Climate of Exclusion: Spillover Effects of Home-Country Natural Disasters on Immigrant Removals from the United States

By Agustina Laurito, Ashley N. Muchow 

Deportations of immigrants from the United States have grown substantially over the past two decades. While existing research has examined how changes to US laws and policies have contributed to this increase, less attention has been given to how conditions in immigrants’ countries of origin shape deportation patterns. This article investigates how an important external shock—home-country natural disasters—influences immigrant removals from the US. We combine annual data on removals by country with information on natural disasters to estimate difference-in-differences models that exploit exogenous variation in the timing and magnitude of natural disasters across countries. Our results show that immigrant removals increased, on average, by 29 percent after salient natural disasters. When we explore mechanisms, we find little evidence that home-country natural disasters increase irregular migration, but we do find that noncitizen and likely undocumented immigrants increase their labor force participation and employment following these shocks. This finding suggests that natural disasters in immigrants’ countries of origin may influence the economic behavior of immigrants, putting them at greater risk of detection by immigration enforcement authorities.