Immigration Demand and the Boomerang of Deportation Policies: Was the Central American Migrant Caravan created in the United States?

By Christian Ambrosius and David Leblang

What causes the demand for entry into the United States? We demonstrate the existence of a vicious cycle of deportation policies and migration between the United States and countries from Latin America and the Caribbean. Our argument is simple: deportation of convicts from the United States leads to violence in the deportee’s home country which, in turn, increases the demand for that country’s natives to seek entry in the United States. We test this argument utilizing a nested research design based on both cross-country data as well as subnational data from the case of El Salvador. For both samples of data, we first estimate the effect of deportations on home country violence. In the second step, we show that the predicted level of home country violence helps explain the demand for entry into the United States.

Unpublished report, 2019. 40p.