Missing Links: Underestimating the Effects of Surveillance on Immigrant Education and Employment in the United States

• In Event: Roundtable: Criminal Justice Contact and Race/Ethnicity

Abstract

Recent shifts in immigration policies and practices have resulted in increased surveillance of immigrants in the United States. Through the 2009 Secure Communities program, criminal records are now routinely linked with immigration records, subjecting immigrants to heightened criminal penalties and increased risk of detention and deportation. Nevertheless, measuring the effects of criminal legal contact among hard-to-reach populations remains remarkably difficult. In this paper, we draw on a novel data source from a state with a large immigrant population, Texas, to explore the utility of administrative records for understanding how justice involvement affects education and employment outcomes for Mexican citizens living in the United States. Our results indicate that, while the likelihood of matching criminal records with education records among U.S. citizens has improved to nearly 90% for recent birth cohorts, the match rate for Mexican citizens has remained under 30%. Preliminary analyses suggest that low match rates, in the context of rising surveillance, contribute to growing bias in estimates of the effects of criminal justice contact for immigrants in the U.S. The implications are that the consequences of heightened surveillance of immigrants are worse than conventional estimates using survey and administrative data imply.

Authors

• Marta Ascherio, University of Texas at Austin

• Lindsay Bing, University of Texas at Austin

• Becky Pettit, University of Texas at Austin