By American Immigration Council

Under United States law, any person who is physically present in the United States or who “arrives” at the border must be given an opportunity to seek asylum. Despite this clear command, in recent years U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) officers stationed at the southern border have turned away thousands of people who come to ports of entry seeking protection, including through a practice known as “metering” (or “queue management”). This has occurred even as officials issued pleas to asylum seekers to go to ports of entry and request asylum, rather than crossing the border between the ports of entry to ask for asylum. Under metering, CBP officers assert a lack of capacity to refuse to inspect and process asylum seekers, requiring them to wait for weeks or months in Mexico just for the opportunity to start the asylum process. This practice began as early as 2016 at certain ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border but its use expanded significantly border-wide during the Trump administration. Metered individuals followed the U.S. government’s instructions to wait to seek asylum without crossing the border between ports of entry but have been left to languish in Mexico indefinitely or return home and abandon their hopes of applying for asylum in the United States.

Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, 2021. 5 p.

By Jasmine R. Hernandez and Heather J. H. Edgar

The United States is no stranger to migration across its borders. In 2020, its Southwestern border saw a drastic increase in apprehensions by the Border Patrol. While imperfect and an undercount of the true number of migration events, apprehension data is often used as a proxy to understand migration patterns. The rise in migration was coupled with an increased but unknown number of deaths along migration routes. This article focuses on the New Mexico portion of the El Paso Border Patrol Sector and the increased migrant caseload at New Mexico’s Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI) over the last few years. To the best of our knowledge, this article is the first academic study to examine migrant deaths in detail in southern New Mexico. We begin by contextualizing the changing pattern of migrant deaths in New Mexico within the broader framework of border policing strategies that have intentionally pushed migration routes to remote areas. We describe the work of the OMI, highlighting its very recent initiatives to track migrant deaths in its database. We then discuss the changes seen by the OMI in its migrant caseload from fiscal year (FY) 2009 to 2023, with the most drastic increase in cases occurring from 2022 to 2023. For instance, the data indicate that most of the identified migrants that have died in New Mexico were recovered in June and July (45 percent), crossed through Doña Ana County (66 percent), were male (60 percent), and among those identified, were from Mexico (65 percent) and between 20 and 39 years of age (69 percent). Of the 248 cases of migrant deaths, 87 percent have been identified. The most common causes of death were undetermined (46 percent) and environmental exposure (41 percent). We then explore the effects of changing governmental policies and state initiatives to curb/reduce migration in the US on OMI’s increased caseload. We discuss the impact that the rapid shift in migration deaths is having on the OMI and how OMI is working to respond and adjust to the dynamic situation. This work highlights the collateral damage of border security measures, underscored by the increasing number of deaths and challenges faced by the OMI. We consider the need for new and amended policies aimed at mitigating the humanitarian crisis that continues to unfold, emphasizing the need for the humane treatment of migrants. Finally, we suggest allocating resources to death investigating agencies. These resources would provide essential support to find, identify, and repatriate migrants, improve agencies’ abilities to collaborate with governmental agencies and programs such as Border Patrol’s Missing Migrant Program, and improve our understanding of the circumstances along the Southwestern border.

Journal on Migration and Human SecurityVolume 12, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 226-242

By Daniel E. Martínez, Sam Chambers, Geoff Boyce and Jeremy Slack 

Immigration at the US-México border has drastically changed since the mid-2010s. Instead of adult undocumented Mexican men, generally migrating for economic purposes, there are now large numbers of men, women, unaccompanied minors, and families from diverse countries seeking asylum in the United States, as they are allowed to do under US and international law. In response to these changes, the US federal government leveraged multiple strategies to impede access to the country’s asylum system, including relying on Title 42 “expulsions.” Title 42, a COVID-19-era health measure, prevented migrants from initiating an asylum claim. Instead, asylum-seekers were typically immediately expelled to the closest port of entry in México. The use of public health as a pretext to control the border placed these migrants at risk and led many to attempt repeat border crossings. Given this policy context, we ask: what, if any, is the association between Title 42 expulsions and migrant deaths in southern Arizona? We address this question by drawing on records of recovered undocumented border crosser (UBC) remains investigated by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) in Tucson, Arizona. We examined differences in the number and demographic characteristics of UBC remains recovered between what prior studies have characterized as the “Localized Funnel Effect” Era of border enforcement in southern Arizona (i.e., October 1, 2013–March 19, 2020; N = 851), and the “Title 42” Era (i.e., March 20, 2021–September 30, 2023; N = 709). We also assessed how, if at all, the geography of recovered UBC remains shifted between these eras. We found that migrant deaths rose from an annual mean of 133 during the Localized Funnel Effect (LFE) Era to 198 in the Title 42 (T42) Era, representing a 48 percent increase. Compared to the earlier era, remains recovered during the T42 Era clustered closer to the border and near the cities of Nogales and Agua Prieta, Sonora, having shifted from west to east in southern Arizona. Additionally, we found that Title 42 disproportionately affected Mexican and Guatemalan nationals both in terms of expulsions as well as deaths. We propose several policy recommendations based on our study’s findings intended to reduce unnecessary suffering and increase human security:

