The Effect of 287(g) and Sanctuary Cities in the Social and Economic Integration of Immigrants

• In Event: 4151 - International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 6: Immigration Lawmaking and Political Activism

Abstract

Since 1996, section 287(g) of IIRAIRA has allowed for collaboration between the federal government and local police departments to enforce immigration laws. These actions had led to the creation of areas with uneven levels of immigration enforcement. Moreover, as a response to increasing immigration enforcement and the resulting ethnic profiling, cities with high presence of immigrants have declared themselves as sanctuaries. Using a selected sample of foreign-born immigrants from the American Community Survey (2006, 2011 and 2016) we identify residents living in 173 counties that vary in their local immigration regimes and test arguments from the Migrant-Trust-Network Theory. We observe the negative effects of local immigration enforcement and residential clustering for foreign-born migrants on household linguistic isolation, employment in immigrant occupational niches, and total household income. Our results indicate that the main driver of immigrant disadvantage is lack of citizenship status and that the substantial negative effects of this variable interact with the effects of local immigration regimes, measures of residential segregation and region of birth. We show that Mexican and Central American immigrants face additional gaps in their reported measures of assimilation relative to immigrants born elsewhere due to the racialization and profiling on this group of immigrants.

Authors

• Nadia Y. Flores-Yeffal, Texas Tech University

• Maria Aysa-Lastra, Winthrop University