Interior immigration enforcement policy and the subjective well-being of US residents: evidence from secure communities

ABSTRACT

There were increased efforts to enhance interior enforcement of immigration laws in the United States in recent years. Considering that more interior immigration enforcement measures are going to be proposed in the near future, there is a need to evaluate whether such policy can achieve its objective and imparts some benefits to the population it is supposed to help. In this article, I examine the impact of one of the largest interior immigration enforcement effort – Secure Communities – on the subjective well-being of US residents. The analyses show that there is no evidence that Secure Communities statistically significantly increased the proportion of white or black non-Hispanics reporting that they were satisfied with their life. Evaluated at the mean, at 10% significance level, the results suggest that I can rule out an effect size larger than 0.5% and 1% for white and black non-Hispanics, respectively. Since only a small share of white or black non-Hispanics are foreign-born, this finding suggests that the benefit of Secure Communities to US-born individuals that are coming through an increase in their life satisfaction is not economically large.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• life satisfaction
• subjective well-being

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I31
• D63
• J61

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Joseph Cummins and Michael Bates for their comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the editor and an anonymous referee for the constructive comments. All errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Also usually known as Section 287(g) agreement. Between 2002 and 2011, 10 states and 47 counties signed an enforcement contract under Section 287(g).

² A recent study by Miles and Cox (2014) found that although Secure Communities did not reduce the rates of violent crime, it led to a modest decline in property crime rates such as burglary and motor vehicle theft.

³ If an interior immigration policy reduces the share of the non-citizen population, one may expect that the life satisfaction among non-Hispanics would increase because Hispanics are overrepresented among the non-citizen population (approximately 55% of non-citizen are Hispanics in 2000 Census) and people tend to be happier living among those who are similar to them in the US (Kuroki 2018). It is worth noting, however, that Akay et al. (2017) found positive relationship between ethnic diversity and subjective well-being of citizens in Germany, and East et al. (2018) found no evidence that Secure Communities statistically significantly affected the population of non-citizens in US counties.

⁴ Income and joblessness have been documented as important determinants of an individual’s life satisfaction (Oswald 1997; Sacks, Stevenson, and Wolfers 2010).

⁵ In 2000 Census, approximately 3.5% and 5.7% of white and black non-Hispanics are foreign-born, respectively.

⁶ I define low-skilled individuals as those who did not graduate from high school while high skilled individuals are defined as those who at least graduated from high school.

⁷ The information on county or state level 287(g) agreement is obtained from Kostandini, Mykerezi, and Escalante (2013).

⁸ There were two states implementing universal E-Verify mandate during the period of analysis: Arizona in 2008 and Utah in 2010.

⁹ Anti-Hispanics hate crime data is obtained from the FBI Uniform Crime Report available on ICPSR (https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACJD/series/57?q=hate+crime+data). There are approximately 0.47 anti-Hispanics hate crimes per 100,000 for an average county in the sample. The ANES data is also obtained from ICPSR (https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/8475). Because ANES data is not available every year, I imputed the value for 2005, 2006, and 2007 using linear interpolation method based on the value from 2004 and 2008 ANES. Similarly, the value for 2009 and 2010 are imputed based on the values from 2008 and 2012 ANES. It is also worth noting that ANES data in 2004 and 2008 does not cover every US states. In the case that a state was not covered in ANES 2008, the values are imputed using 2004 and 2012 ANES data.