• The US federal government should not impede or limit migrants’ access to the asylum system. Policymakers should instead create clear pathways and procedures that obviate the need for migrants to undertake dangerous journeys and overcome barriers to fair consideration of their claims.

• The US government must expand its ability to address these claims, as continued attempts to block asylum seekers will result in additional loss of life and increased violence. It should increase its capacity to screen asylum seekers at the US-México border. We propose an increase in USCIS Asylum Officers to carry out this duty. US Customs and Border Protection agents should not screen asylum seekers, nor should they assume the responsibility of serving as asylum officers, given the agency’s extensively documented record of persistently dehumanizing and mistreating migrants.

• The US federal government must take measures to eliminate the backlog of asylum cases in the immigration courts. These measures need to include reforms in the underlying immigration system and in the removal adjudication system, such as greater access to legal counsel and changes to the law that offer legal pathways to imperiled migrants who do not meet the narrow definition of asylum. Absent these reforms, the asylum case backlog will grow, and many asylum seekers with strong claims to remain will be removed after living for years in the United States.

Journal on Migration and Human SecurityVolume 12, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 182-203

By César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

Borders do not exist. They are made and remade. At every step, the law creates, moves, reforms, reproduces, and reinforces the border. Focusing on the boundary that México and the United States share, this essay critiques the U.S. Supreme Court’s privileging of the sovereign prerogative to control access to the nation’s territory. In their efforts to control movement across and near the border, legal doctrine permits Executive officials to deviate from ordinary legal constraints on the use of violence. This creates a modern version of the sovereign that Carl Schmitt described a century ago: extra-constitutional in origin and subject to law only on its own terms. Urging an end to the law of border exceptionalism, the essay argues that the Schmittian sovereignty that exists in the borderlands is neither justified by the facts on the ground nor required by the very legal principles that the Supreme Court points to.

Ohio State Legal Studies Research Paper No. 820

University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 2023, Article 5

By The American Immigration Council

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a temporary immigration status provided to nationals of certain countries experiencing problems that make it difficult or unsafe for their nationals to be deported there.1 TPS has been a lifeline to hundreds of thousands of individuals already in the United States when problems in a home country make their departure or deportation untenable. This fact sheet provides an overview of how TPS designations are determined, what benefits TPS confers, and how TPS beneficiaries apply for and regularly renew their status.

Washington DC: American Immigration Council, 2024. 8p.

