Abstract
The recent impetus of tougher immigration-related measures passed at the state level raises concerns about the impact of such measures on the migration experience, trajectory, and future plans of unauthorized immigrants. In a recent and unique survey of Mexican unauthorized immigrants interviewed upon their voluntary return or deportation to Mexico, almost a third reported experiencing difficulties in obtaining social or government services, finding legal assistance, or obtaining health care services. Additionally, half of these unauthorized immigrants reported fearing deportation. When we assess how the enactment of punitive measures against unauthorized immigrants, such as E-Verify mandates, has affected their migration experience, we find no evidence of a statistically significant association between these measures and the difficulties reported by unauthorized immigrants in accessing a variety of services. However, the enactment of these mandates infuses deportation fear, reduces interstate mobility among voluntary returnees during their last migration spell, and helps curb deportees’ intent to return to the United States in the near future.
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Notes
The E-Verify system was originally established by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 as a voluntary pilot program. Logistically, E-Verify is an internet-based, free program run by the United States government that compares information from an employee's employment eligibility verify form (I-9) to data from U.S. government records. If the information matches, that employee is considered eligible to work in the United States. If there is a mismatch, E-Verify alerts the employer, and the employee is allowed to work while the problem is resolved.
Georgia, Alabama, and Utah are some of the states that have followed Arizona, passing laws that expand the power of local police to check the immigration status of residents. Like bills have been passed by at least one chamber of state legislatures in Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. In total, up to 30 states are contemplating similar measures.
See Menjivar and Abrego (2012) for more information on the dramatic increase in deportations taking place nationally.
For instance, Donato et al. (1992) and Orrenius (2001) relied on data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) to examine changes in the likelihood of a variety of events—such as taking a first illegal trip, repeat migration, being apprehended, using a border smuggler or coyote, and changes in smuggling costs or border-crossing sites—before and after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Angelucci (2005) also relied on MMP data to assess the impact of border enforcement on net flows (i.e., coming into and exiting the United States) of illegal Mexican immigrants. Ritcher et al. (2007), however, used data from the Encuesta Nacional a Hogares Rurales de Mexico (ENHRUM) to examine the impact of three policies: IRCA, NAFTA, and increased border enforcement expenditures on migration. And Amuedo-Dorantes and Bansak (2011) relied on data from the Encuesta sobre Migración en la Frontera Norte de México (EMIF) to explore how changes in border enforcement helped deter undocumented migrants from repetitively attempting to cross the Mexico-U.S. border.
In 2002, more than 40 % of immigrants are without health insurance (Bell 2004). Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured (2003) found that low-income immigrants are more than twice as likely to be uninsured as low-income citizens. Moreover, immigrants’ health coverage varies by state. Uninsured immigrants ranged from 46 % in California and New York to 56 % in Texas during a 2001–2002 population survey by this agency.
A comprehensive overview of state and local immigration policy–making in the United States can be found in Varsanyi (2010).
See the Appendix for more detailed information on the survey methodology.
See Secretaría de Gobernación, Consejo Nacional de Población, Instituto Nacional de Migración, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Secretaría del Trabajo y Previsión Social, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (2007).
Unlike migrants in groups (1) and (4), who are return migrants, or migrants in group (3), who have resided in the border region and have often crossed to the United States before, the vast majority of individuals in group (2) did not have previous U.S. migratory experience and, as such, they were not questioned about their experiences in obtaining needed services while in the United States.
This hypothesis is supported by the fact that other surveys—such as the Mexican Migration Project (MMP; www.pop.upenn.edu/mexmig/databases/databases.htm)—in their attempt to obtain a representative sample of Mexican migrants, interviewed a relatively small number of Mexican migrant households residing in the United States, while the vast majority of households with U.S. migration experience were interviewed in Mexico.
Indeed, even surveys that interview migrants both in Mexico and in the United States, as is the case with the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), lack data on the questions’ object of study, including those regarding encountered difficulties, deportation fears, interstate mobility, or the intent to go back to the United States in the foreseeable future.
Because of the small number of women in our sample, we also conducted the analysis using only men. Results, available from the authors upon request, were robust to the use of that alternative sample.
The low unemployment rate follows from the fact that the samples used in this article are undocumented returnees, many of them deported while crossing or voluntarily returning home after not finding work.
”Poor housing” includes a mobile home, homeless shelter, halfway house or boarding home, car or truck, and on the streets.
These refer to difficulties in finding legal assistance when encountering difficulties in renting, when experiencing discrimination, or when being abused, for example.
We do not have information on all moves across state lines. We know, however, the migrant’s destination state when he or she last entered the United States, as well as the state in which he or she spent most of the migration spell. We use that information to identify mobility across state lines during the last migration spell.
E-Verify was mandated in Arizona in July 2007 (see http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/immig/2011-state-laws-addressing-e-verify.aspx). We use the enactment dates of E-Verify mandates, regardless of their scope.
The vast majority of our sample, modeled after the EMIF, was headed to California (75.26 %) and Arizona (6.81 %) during their last visit.
Examples of the latter include any ICE agreements with state law enforcement agencies under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
We also estimate Eq. (2) separately for voluntary returnees and deportees. Our main finding regarding the impact of E-Verify mandates on the intent to return to the United States proves robust. However, the model fails to document the very important role that deportation during the last migration spell plays in explaining the intention to cross again in the near future or the extent to which the enactment of an E-Verify mandate offsets such an impact.
