immigration to Mexico and border enforcement (Massey,Durand, & Pren, 2015).

Although other research (Bohn & Pugatch, 2015; Davila,Pagan, & Soydemir, 2002) has found that bor-

der enforcement can, under certain conditions, be effective in reducing immigration flows, given the

high economic and social costs of intensive border enforcement (Cornelius, 2001; Hagan & Phillips,

2008) and the limited evidence that border enforcement has served to substantially reduce the stock

of undocumented immigration (Cornelius & Salehyan, 2007; Massey et al., 2016), a number of schol-

ars have concluded that, over the past three decades, U.S. immigration policy has been, in large part,

counterproductive (Massey, 2017).4

Given the inherent difficulty involved in policing a long and porous U.S.–Mexico border, recent

trends in U.S. immigration enforcement have emphasized policies that address undocumented immi-

gration within the country’s interior (Cox & Miles, 2013; Decker, Lewis, Provine, & Varsanyi, 2009;

Hines & Peri, 2019; MacDonald & Sampson, 2012; Treyger,Chalfin, & Loeffer, 2014; Wishnie, 2003).

Enforcement in the interior has, in particular, emphasized expanded cooperation between federal and

local law enforcement, deputizing local police departments that employ more than 75% of the nation’s

sworn police officers, to identify and apprehend deportable noncitizens. In the past decade, expanded

cooperation between federal and local lawenforcement is perhaps best demonstrated by the rise and fall

and subsequent resurrection of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s “Secure Communities"

program, a data interoperability system that automatically transmits and checks fingerprints against

its Automated Biometric Identification System, which contains data on known immigration violators,

known and suspected terrorists, criminal aliens, and noncitizens subject to the U.S.-Visit program.5

Under Secure Communities, county and city jail systems are required to provide biometric data to fed-

eral authorities in order to identify arrestees who are not lawful residents of the United States. Federal

authorities then have an opportunity to issue an immigration detainer, requiring local authorities to

hold an arrestee pending a transfer to federal custody.

The idea behind federal–local law enforcement partnerships like Secure Communities is to leverage

the fact that local law enforcement, in the course of their regular duties, comes into contact with undoc-

umented immigrants who are unknown to federal authorities. By focusing on the portion of the undoc-

umented population that has been arrested and is presumably more likely to be criminally active, it

has been suggested that federal–local law enforcementpar tnerships will improve public safety in com-

munities with large immigrant populations. Several recent papers, however, have evaluated the Secure

CHALFIN AND DEZA 517

Communities program and have, in general, found little evidencet hat the program reduces crime once

it is activated in a jurisdiction (Cox & Miles, 2013; Hines & Peri, 2019; Miles & Cox, 2014; Treyger

et al., 2014), a finding that mirrors research that studies other cooperative agreements such as those

conceived of under 287 g agreements [Koper, Guterbock, Woods, and Taylor (2013)].6Why might

this be? One explanation is that individuals who are arrested for serious crimes will be prosecuted and

subsequently incapacitated under applicable state laws regardless of whether they are subject to depor-

tation under federal law. As such, the inframarginal arrestee who is subject to removal under Secure

Communities but who would have otherwise been allowed to remain in the United States is likely to

be a low-level offender(Treyger et al., 2014). A second explanation, and one that has been emphasized

by several observers in both academia and the policy world, suggests that deputizing municipal police

officers to enforce federal immigration laws undermines trust in police, thus, leading to less com-

munity involvement in the co-production of public safety (Barrick, 2014; Decker et al., 2009; Kirk,

Papachristos, Fagan, & Tyler, 2012; Vidales, Day, & Powe, 2009). Given the central role that commu-

nity support plays in the ability of the police to investigatecr imes and successfullyprosecute offenders,

cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities can potentially com-

promise public safety (Desmond, Papachristos, & Kirk, 2016).7

Another means of enforcing immigration laws in the interior of the country involves government

intervention in the labor market (Bohn, Lofstrom, & Raphael, 2014; Gentsch& Massey, 2011; Wishnie,

2007). Motivated by the reality that undocumented migration is, in large part, a function of employer

demand for unauthorized labor (Cornelius, 2005; Ruhs & Anderson, 2010), it has been suggested that

workplace-centered measures that seek to either incentivize or compel employers to deny employment

access to undocumented immigrants might have the effect of reducing either the stock or the flow of

undocumented immigrants to a jurisdiction (Ayon, Gurrola, Salas, Andro, & Krysik, 2012; Raphael,

2011). Federal sanctions on employers who knowingly hire unauthorized workers date to the 1986

Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) and have since expanded rapidly, leading to the creation

of the federal “E-Verify” system in 2004 and the proliferation of several state laws that require public

employers to verify the work eligibility of new hires. By 2018, 20 U.S. states had enacted legisla-

tion requiring its use by at least some employers, typically those in the public sector (Huennekens,

2011).

Although several recent papers have studied the effectiveness of federal–local law enforcement col-

laboration in controlling crime (Cox & Miles, 2013; Hines & Peri, 2019; Koper et al., 2013; Miles &

Cox, 2014; Treyger et al., 2014), the literature is almost entirely silent on the effects of labor market

immigration enforcement.8In the spirit of Card’s seminal 1990 research on the labor marketimpacts of

the Mariel Boatlift in Miami, we leverage a remarkable natural experiment created by recent labor mar-

ket immigration enforcement legislation in Arizona that led to an extremelylarge and discrete decline in

the state’s foreign-bornMexican population (Bohn et al., 2014). We show that this population decreased

by as much as 20% in the wake of the state’s 2008 implementation of the Legal Arizona Workers Act

(LAWA), a broad-based E-Verify law that required both public- and private-sector employers to verify

the work eligibility of new hires, coupled with severe sanctions for noncompliance. By contrast, the

law seems to have had no effect on the state’s share of other noncitizens (who are more likely to be

documented) or on naturalized Hispanic residents.

To isolate the causal effect of the passage and implementation of LAWA on crime, we employ two

approaches, First, using state-level data, we use a synthetic “differences-in-differences” estimator, a

method of counterfactual estimation for case studies proposed by Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller

(2010). Second, using city-level data, we estimate the effect of the intervention using a traditional

regression-based differences-in-differences in estimator.Using both approaches, we find evidence that

property crimes declined in the aftermath of the law.