The Unintended Consequences of US immigration Enforcement Policies

By Emily Ryo

US immigration enforcement policy seeks to change the behaviors and views of not only individuals in the United States but also those of prospective migrants outside the United States. Yet we still know relatively little about the behavioral and attitudinal effects of US enforcement policy on the population abroad. Thisstudy uses a randomized experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey that was administered in El Salvador,Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico to analyze the effects of USdeterrence policies on individuals migration intentions and their attitudes toward the US immigration system. The two policies that the current study examines are immigration detention and nonju-dicial removals. The survey results provide no evidence that a heightened awareness of these US immigration enforcement pol-icies affects individuals intentions to migrate to the United States.But heightened awareness about the widespread use of immigra-tion detention in the United States does negatively impact indi-viduals’assessments about the procedural and outcome fairness of the US immigration system. These findings suggest that immi-gration detention may foster delegitimating beliefs about the USlegal system without producing the intended deterrent 

PNAS, Vol. 118, no. 21, 2021. 7p.