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We test for an effect of Arizona's 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) on the proportion of the state's population characterized as noncitizen Hispanic. We use the synthetic control method to select a group of states against which Arizona's population trends can be compared. We document a notable and statistically significant reduction in the proportion of the Hispanic noncitizen population in Arizona. The decline observed matches the timing of LAWA's implementation, deviates from the time series for the synthetic control group, and stands out relative to the distribution of placebo estimates for other states in the nation.

We provide the first evidence on the causal effect of border enforcement on the full spatial distribution of Mexican immigrants to the United States. We address the endogeneity of border enforcement with an instrumental variables strategy based on administrative delays in budgetary allocations for border security. We find that 1,000 additional Border Patrol officers assigned to prevent unauthorized migrants from entering a U.S. state decreases that state's share of Mexican immigrants by 21.9 %. Our estimates imply that if border enforcement had not changed from 1994 to 2011, the shares of Mexican immigrants locating in California and Texas would each be 8 percentage points greater, with all other states' shares lower or unchanged.

We take advantage of provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which granted legal resident status to long-time unauthorized residents but created new obstacles to employment for more recent immigrants, to explore how employment opportunities affect criminal behavior. Exploiting administrative data on the criminal justice involvement of individuals in San Antonio, Texas and using a triple-differences strategy, we find evidence of an increase in felony charges filed against residents most likely to be negatively affected by IRCA’s employment regulations. Our results suggest a strong relationship between access to legal jobs and criminal behavior.

Since immigration to the US began to accelerate in the 1970s, economic and social policy issues surrounding immigration frequently raise concern and generate debate. These policy debates often aim to mitigate the costs of immigration and augment the benefits. Key to this is understanding the characteristics of immigrants, especially those related to economic success and integration. A commonly accepted finding in the economic literature regards the declining economic “quality” of successive immigrant cohorts as measured by differences in entry wages across cohorts. In this paper, I refine our understanding of immigrant cohort quality. I show that increasing competition in the labor market among immigrants can explain a significant portion of declining “quality”. This result suggests that labor market interactions are as important to immigrant economic integration as their inherent “quality”.

Despite the many benefits of bank use, large portions of the U.S. population remain unbanked. One of the largest is immigrants, where the incidence of being unbanked is over 13% higher than among natives in 2001. We document growth in the nativity gap in bank use over time. We also test the importance of immigrant enclaves, defined as areas with high concentrations of immigrants from the same region, in explaining the increasing differential in bank use. Combining data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, Census, and FDIC we find that immigrants living in enclaves are significantly less likely to have a bank account. We take steps to isolate one particular channel through which this might operate: the use of informal financial services provided by co-ethnics in enclaves. The results suggest that demand-side preferences may have power in explaining the persistence of the nativity gap in bank use in the United States.

We examine the impact of the 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) on employment outcomes of low-skilled legal workers. We use the synthetic control method to select a group of states against which the labor market trends of Arizona can be compared. Our results suggest that contrary to its intent, LAWA does not appear to have improved labor market outcomes of legal low-skilled workers who compete with unauthorized immigrants, the target of the legislation. In fact, we find some evidence of diminished employment and increased unemployment among legal low-skilled workers in Arizona. These findings are concentrated on the largest demographic group of workers—non-Hispanic white men. While they are less likely to find employment, those who do have on average higher earnings as a result of LAWA. The pattern of results points to both labor supply and labor demand contractions due to LAWA, with labor supply dominating in terms of magnitude.

Changes in the treatment of individuals by the criminal justice system following a policy intervention may bias estimates of the effects of the intervention on underlying criminal activity. We explore the importance of such changes in the context of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). Using administrative data from San Antonio, Texas, we examine variation across neighborhoods and ethnicities in police arrests and in the rate at which those arrests are prosecuted. We find that changes in police behavior around IRCA confound estimates of the effects of the policy and its restrictions on employment on criminal activity.

The United States is home to a large and growing number of unauthorized immigrants. The most recent estimates indicate that this population increased from about 3 million in the late 1980s to around 11 million in 2009 (Passel and Cohn 2010). The legal immigrant population has also grown substantially over this time, as described in chapter 1 and throughout this volume, but the unauthorized immigrant population has grown at an even higher rate. Not surprisingly, the size and growth of the unauthorized population has not gone unnoticed and is the source of much controversy surrounding immigration policy. Reflected in both