Local Immigration Policy and the MS-13 "Threat"

• In Event: The Micro-politics of Immigrant Integration

Abstract

Heated rhetoric from U.S. politicians who seek to tie immigrants to crime have focused in recent years on Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, a "transnational criminal gang" active in the U.S. and Central America. Members of MS-13 have been responsible for a number of high profile murders in the U.S., and which has been largely responsible for the security crisis prompting large scale emigration from Central America's Northern Triangle countries. Anti-immigration activists and politicians talk of an MS-13 crime wave, and explicitly link it to permissive local-level immigration legislation, particularly sanctuary cities. Yet there has been almost no comprehensive tallying of the scope of MS-13 activity in the U.S., much less testing of any causal link with local immigration laws. This paper compiles the first comprehensive dataset of violent crimes by MS-13 in the United States since 2000, and uses it to test whether local immigration policy, whether permissive (sanctuary cities) or restrictive (partnership with ICE) has any effect on MS-13 violence. Leveraging a variety of statistical techniques, including matching, difference in difference, and standard regression analysis, we find no evidence that MS-13 violence is affected by local level immigration policy.

Authors

• Michael Ahn Paarlberg, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Loren Collingwood, UC Riverside