By The University of Washington, Center for Human Rights

As the United States enters the height of the 2024 electoral season, a familiar pattern is at the forefront of campaign rhetoric: Democrats and Republicans alike declare themselves ever tougher on “the border,” making claims about “record” numbers—of arrests, deportations, border crossings—to bolster their arguments. The deep politicization of immigration policy provides incentives for the data to be used misleadingly by both sides. In fact, the reality of how immigration policy is carried out is more complex: against the backdrop of shifting local and national policies, raw numbers do not necessarily capture what is happening on the ground in actual communities, and may in fact obscure our understanding of the human rights implications of immigration enforcement. This report dives into the question of what shifting trends in immigration enforcement – nationally and locally – mean for communities here in the Pacific Northwest (PNW).1 Drawing on various collections of data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including some datasets we release here for the first time, as well as on data from immigration courts and insights from immigrant-serving organizations, we examine three central questions: • How is immigration enforcement happening in the PNW? • How does our region’s experience compare to national trends? • What are the implications of these trends for human rights? We find that recent changes in state and local   In this report, we refer to the “Pacific Northwest” or “PNW” as shorthand for the states of Oregon and Washington. These two states, plus Alaska, make up ICE’s “Seattle Area of Responsibility.” Because there is comparatively little immigration enforcement in Alaska, we do not address the circumstances in that state here. policy have contributed to important gains for migrant justice here in the PNW, many of which are highlighted in our recent report “Paths to Compliance: The Effort to Protect Immigrant Rights in Washington State”. This is reflected in changing arrest patterns across the PNW: whereas in past years, local and state law enforcement helped channel migrants into the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in the wake of “sanctuary state” legislation in Oregon and Washington, this happens much less frequently. And while ICE officials warned that they would compensate for curtailed collaboration in sanctuary jurisdictions by conducting more “at large” arrests on the streets and in communities, this does not appear to have been the case in recent years. Instead, Biden administration policies have attempted to alleviate bottlenecks at the US/ Mexico border by shifting the processing of new arrivals to the interior of the country and opening up new pathways for some migrants seeking asylum. For the most part, the growing enforcement numbers we have seen in the PNW reflect this, as migrants arriving here from the southern border are arrested at subsequent check-ins while following instructions from CBP and ICE, rather than in community raids. This is not to suggest that enforcement has been lax. Quite the contrary: recently-arrived migrants, many of them families with small children, and from communities with fewer established support networks in the PNW, face dire conditions and deep challenges defending their rights. And although reports of workplace raids or community-based arrests appear to have waned, such practices could return under a more overtly repressive administration;  thanks to DHS’ growing use of public and private databases, tracking technologies, and digital detention, data on migrant communities is readily available to ICE and CBP, here as elsewhere in the country. At the same time, analysis of court data shows that in fact, outcomes of immigration court cases brought in Washington and Oregon are markedly worse than the national average. This means that although our communities have taken important steps to protect the rights of immigrants, there is no firewall between the “progressive” PNW and national anti-immigrant practices. The border is, in this sense, everywhere: our neighbors continue to be separated from their families in our courts, held under abysmal conditions in ICE detention, and deported through our airports; in some ways, in fact, migrants fare worse here than in other parts of the country. We have a lot of work to be done before the PNW can truly consider itself a “sanctuary” for immigrants.    

Seattle: The University of Washington Center for Human Rights 2024. 24[p.

 By Daniel Di Martino  

This report estimates the lifetime fiscal impact of immigrants, of various ages and educational attainment, to the United States. It offers a methodological upgrade over similar analyses and estimates and evaluates the fiscal impact of various proposed immigration reforms. A clear picture of the fiscal cost of immigrants is particularly important, given the ongoing border crisis. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the border surge will number 8.7 million unlawful immigrants between 2021 and 2026. The original analysis in this report finds that the border crisis will cost an estimated $1.15 trillion over the lifetime of the new unlawful immigrants—a cost larger than the entire U.S. defense budget and almost equal to the cost of Social Security in 2023. Looking at immigrants more broadly, this report shows that the average new immigrant (lawful or unlawful) has a positive fiscal impact and reduces the federal budget deficit by over $10,000 during his lifetime. For comparison, the average native-born citizen is expected to cost over $250,000 to the federal government. Despite the average immigrant reducing the budget deficit, immigrants without a college education and all those who immigrate to the U.S. after age 55 are universally a net fiscal burden by up to $400,000. The large positive fiscal impact of young and college-educated immigrants pulls up the overall average. Each immigrant under the age of 35 with a graduate degree.   Therefore, for policymakers considering the fiscal impact of immigrants to the U.S., the characteristics of people seeking entry into the country are crucial. Certain immigrants are fiscally beneficial; others are fiscally detrimental. This report quantifies the fiscal impact of common immigration reform proposals: • Mass deportations would significantly reduce the national debt over the long run, but a policy of selective legalization, coupled with mass deportations, would be even more fiscally beneficial, reducing the debt by about $1.9 trillion. • Given the education, age, and earnings of H-1B visa recipients, doubling the number of H-1B visas for just one year would reduce the budget deficit by $70 billion over the long run—and by another $70 billion each year thereafter. • The most beneficial immigration policy change would be to exempt STEM graduate degree holders from green-card caps, increasing immigration by some 15,000 people per year and reducing the visa backlog; this would reduce the deficit by $150 billion in the first year and $25 billion each year thereafter. • Eliminating refugee resettlement and permanent immigration by parents of U.S. citizens would reduce the debt by a combined $40 billion in net present value every year. • Congress could upskill the existing immigration flow by eliminating the diversity visa category and increasing the visas available to the top employment-based categories, and requiring immigrants to have earned a high school diploma to be eligible for a family visa, reducing the national debt by over $60 billion per year. By enacting a selectionist immigration policy—which requires securing the border from unlawful immigration, reducing low-skilled immigration, and expanding high-skilled immigration—the U.S. could reduce future federal debt by trillions of dollars over the long run. This report proposes a legislative package that provides over $2 trillion in net present value during the first year and over $200 billion each subsequent year, without accounting for the additional productivity growth resulting from high-skilled immigration. Furthermore, under these reforms, the annual number of immigrants who are new permanent residents decreases by about 15% after a temporary legalization program and a partial clearing of the employment-based visa backlog. Over the long term, annual legal immigration decreases under this plan from approximately 1 million in FY 2019 to approximately 860,000 

