Border Flows
US Enforcement Politics and Remittance Dynamics in Mexico
Matthew Smoldt, Valerie Mueller & Cameron Thies
Journal of Politics, January 2025, Pages 143-157
Abstract:
Prior research indicates the enforcement of immigration policy by the host country affects immigrants’ political behavior. Yet, its effect on their economic behavior -- namely, remittances -- remains understudied. To fill this gap, we theorize on remittances’ political determinants in the host country. In general, we argue remittance flows vary with subnational enforcement of the host country’s immigration policy. In particular, immigrants insure themselves against deportation by remitting more in highly punitive locales. We test our theory in the context of the United States’ Secure Communities program, a nationwide policy involving local–federal partnerships to identify and deport undocumented immigrants. We expect greater remittance inflows to Mexican states with more deportees under the program. Instrumental variable analysis affirms our expectation. Mexican states with more deportees under Secure Communities receive significantly more remittances than other Mexican states. The analysis illuminates the indirect effects of host countries’ enforcement of their immigration policy.
The political consequences of public attitudes toward ‘Legal’ vs. ‘Illegal’ immigrants
David Macdonald
Politics, Groups, and Identities, forthcoming
Abstract:
Immigration is one of the most salient and consequential issues in contemporary American politics. Accordingly, we have learned a good deal about the correlates and consequences of immigration attitudes. However, we know far less about how the public differentiates between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants, and how such attitudes matter politically. I overcome this limitation with data from the 2019 ANES Pilot, which queries views toward both groups. I supplement this with data from the 1994 GSS. Overall, I find that while the American public views “legal” immigrants more favorably than “illegal” immigrants, feelings toward the latter dominate the former in shaping general immigration policy preferences and evaluations of presidential candidates. I attribute this to news media coverage that hyper-focuses on “illegality,” demonstrating this phenomenon via original content analyses of five major U.S. newspapers. The seeming predominance of “illegality” in ordinary Americans' thinking will likely make it difficult for politicians to marshal public support for a more accommodating and welcoming immigration system.
Risk Assessment as Policy in Immigration Detention Decisions
David Hausman
Journal of Law and Economics, February 2025, Pages 103-119
Abstract:
A large literature examines the effects of algorithmic risk assessments on judges’ bail decisions in criminal cases. This article examines these effects in the immigration detention context. In 2017, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement changed its risk-assessment tool. Before the change, the tool could recommend detention, release, or referral to a supervisor; afterward, it did not recommend release -- ever. Taking advantage of the suddenness of this change, I show that the removal of the release recommendation reduced actual release decisions by about half, from around 10 percent to around 5 percent of all decisions. Officers continued to follow the tool’s detention recommendations at only a slightly lower rate after the change, and when officers did deviate from the tool’s recommendation to order release, supervisors became more likely to overrule their decisions.
Inventing Birthright: The Nineteenth-Century Fabrication of jus soli and jus sanguinis
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal & Sam Erman
Law and History Review, August 2024, Pages 421-448
Abstract:
Formal membership in a state has been an essential political status for well over a century. It is typically gained at birth, either jus soli or jus sanguinis. Jus soli assigns nationality by birth in a nation's territory; jus sanguinis assigns children their parents’ nationality. This article provides an alternative intellectual history of the modern dominance of these principles for attributing nationality. Contrary to prior scholarship, soli and sanguinis were not restatements of existing principles. The soli/sanguinis binary was a nineteenth-century invention. Old-regime European empires attributed membership in the community under one or another single natural law principle. Parentage and birthplace were mostly evidence of conformity. In the early nineteenth century, officials in multiple jurisdictions began prioritizing positive law above natural law and transformed parentage and birthplace into competing principles for assigning nationality. This movement crystallized in 1860 when Charles Demolombe introduced jus soli and jus sanguinis to nationality law as competing, ostensibly ancient legal traditions. The framework spread quickly because it was a useful way to assign nationality despite states’ conflicting approaches to political membership. Yet, as its role in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) helps illustrate, the invented tradition has also obscured our understanding of more complex historical dynamics.
