Immigration Enforcement and Its Ripple Effects: Labor Markets, Mobility, and Health

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

In 2025, U.S. immigration policy is marked by renewed and intensified enforcement efforts, growing policy fragmentation across jurisdictions, and deepening stratification by legal status. These dynamics raise urgent questions about how immigration governance is reshaping opportunity structures and well-being for immigrant communities. This panel brings together four innovative studies that examine how legal status and immigration enforcement shape geographic mobility, labor market access, and health outcomes. Together, these papers illuminate the institutional mechanisms and lived consequences of legal precarity, contributing to a broader understanding of inequality and immigrant incorporation in the contemporary United States.

The first paper, by Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Chunbei Wang, investigates how fragmented local immigration policy regimes influence pathways to legal employment in U.S. agriculture. Using administrative data on H-2A guestworker visas from 2010 to 2022, they analyze how local enforcement intensity and sanctuary protections affect the flow and composition of the legally authorized farm workforce. Their quasi-experimental design reveals that restrictive enforcement environments can accelerate transitions to legal work via H-2A visas, while sanctuary policies slow or reshape those transitions. This study highlights how policy context functions as a gatekeeper to legal labor market access, with implications for who works in agriculture, where, and under what conditions.

The second paper, by Chloe East, uses newly assembled real-time administrative and enforcement data to examine the consequences of heightened immigration enforcement under the Trump 2.0 administration. The analysis documents surges in detentions and deportations, identifies shifts in the characteristics of those targeted, and assesses broader economic impacts. East’s work sheds light on how stepped-up enforcement efforts disrupt immigrant communities and labor markets, generating spillover effects across regions and potentially altering trajectories of immigrant incorporation.

In the third paper, Matthew Hall and Giulia Olivero analyze pooled longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (1996–2023) to assess how unauthorized legal status constrains residential mobility among Mexican and Central American immigrants. They find that undocumented immigrants are significantly less likely to move and more likely to remain in lower-quality, segregated neighborhoods. These findings suggest that legal status suppresses spatial mobility and reinforces spatial inequality—limiting access to neighborhood-level resources and opportunities essential for social and economic integration.

Finally, Edward Vargas presents original survey data from 1,000 Latino immigrants to assess the health impacts of immigration enforcement-related stress. Drawing on stress theory, he shows that individuals with personal ties to deportees are substantially more likely to report poor physical and mental health. The findings suggest that enforcement environments create chronic stress conditions that translate into measurable health disparities, with implications for population health and access to care in immigrant communities.

Policy Area

• Population and Migration Issues

Secondary Policy Area

• Social Equity and Race

Chair

• Tatiana Padilla, University of Minnesota

Discussants

• Ashley Nicole Muchow, University of Illinois, Chicago

• Stephanie Potochnick, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Organizer

• Matthew Hall, Cornell University

Individual Presentations

• Sanctuary or Scrutiny? How Immigration Policy Shapes the Agricultural Guestworker Market - Presenting Author: Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, UC Merced; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Chunbei Wang, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

• Tracking Immigration Enforcement Activity and Its Effects in Real-Time - Presenting Author: Chloe N East, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Trapped in Place: Unauthorized Immigration, Residential Mobility and Neighborhood Outcomes - Presenting Author: Matthew Hall, Cornell University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Giulia Olivero, Cornell University

• Direct Damage: How the Stress of Deportations Is Impacting Latina/o Health - Presenting Author: Edward David Vargas, Arizona State University