New York: The Manhattan Institute, 2024. 58p.

By Alex Nowrasteh, Sarah Eckhardt, and Michael Howard

The National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published ground breaking investigations into the economics of immigration in 1997 and 2017. Both publications contained thorough literature surveys compiled by experts, academics, and think tank scholars on how immigration affects many aspects of the U.S. economy. The 2017 NAS report included an original fiscal impact model as a unique contribution to immigration scholarship. Its findings have been used by policymakers, economists, journalists, and others to debate immigration reform. Here, we acquired the exact methods used by the NAS from its authors to replicate, update, and expand upon the 2017 fiscal impact model published in the NAS’s The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration. This paper presents two analyses: a measure of the historical fiscal impacts of immigrants from 1994 to 2018 and the projected long-term fiscal impact of an additional immigrant and that immigrant’s descendants. An individual's fiscal impact refers to the difference between the taxes that person paid and the benefits that person received over a given period. We use and compare two models for these analyses: the first follows the NAS’s methodology as closely as possible and updates the data for more recent years (hereafter referred to as the Updated Model), and the second makes several methodological changes that we believe improve the accuracy of the final results (hereafter referred to as the Cato Model). The most substantial changes made in the Cato Model include correcting for a downward bias in the estimation of immigrants’ future fiscal contributions identified by Michael Clemens in 2021, allocating the fiscal impact of U.S.-born dependents of immigrants to the second generation group, and using a predictive regression to assign future education levels to individuals who are too young to have completed their education. Other minor changes are discussed in later sections. Immigrants have a more positive net fiscal impact than that of native-born Americans in most scenarios in the Updated Model and in every scenario in the Cato Model, depending on how the costs of public goods are allocated. The Cato Model finds that immigrant individuals who arrive at age 25 and who are high school dropouts have a net fiscal impact of +$216,000 in net present value terms, which does not include their descendants. Including the fiscal impact of those immigrants’ descendants reduces those immigrants’ net fiscal impact to +$57,000. By comparison, native-born American high school dropouts of the same age have a net fiscal impact of −$32,000 that drops to −$177,000 when their descendants are included (see Table 31). Results also differ by level of government. State and local governments often incur a less positive or even negative net fiscal impact from immigration, whereas the federal government almost always sees revenues rise above expenditures in response to immigration. With some variation and exceptions, the net fiscal impact of immigrants is more positive than it is for native-born Americans and positive overall for the federal and state/local governments

Washington, DC: The Cato Institute, 2023. 246p.  

By Huyen Pham & Pham Hoang Van.

As the Biden Administration decides whether to continue the 287(g) program (the controversial program deputizing local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration laws), our research shows that the program has broader negative effects on policing behavior than previously identified. To date, debate about the 287(g) program has focused exclusively on the policing behavior of law enforcement agencies like sheriff’s offices that sign the agreements, and on concerns that these signatory local enforcement agencies (“LEAs”) engage in racial profiling. Our research shows that the agreements also negatively affect the behavior of nearby, non-signatory law enforcement agencies. Using 18 million traffic stops drawn from the Stanford Open Policing Project, we find that the agreements caused state troopers in North Carolina and South Carolina to stop Hispanic drivers more often than White drivers, in order to funnel them into the intensive immigration screening conducted by signatory LEAs at the shared jails. Because trooper agencies did not sign the agreements, statistical associations between the presence of agreements and the differential treatment of drivers by race are not contaminated by unobserved confounding factors. Our identification of these previously unnoticed spillover effects raises important policy questions about the program’s impact and the adequacy of existing legal and administrative controls.

