Abstract
Immigration control-related audits and their resulting sanctions are not solely determined by impartial enforcement of laws and regulations. They are also determined by the incentives faced by vote-maximizing politicians, agents acting on their behalf, and workers likely to compete with immigrants in the local labor market. In this paper, we use a unique data set to test the extent to which congressional oversight determines the bureaucratic immigration enforcement process. We examine the decisions made at each stage of enforcement from over 40,000 audits from 1990 to 2000. This includes analysis of (1) whether a firm is found in violation, (2) whether a fine is issued, (3) the size of the fine issued, and (4) how much of a dollar reduction fined employers were able to negotiate. We find that the number of audits conducted increases with local unemployment. We also find that a congressman’s party affiliation and its interaction with committee membership and party majority status, as well as firm size and local union membership, correlate to decisions made at every stage of enforcement.
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Notes
For examples, see Senator Rob Portman’s site http://portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/help-with-federal-agencies or Senator John Cornyn’s site http://cornyn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=HelpWithFederalAgencies. (Accessed on 1/16/2014).
There is a large literature on congressional oversight in economics and political science. Important works include Kiewiet and McCubbins (1991), Weingast and Moran (1983), McCubbins and Schwartz (1984), McCubbins et al. (1987), Moe (1989), Balla and Wright (2001), Huber and Shipan (2002), Moe (2012) for an extensive and thorough review of the literature.
In March 2003, INS was merged into the Department of Homeland Security and its immigration functions were divided between U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is responsible for managing and implementing the worksite enforcement program (GAO-06-895T, testimony before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Citizenship, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate).
“The 287(g) program cross-designates state and local officers to enforce immigration law as authorized through section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Scores of state, county and municipal agencies nation-wide have requested 287(g) memorandums of agreement with ICE and hundreds of officers have been trained under the program.”—(ICE Agreements of Cooperation in Communities to Enhance Safety and Security ICE ACCESS Fact Sheet).
With the abandonment of the INS and transition to ICE, some of the documentation for the data we use in our analysis went missing. Specifically, an official codebook of our audit data has proven to be unavailable. However other information allows us to identify the fields in our dataset that are relevant for testing our hypotheses. Using the information contained in the official I-9 inspection overview, as summarized in the flow chart in Appendix A, and remaining basic summary documentation graciously provided by the Department of Homeland Security (available from the authors upon request), we can identify key variables in our data set. Specifically, we can determine the “Administrative Disposition,” i.e., the outcome of the audit. The audit outcomes are Warnings, Notification of Intent to Fine (NIF), dollar fine issued, and the dollar amount collected. The NIF and dollar fine issued is associated with the Tier code assigned to the offense (1, 2, or 3), with higher tiers correlating to larger fines. Given the aggregate data available, it appears that our data set, at the very least, approaches the entire universe of completed investigations. There is, however, no means available to us to confirm that our data set contains the results of all investigations.
Brownell (2005) notes a decline, from 1999 through 2003, in the number of IRCA enforcement fines and administrative worksite arrests. Our data set includes 1999 and 2000, and we observe this decline as well. ICE has attributed this decline to various factors, including the widespread use of counterfeit documents that make it difficult for ICE agents to prove that employers knowingly hired unauthorized workers Government Accountability Office (2006).
While there is increasing evidence that immigrant labor is strongly complementary to existing labor, this remains a far from a popular view Borjas (1995).
In the absence of any variable that can be reasonably be expected to correlated to Fineijkmt, but uncorrelated to $Amountijkmt, we have opted to use a simple “subsample OLS” modeling strategy, rather than a Heckman selection model Puhani (2000).
High Alien industries include agriculture, hospitality and accommodations, food service, and textiles Hill and Pearce (1990).
In the event that a zip code was split across congressional boundaries with the data from the 102nd Congress, we assign the zip code to the Congressional district based with the greater overlapping area.
Because zero constitute only 19 % of observed values, a Poisson or negative binomial model was unnecessary.
We define log audits as log (audits + 1) to avoid dropping the zero values.
Low alien states are all states other than Texas, California, Illinois, Florida and Arizona Hill and Pearce (1990).
We did not estimate the regressions in Table 3 at the congressional district level because it serves as too small a level of aggregation, dominated by zeros and small numbers, and for lack of good instruments for unemployment at the congressional district level.
The effect could, hypothetically, be positive in poorer communities with large minority (non-Hispanic) populations, but Republicans are rarely elected in such districts in the modern era.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Peter Brownell and Bryan Baker for their assistance in acquiring and interpreting the data, Gina D’Andrea, Garett Jones, and Alex Tabarrok for helpful comments, and Garrett Harmon for tremendous research assistance.
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Makowsky, M.D., Stratmann, T. Politics, unemployment, and the enforcement of immigration law. Public Choice 160, 131–153 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0174-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0174-2