“The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime – one of the highest in the country, and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities. Now, immediately upon its building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country.”
Former President Donald Trump
State of the Union address
February 5, 2019
Abstract
Despite a lack of rigorous empirical evidence, reduced crime is often touted as a potential benefit in the debate over increasing border infrastructure (i.e., border walls). This paper examines the effect of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which led to unprecedented barrier construction along the US–Mexico border, on local crime using geospatial data on dates and locations of border wall construction. Synthetic control estimates across twelve border counties find no systematic evidence that border infrastructure reduced property or violent crime rates in the counties in which it was built. Further analysis using matched panel models indicates no effect on property crime rates and that observed declines in violent crime rates precede barrier construction, not the other way around. Taken together, this paper finds that potential crime reductions are not a compelling argument toward the benefits of expanding border infrastructure.
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Notes
Advocacy for border walls continued beyond the end of the Trump presidency, as evidenced by Texas Governor Greg Abbot’s push to use state funds to build border walls in Texas.
Throughout this study, we use the terms “wall,” “barrier,” and “fence” interchangeably.
For example, Allen et al. (2019) look at the labor market effects of building walls along the US–Mexico border.
An advantage of using county-level data in our analysis is that we can effectively control for immigration policies such as SB 1070 that are enacted at the federal and state level, as our analysis focuses on individual counties within states.
Authors’ calculations based on total crossings of bus passengers, pedestrians, and vehicle passengers across 27 different legal ports of entry along the US–Mexico border for the year 2018. Data source is US Department of Transportation (2019).
UCLA Labor Center (2019).
For example, Amuedo-Dorantes and Arenas-Arroyo (2019) find that immigrants are more likely to report domestic violence in “sanctuary cities,” locations with policies that limit the cooperation of local law enforcement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The RMSPE for county i across periods \(1 - s\) is calculated as \(\sqrt{\frac{1}{s}\sum _{t=1}^s {\hat{\alpha }}^2_{it}}\).
For example, if there are 10 placebo estimates with post-/pre-RMSPE ratios larger than the treated unit, and \(N+1 = 243\), the quasi-p value would be 11/243 = 0.045. Also note that, because we are agnostic on the direction of the effect, our ranking is only on the RMSPE, not the sign of the estimated average effect.
The online appendix may be accessed at https://sites.google.com/sdsu.edu/hishamfoad/research/border-walls.
Figure A8 in the online appendix plots average crime rates across our treated counties and the weighted average of control counties. Comparing this plot to Fig. 4, the matched sample does is better able to align the pre-period crime rates than the full sample.
We use 97.5% rather than 100% only because there are a large number of counties that show very small sections completed only in the last year. As such, we believe that 97.5% provides a more meaningful end date of the construction.
These numbers are in 2008 dollars. In terms of today’s prices, the same figures would be $7.8 and $2.0 million per mile, respectively. Source: US Government Accountability Office (2009) For a side-by-side visual comparison of the two types of barriers, see Figure A1 in the online Appendix.
Table A21 presents the estimates from these models, and Table A22 presents the results split by construction completion date.
We present the graph of averages for these two groups in the online appendix. We also estimated a difference-in-differences model using county income and population as controls with both county and year fixed effects. The average treatment effect of border wall construction (defined as counties experiencing construction activity during the period 2006–2011) is statistically insignificant.
Our earlier analysis of these data suggests limited internal mobility of migrants, implying that those migrating to border counties tend to stay in border counties.
Construction cost estimates reported in US Government Accountability Office (2009). Miles of border wall constructed include all construction from 2006 to 2014 based on authors’ calculations. Vehicle barriers are not included so as to estimate a lower bound of construction costs.
This was computed by first looking at the breakdown of violent crimes in Santa Cruz County over the sample period as 4% murder, 12% rape, 32% robbery, and 52% aggravated assault. We then multiplied these weights by the costs in Chaflin and McCrary (2018) of $7,000,000 per murder, $142,000 per rape, $12,624 per robbery, and $38,924 per assault.
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Abman, R., Foad, H. Border Walls and Crime: Evidence From the Secure Fence Act. Eastern Econ J 48, 167–197 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-021-00207-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-021-00207-6