Arizona Law Review, 2022. 41p.

By JULIET P. STUMPF 

Crimmigration law—the intersection of immigration and criminal law—with its emphasis on immigration enforcement, has been central in discussions over political compromise on immigration reform. Yet crimmigration law’s singular approach to interior immigration and criminal law enforcement threatens to undermine public faith in the legitimacy of immigration law. This Article explores the significance of crimmigration for the procedural legitimacy of immigration law. Seminal scholars of psychological jurisprudence have concluded that perceptions about procedural justice—whether the law and legal authorities treat people fairly—are often more important than a favorable outcome, such as winning a case or avoiding arrest. Crimmigration introduces procedural deficiencies into immigration law that may undermine people’s perceptions of its legitimacy. These deficiencies, seen through the lens of psychological jurisprudence, mean that individuals and institutions are less likely to trust immigration law and cooperate with immigration authorities. This Article applies specific criteria that jurisprudential psychologists have shown influence perceptions about justice. It predicts that the core procedural deficiencies of crimmigration—which bar access to immigration benefits, undermine procedural safeguards for fair and accurate outcomes, and embed racialization into immigration enforcement—will undermine perceptions about the legitimacy of immigration law. This has important implications for immigration reform. If immigration enforcement lacks procedural justice, any compromise struck with crimmigration at its core will exacerbate public distrust of immigration law.

Arizona Law Review, 2023. 47p.

By Elizabeth Hannah

Immigration detention is a central feature of the United States’ immigration system. Noncitizens facing removal are detained in staggering numbers throughout the removal process, from the initiation of legal proceedings to the issuance of a final removal order. Moreover, as the U.S. government’s reliance upon immigration detention has grown, the Supreme Court has systematically stripped noncitizens of important substantive and procedural protections. This is especially true in the post-removal-order context, where a series of recent decisions have placed more people than ever at risk of prolonged detention without a bond hearing. Three cases in particular—Johnson v. Guzman Chavez (2021), Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez (2022), and Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez (2022)—have increased the likelihood that noncitizens subject to post-removal-order detention will remain incarcerated for months or years, even if they have pending claims for relief. This Note describes each of these three cases and explains how, together, they severely undermine the rights of noncitizens with final removal orders. This Note further argues that people facing post-removal-order detention should be entitled to rigorous due process protections. Even though detention constitutes a clear deprivation of liberty, the Supreme Court has held that six months of post-removal-order detention is “presumptively reasonable.” This Note criticizes that premise and asserts that no period of immigration detention is presumptively reasonable. In other words, even if the Court had decided Guzman Chavez, Arteaga-Martinez, and Aleman Gonzalez in favor of the noncitizen plaintiffs, the existing framework would still be insufficient to protect immigrants in post-removal-order detention from experiencing protracted and unnecessary trauma. This Note therefore posits that, at minimum, immigrants with final removal orders should receive a bond hearing before an immigration judge at the close of the 90-day mandatory detention period. While more radical solutions like detention abolition are ultimately in order, a 90-day bond hearing requirement would at least provide noncitizens facing post-removal-order detention a meaningful opportunity to secure release from custody.

Arizona Law Review, 2023. 36p.

By Chase Childress, Amy Farrella, Shawn Bhimani, and Kayse Lee Maass

Law enforcement interventions continue to be the primary mechanism used to identify offenders and illicit businesses involved in human trafficking, yet trafficking continues to be a thriving international operation. We explore alternative mechanisms to disrupt illicit operations and reduce victimization through labor trafficking supply chains using supply chain disruption theory. Using a case study approach to examine one federally prosecuted labor trafficking case in the agricultural sector, we (1) extend criminological concepts of disruption by identifying sources and methods of disruption and (2) inform criminal justice system responses by presenting novel methods of assessing effectiveness of anti-human trafficking policies and programs.

Victims & Offenders, 2022. 39p.

