Boundary Flow
How the Trump Administration’s Quota Policy Transformed Immigration Judging
Elise Blasingame et al.
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The Trump administration implemented a controversial performance quota policy for immigration judges in October 2018. The policy’s political motivations were clear: to pressure immigration judges to order more immigration removals and deportations as quickly as possible. Previous attempts by U.S. presidents to control immigration judges were ineffective, but this quota policy was different because it credibly threatened judges’ job security and promotion opportunities if they failed to follow the policy. Our analysis of hundreds of thousands of judicial decisions before and after the policy’s implementation demonstrates that the quota policy successfully led immigration judges to issue more immigration removal orders (both in absentia and merits orders). The post-policy change in behavior was strongest among those judges who were less inclined, pre-policy, to issue immigration removal decisions. These findings have important implications for immigration judge independence, due process protections for noncitizens, and presidential efforts to control the federal bureaucracy.
Robots, Natives and Immigrants in US Local Labor Markets
Mohsin Javed
Labour Economics, December 2023
Abstract:
I analyze the impact of industrial robots on the employment of natives and immigrants in US local labor markets between 1990 and 2014. The proposed mechanism, through which robot adoption affects the employment of natives and immigrants differentially, is based on two facts: first, robots tend to displace workers based on the task content of occupations, and second, natives and immigrants in the US differ in their task specialization. Therefore, robots should affect their employment unequally. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in robot exposure across US local labor markets over time, I test this mechanism and find that the effect on immigrants is roughly 1.76 times greater than that observed for natives. Specifically, I find that one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment-to-population ratio of natives and immigrants by 0.38 and 0.67 percentage points, respectively. I attribute these results to the fact that immigrants specialize in jobs or tasks at risk of being automated.
Crimes committed by recent immigrants: Characteristics and community patterns
Davis Shelfer & Yan Zhang
Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, forthcoming
Abstract:
The notion persists that recent immigrants commit substantively more serious crimes than citizens, but prior research has only used aggregate-level data or youth-focused samples. We address this gap using individual-level 2017 crime arrest data from the Houston Police Department (HPD) that include citizenship, supplemented by Houston Super Neighborhoods data and American Community Survey estimates. We conduct bivariate and multilevel multinomial analyses to compare crime characteristics and neighborhood-level influences on offending by citizenship, finding that non-U.S. citizen arrestees were less likely to have been arrested for felonies, drug crimes, and Part I property crimes than U.S. citizen arrestees. An exploration of neighborhood contextual influences and interaction effects reveals further nuances. Directions for future research and implications for evidence-based policy are discussed.
An Empirical Examination of the In-Prison Behaviors of Foreign-Born Individuals: Does Nationality Predict Misconduct?
Javier Ramos, Sylwia Piatkowska & Cristal Hernandez
Race and Justice, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current study investigates how immigrants cope and adapt to the “pains of imprisonment” by examining a specific maladjustment outcome -- disciplinary infractions. Like other groups (e.g., females, LGBTQ, elderly), immigrants are regarded as a special population in prison considering that they encounter a unique set of challenges that the typical incarcerated person does not. At the same time, immigrants are not a monolithic group, and there are reasons why misconduct may differ when we separate them by country of birth. To this end, we explore whether the frequency and probability for institutional misconduct varies across Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Mexicans, as well as immigrants from other countries. We also consider whether any nationality group exhibits a higher (or lower or similar) propensity for in-prison offending than the native-born. Our results reveal there are greater differences in disciplinary infractions among our foreign-born groups than between them and natives, a finding that is obscured when immigrants are lumped into a single measure (i.e., all foreign-born).
The Refugee Advantage: English-Language Attainment in the Early Twentieth Century
Ran Abramitzky et al.
NBER Working Paper, September 2023
Abstract:
The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs. Scholars attribute the success of refugee groups to governmental programs on assimilation and integration. Before 1948, however, refugees arrived without formal selection processes or federal support. We examine the integration of historical refugees using a large archive of recorded oral history interviews to understand linguistic attainment of migrants who arrived in the early twentieth century. Using fine-grained measures of vocabulary, syntax and accented speech, we find that refugee migrants achieved a greater depth of English vocabulary than did economic/family migrants, a finding that holds even when comparing migrants from the same country of origin or religious group. This study improves on previous research on immigrant language acquisition and refugee incorporation, which typically rely on self-reported measures of fluency. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that refugees had greater exposure to English or more incentive to learn, due to the conditions of their arrival and their inability to immediately return to their origin country.
Immigration policy shocks and infant health
Laxman Timilsina
Economics & Human Biology, December 2023
Abstract:
This paper evaluates the effect of positive and negative immigration policy shocks on infant health outcomes in the U.S. I examine changes in mean birth weight and the incidence of low birth weight (LBW) at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level around two major institutional shocks: The 1986 Immigration Reform Act (IRCA), which favored immigrants, and the increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency arrests at the start of 2017 which might have put immigrants at greater risk of apprehension. It uses a triple difference approach, comparing birth outcomes of foreign-born mothers with U.S.-born mothers (relative to mothers living in MSAs with a higher and lower concentration of IRCA applications and an increase in ICE arrests) before and after the two immigration policies. I find that in MSAs that had higher IRCA applications, mean birth weight increased, and the incidence of LBW decreased by 3–6 percent for babies born to foreign-born mothers. By contrast, in MSAs that had higher ICE arrests starting in 2017, mean birth weight decreased, and the incidence of LBW increased by 3–7 percent for babies born to foreign-born mothers. The effect of the increase in ICE arrests was more pronounced among mothers who were born in Latin and Central American countries. Sub-sample analysis shows that the incidence of LBW increased by as much as 12 percent for babies born to foreign-born mothers of Hispanic origin.
Shades of Perception: Non-White Refugee Flows and Migration Policy Restrictiveness
Andrew Rosenberg
University of Florida Working Paper, September 2023
Abstract:
Is there a policy backlash to non-white refugees? Differential reactions to the 2015 European refugee “crisis” and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine underscore the unequal treatment experienced by forcibly displaced persons. While states have long resisted taking in refugees that they perceive to be racially undesirable, they often make exceptions for those deemed more desirable. Case-specific evidence suggests that states respond to the former by enacting restrictive policies and to the latter by creating new pathways for temporary and permanent immigration. However, no systematic tests exist of this proposition. I pair a regression discontinuity analysis of two population-based surveys with a time-series cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between large refugee inflows and migration policy changes from 1968 to 2013, finding support for my argument. Exposure to non-white refugees leads states to enact more restrictive policies and triggers public support for those restrictions. Exposure to white refugees produces the opposite result. These findings corroborate a growing literature on racial inequality in international politics.