Local Immigration Enforcement and Local Economies

• Date: 01 April 2017
• Author: Sarah Bohn,Robert Santillano
• Published date: 01 April 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12172

Local Immigration Enforcement and Local

Economies

*

SARAH BOHN and ROBERT SANTILLANO

We examine the impacts of a locally enforced immigration program—287(g)—on

private employer reports to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

Using contiguous-county pairs to account for time-varying local economic shocks,

we identify impacts on immigrant-intensive industries that are robust to prepolicy

time trends, implementation timing, and the exclusion of pairs with large prepol-

icy differences. Reported employment was 4 percent higher in manufacturing, but

7–10 percent lower in administrative services. These results are consistent with

adverse labor-supply shocks, and, to a lesser extent, a decline in labor demand for

locally produced goods and services.

Introduction

Comprehensive immigration reform remains a hotly debated political issue

in the United States. Since the last immigration overhaul in 1986, the unautho-

rized population has grown from about three million in 1990 to eleven million

in 2013 (Hoefer, Rytina, and Baker 2012; Passel and Cohn 2011; Warren

2014). As in previous policy-reform attempts, debate tends to center around

the contentious issues of legalization for unauthorized immigrants and prevent-

ing future unauthorized flows.

In this paper, we study the economic impacts of a federal law established

by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA)

of 1996 aimed at deterring unauthorized immigrants from settling in U.S.

localities. The program, referred to as 287(g), allows local authorities to

enforce certain immigration laws, such as investigating the documented status

*The authors’affiliations are, respectively, Public Policy Institute of California, San Francisco, California.

E-mail: bohn@ppic.org; and Tulane University, New Orleans, Lousiana. E-mail: rsantillano@gmail.com.

Davin Reed provided excellent research assistance. The authors thank Kevin O’Neil for sharing his data on

local policy measures; Aarti Kohli and Michele Waslin for immigration policy discussions; and Pia Orrenius,

David Card, Joanne Lee, and seminar participants at the Western Economic Association and Mathematica

Policy Research for useful discussions. The views expressed in this work are independent from all aforemen-

tioned individuals and organizations, and all remaining errors are the authors’.

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April 2017). ©2017 Regents of the University of California

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

236

of individuals during routine police activities. Since 2006, the program has led

to more than 1500 participating officers being trained, and more than 300,000

individuals being identified for potential deportation (Immigration and Customs

Enforcement 2013). It has long been recognized that economic opportunity is

the primary draw for unauthorized immigrants to the United States, but the

local economic impacts of their removal are not well understood—despite

often being the centerpiece of the motivation. Here we provide direct impact

estimates of this type of local enforcement policy on measures of economic

activity.

In 2012, the Department of Homeland Security began a phaseout of the 287

(g) program by no longer renewing agreements as they expire. Through 2009,

the endpoint of our analysis period, more than seventy law enforcement agen-

cies had entered into 287(g) agreements, and as of August 2015, at least thirty

agreements were still in effect. Despite these laws having a limited lifespan,

they represented an important shift of enforcement activities from federal to

local authorities, which is one of the considerations of future reform efforts.

For this reason, we believe that identifying the economic impacts of 287(g)

can inform the debate on immigration enforcement policy, which continues

unabated.

Although the impacts of 287(g) agreements have been the topic of previous

studies, their economic consequences have not been documented precisely or

comprehensively. Previous research finds mixed results related to demographic

responses, with one study showing initial declines of the Mexican immigrant

population (Parrado 2012) that go away once large outliers are excluded,

others showing more robust population declines of immigrants (O’Neil 2011;

Watson 2013), and one identifying both—depending on the location (Capps

et al. 2011). Parrado (2012) further finds no relationship between 287(g) and

employment for native workers at the metropolitan-area level, while Pham and

Van (2010) combine 287(g) with other local laws and show that employment

falls when restrictive immigration laws are implemented. Although these stud-

ies begin to clarify the role that local immigration laws have played on local

economies, those that focus on economic outcomes do not explicitly control

for local economic changes that could have dramatically influenced their

results.

The main identification challenge of estimating the impacts of 287(g) is

nonrandom implementation across localities. For example, passage of local

immigration laws could be related to poor economic conditions and high

unemployment. This concern is heightened by the fact that the broad economic

crisis that started in late 2007 overlaps with the period when many 287(g)

agreements were made. The key identifying assumption in our approach is that

economic shocks are shared across localities in geographically close regions.

Local Immigration Enforcement / 237