By Nicole Ward and Jeanne Batalova

The United States is in the midst of an historic period in its immigration history, facing a changing composition of the immigrant population, pandemic-related pent-up demand for permanent and temporary visas resulting in extensive backlogs, record pressure at the U.S.-Mexico border, and somewhat decreasing public support for expanded immigration. Legal permanent and temporary immigration rose in 2022 after a few years of chill brought about by the COVID-19 public-health crisis and the Trump administration’s restrictive policies and rhetoric. Amid crises around the world, the Biden administration extended or expanded Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for certain eligible immigrants already in the United States and announced special humanitarian parole programs allowing some migrants from several countries to enter the United States and stay temporarily. At the southwest border, record numbers of migrant encounters in 2022 accompanied court orders preventing the Biden administration from revoking the Title 42 public-health order authorizing the rapid expulsion of asylum seekers and other migrants. The administration has proposed a revised system to govern asylum at the border, but as of this writing the situation remains in flux. To promote orderly arrival and processing of asylum seekers and expedite the expulsion of unauthorized migrants, in January 2023 the Biden administration announced another humanitarian parole program to include up to 30,000 authorized newcomers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela every month if they have a U.S. sponsor. This program was followed by controversial proposed changes to U.S. asylum system. Worldwide, the United States is home to more international migrants than any other country, and more than the next four countries—Germany, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—combined, according to the UN Population Division’s mid-2020 data. While the U.S. population represents about 5 percent of the total world population, close to 20 percent of all global migrants reside in the United States. This Spotlight offers information about the approximately 45.3 million immigrants in the United States as of 2021, by compiling the most authoritative and current data available. It provides an overview of historic immigration trends in the United States, sociodemographic information about who is immigrating, through which channels, and how many immigrants become naturalized citizens. It also provides data on the government’s enforcement actions and adjudication efforts to process visas.

Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2023. 34p.

By Robert Warren.

This report describes estimates of the undocumented population residing in the United States in 2022 compiled by CMS. The estimates are based on data collected in the American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the US Census Bureau.

The report finds that the undocumented population grew from 10.3 million in 2021 to 10.9 million in 2022, an increase of 650,000. The increase reverses more than a decade of gradual decline. The undocumented populations from 10 countries increased by a total of 525,000. The report explains why undocumented population growth is much less than the number of apprehensions by the Department of Homeland Security. Finally, the Appendix provides a detailed description of the CMS methodology.

The report includes the following topline findings:

• After remaining at or near zero growth from 2010 to 2021, the US undocumented population increased by 650,000 in 2022.

• The largest population gains in 2022 were for Central America (205,000), South America (200,000), and Asia (140,000).

• From 2015 to 2022, the undocumented population from Mexico declined by 1.3 million; in the same period, the combined population from Central and South America increased by 1.2 million.

The report describes changes in the US undocumented population by country of origin and state of residence since 2018 with special emphasis on changes from 2021 to 2022. The rapid increase in annual apprehensions and expulsions of migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border that began in 2019 has dominated media attention on migration for the past four years. That, in turn, has focused attention on the prospect of large annual increases in the undocumented population. Unfortunately, ACS data needed to monitor changes in the population are not available until about a year after the ACS survey is completed. The unique CMS methodology made it possible to derive these estimates less than two months after the release of 2022 ACS data.

By Christian Gunadi

The implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012 grants undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children a temporary reprieve from deportation and authorization to work legally, potentially increasing their opportunity costs of committing crimes. In this article, I examine the impact of DACA on crime. The analysis yields a few main results. First, at the individual level, comparing the difference in the likelihood of being incarcerated between DACA-eligible population with its counterpart before and after the implementation of DACA, I fail to find evidence that DACA statistically significantly affected the incarceration rate of undocumented youth. This result is robust to controlling for the differences in characteristics associated with DACA eligibility, such as age and age at arrival. Second, using the variation in the number of DACA applications approved across the U.S. states, the evidence suggests that DACA is associated with a reduction in property crime rates. An increase of one DACA application approved per 1,000 population is associated with a 1.6% decline in overall property crime rate. Further analysis shows that this reduction is driven by the decline in burglary and larceny rates. This finding suggests that policies that expand the employment opportunities of immigrants may reduce crimes committed for financial gains that often do not lead to incarceration.

Unpublished paper, 2020. 61p,