The F statistics from the Chow tests determining whether deportees and voluntary returnees differ in their experienced difficulties in receiving government assistance or finding legal services, or in their fear of deportation are 3.23, 4.33, and 4.96, respectively. These differences are statistically significant at 10 %, 5 %, and 5 % levels, respectively.
The F statistics from the Chow tests determining whether the impact of E-Verify on the experienced difficulties in receiving government assistance, finding legal services, and finding health care services differs between deportees and voluntary returnees are 1.39, 0.64, and 0.46, respectively. None of these differences are statistically significant at standard significance levels. The F statistic from the Chow test determining whether the impact of E-Verify mandates on the experienced fear of deportation differs for these two groups of immigrants is 26.68, which is significant at the 1 % level.
The F statistic from the Chow test determining whether deportees and voluntary returnees differ in their decision to move across states is 8.06, which is significant at the 1 % level.
The F statistic from the Chow test determining whether deportees and voluntary returnees differ with respect to the effect of E-Verify on the decision to move across states is 10.73, which is significant at the 1 % level.
The coefficient estimates for Deported and E-Verify State × Deported are jointly significant at the 1 % level.
Deportations may not increase the desire to return to the United States in the near future if, as noted by Hagan et al. (2008), they disrupt the stream of remittances and separate families.
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This study was funded by the National Institute of Child and Human Development (Grant:1 R01HD046886-01A2).
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Appendix: Survey Methodology
Appendix: Survey Methodology
The survey uses methods suited to the observation of migrant flows modeled after the EMIF, which relies on the following premises: (a) migrants represent mobile units that can be intercepted at certain times and places; (b) the vast majority (more than 90 %) of migrants traveling across the U.S.-Mexico border do so through eight Mexican border cities, one of them being Tijuana, Mexico; (c) migrants arrive at these border cities from other regions in Mexico through specific crossing areas (e.g., airports, bus stations, and migration facilities) identified through formative research; (d) after returning from the United States, migrants depart from these border cities to other regions in Mexico through the same crossing areas; (e) within these venues, there are specific sites (e.g., gates, doorways) migrants necessarily cross by when arriving or departing from these border cities; (f) observation and screening for migration status of individuals crossing in these specific sites allows an accurate enumeration, sampling, and characterization of the migrant population traveling through the U.S-Mexico border.
Specifically, a multistage sampling design with two dimensions and several stages within each dimension is employed. The geographic dimension takes into account the region, city within the region, area within the region, and site within the area where the migrant is intercepted. The sampling areas are defined as facilities through which migrants typically pass when arriving at Tijuana, such as the Tijuana International Airport, the Tijuana central bus station, and the San Ysidro deportation station on the San Diego–Tijuana border. The temporal dimension consists of the quarter of the year, day of the week, and survey shift (i.e., each day was divided into eight-hour shifts) when the respondents are intercepted. Every three months, a random sample of sampling pairs “place–time” was generated to determine the specific combinations of sites and times where and when the survey was to be conducted during the following three months. The weighting procedures take into account that not all individuals have equal probability of being selected and included in the survey, and adjust for this unequal probability. Moreover, the survey weights include expansion factors to reflect the volume of migrants traveling through each sampling site during specific time periods. This information is also used to estimate the size of the population represented by the study sample.
For weight computation, the survey uses an adapted version of a formula developed by researchers at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte and used routinely for computing survey weights for the EMIF. The formula follows the logic behind standard weighting procedures for surveys using multistage sampling methods and has been adapted to reflect the specific sampling design of our survey. Each observation is assigned a weight W, which is calculated as follows:
where k is the number of individuals who crossed by the sampling shift, were screened for participation in the survey, and did not meet eligibility criteria or refused to participate; for deported migrants, n is the number of persons released by Mexican migration officers within the sampling shift when the questionnaire was administered; for sites other than the deportation site, n reflects the number of persons traveling through the sampling site from the beginning of the sampling shift to the end of the administration of the first questionnaire (for the first respondent) and from the end of the administration of the first questionnaire to the end of the administration of the second questionnaire (for the second respondent), and so on; pPoint equals the proportion of individuals traveling through the sampling point relative to the estimated total volume of individuals traveling through the sampling site where the point is located; pSite represents the proportion of individuals traveling through the sampling site relative to the estimated total flow traveling through the city where the site is located; unlike for the EMIF, pCity and pRegion are both equal 1, given that the city (Tijuana) is only one, and the region (western U.S.-Mexico border) is only one, and they are all included with probability equal to 1 in the sampling design; (pShift D )–1 is the probability of selecting the sampling shift of all possible sampling shifts on a day; (pDay S )–1 is calculated for each day of the week and reflects the probability of selecting each day of the week considering the total number of Mondays, Tuesdays, and so on, included in the period during which the survey was implemented; and pStudy is equal to 1, given that the study period was included with probability 1 in the sampling frame.
At the beginning of each sampling shift at each sampling site, an interviewer intercepted the first adult-looking subject who crossed by the sampling site and applied a screening intercept survey to determine if he/she qualified as a migrant. If the participant did not meet the inclusion criteria, the interviewer intercepted the next adult-looking person crossing by the sampling site and repeated the process. For the current study, we focused on migrants who were returning from the United States either voluntarily or via deportation, who were not born in the United States, and who were18 years of age or older. A short screening survey determined eligibility.
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Amuedo-Dorantes, C., Puttitanun, T. & Martinez-Donate, A.P. How Do Tougher Immigration Measures Affect Unauthorized Immigrants?. Demography 50, 1067–1091 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0200-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0200-x