Race, immigration, and Black intergroup politics
Leann Mclaren
Politics, Groups, and Identities, Winter 2025, Pages 86-110
Abstract:
While the literature has established that immigration opinions among African Americans are frequently driven by economic anxieties, less is known about how this co-exists with other factors. I argue that race and distribution of foreign-born immigrants at the local level may be important additional factors in determining African American immigration restrictionist sentiment. OLS regressions were run with robustness checks. Results suggest that African Americans living in counties with high proportions of Black or Asian immigrants may lead to more positive immigration sentiments. I find the opposite for those in high Latino foreign-born counties. Additional results with interactions show the limitations of group competition as a mechanism for this relationship. These findings have implications for the future of intergroup relations and suggest further examining the diverse identities of immigrants and their effects on Black political opinion. As the demographics profile of immigrant groups in the US continues to diversify, it is imperative that we continue to investigate how the increasing ethnic diversity of Black America may be disrupting scholarly knowledge and expectations for the future of intergroup relations in America.
Effects of immigration on native entrepreneurship in the US: An analysis of self-employment over 1980–2018
Bulent Unel
Small Business Economics, February 2025, Pages 755-773
Abstract:
This paper examines the causal impact of immigration on entrepreneurship among US-born non-Hispanic whites in non-agricultural private sectors from 1980 to 2018. Using self-employment as a proxy for entrepreneurship and distinguishing between incorporated individuals and unincorporated self-employed workers, I find a sizable negative impact of immigration on native self-employment. Importantly, this effect is consistent across incorporated and unincorporated self-employment and remains robust across demographic groups based on gender, age, and education. Results are robust to the choice of controls and estimation methods.
Paradox Between Immigrant Advantages in Morbidity and Mortality: Dynamic Patterns and Tentative Explanations
Hui Zheng & Wei-hsin Yu
Demography, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research indicates that immigrants are more likely to experience chronic conditions and disabilities than natives at older ages, yet they continue to exhibit lower overall mortality, thus suggesting a morbidity–mortality paradox. We utilize the IPUMS National Health Interview Survey 2002–2018 with linked mortality data through 2019 (n = 405,270) to comprehensively investigate how this paradox unfolds with age for various groups of immigrants. The analysis shows that immigrants’ advantages in chronic conditions and disabilities narrow or even disappear at old ages, whereas their mortality advantages continuously increase with age. These patterns exist for immigrants of different ethnoracial, sex, and educational groups. The decomposition analysis reveals that the narrowing disability gap is due to immigrants’ increasing prevalence of mental illness and diabetes, shrinking advantages in lung diseases and musculoskeletal conditions, and increasing vulnerability to the disabling effects of major chronic conditions. However, immigrants are less likely to die from chronic diseases and disabilities, and this advantage strengthens with age, widening the nativity gap in mortality risk with age. We suggest that health-based selection might simultaneously postpone the onset of chronic diseases and disabilities to later ages for immigrants and better enable them to weather the mortality consequences of the diseases and disabilities.
Immigration, acculturation, and diabetes: A comparative study of diabetes prevalence among Asian Indian immigrants living in the United States and native-born populations in India and the United States
Emma Nichols et al.
SSM - Population Health, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite evidence that Indian immigrants in high-income countries have higher diabetes risk, few studies have directly compared Indian immigrants to both Indians in India and the general population. We compared diabetes prevalence in the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) study (Indian immigrants) (N=686), the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI) (Indians in India) (N=40,496), and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) (general US population) (N=7,643), accounting for selective immigration using propensity score matching. We used generalized regression models to assess associations between diabetes and acculturation in MASALA and compare correlates of diabetes across studies. After matching, Indians in India had a higher prevalence of diabetes (37.9% [35.4-40.5]) than Indian immigrants in the US (26.7% [23.5-30.1]) and the general US population (19.6% [17.6-21.8]). Higher acculturation was associated with a lower diabetes prevalence (prevalence ratio [PR]: 0.68 [0.45-1.04], P=0.078) and lower HbA1c (difference: -0.205% [-0.408 to -0.001], P=0.049). We also identified differences in the magnitude of correlations between diabetes and risk factors, including abdominal obesity (MASALA PR: 1.41 [1.09-1.81], LASI PR: 2.41 [2.29-2.54], HRS PR: 2.52 [2.17-2.93]). Cultural factors, including differences in lifestyle and diet, may play an important role in the high diabetes risk among Indian immigrants and explaining racial disparities in diabetes burden in the US.