Deportation of criminals and immigration back to the United States: evidence from Central America and Mexico

ABSTRACT

We show that the deportation of criminals from the United States increased subsequent migration from Central America and Mexico. We focus on a time period in which U.S. policy led to significant increases in the deportation of criminals. Our findings are robust to tests that suggest the documented link is causal and not simply correlational. Finally, we argue that deportation policy shifts the selection of the migrant flow, which becomes skewed more heavily towards female children.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• migration policy
• Central America
• Mexico
• crime-related deportations

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J15
• J08
• J61

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Jacob Jansen and Austin Wright for excellent research assistance on this this project. We would also like to thank Francisca Antman, Bree Lang, Matt Lang, and Zach Ward, as well as participants at the 2016 meetings of both the Southern Economic Association and Western Economic Association International, and those at Xavier University’s brown bag for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Individuals deported to Central America are flown directly to their country of origin by ICE (Wise and Petras 2018). Once arriving in their country of origin, these individuals are typically released within an hour of arrival and left to fend for themselves (Haugaard, Burgi-Palomino, and Andrea 2018).

² The U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were formed under the DHS.

³ At the beginning of our sample, we are limited by the lack of available crime-related deportation data prior to the early 1990s. We end our sample in 2008 since it marks the beginning of a major recession, which is known to alter immigration patterns (Cadena and Kovak 2016).

⁴ One might be concerned that deportations of criminals is simply a proxy for interior deportations and deportations of non-criminals a proxy for border deportations. An analysis of the correlations between these, however, reveals that deportations of criminals are equally correlated with border and interior deportations, and that deportations of non-criminals are also equally correlated with border and interior deportations. Further, an analysis of correlations between border apprehensions and both crime and non-crime-related deportations provides no evidence that non-crime-related deportations are extraordinarily correlated with border apprehensions. Thus, there is no evidence that these are simply proxies for each other.

⁵ In fact, our results are not sensitive to dropping any one of our eight countries from the sample.