Annie Laurie Hines
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 0
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This dissertation examines the effects of US immigration policy on both immigrants themselves and the US economy and society more broadly. The past two decades were a period of large swings in immigration policy, from which immigrants are allowed to cross the border, how they access public programs, health care, and education once in the US, and whether those without authorization to live in the country are forced to leave. This work adds to our understanding of the consequences of these changes, both intended and unintended. In addition to providing guidance as to the possible effects future swings in immigration policy, understanding the past effects of policy changes affecting immigrants is a useful tool to gain insight on the costs of barriers to health care and education more broadly. Chapter 1, joint work with Giovanni Peri, considers the effect of immigration enforcement on local crime and police efficiency in the US. Reducing crime by deporting criminals is a key justification for intensified deportations, particularly under the Trump Administration; however, there are also concerns that fear of deportation reduces community policing in immigrant communities and misallocates police resources. Providing empirical evidence for or against the validity of these claims is key to making informed policy decisions. Our identification relies increases in the deportation rate driven by the introduction of the Secure Communities (SC) program, an immigration enforcement program based on local-federal cooperation which was rolled out across counties between 2008 and 2013. We instrument for the deportation rate by interacting the introduction of SC with the local presence of likely undocumented in 2005, prior to the introduction of SC, and document a surge in local deportation rates under SC, concentrated among counties with a large undocumented population. We find that SC-driven increases in deportation rates did not reduce crime rates for violent offenses or property offenses. We do not find evidence that SC increased either police effectiveness in solving crimes or local police resources. Finally, we do not find effects of deportations on the local employment of unskilled citizens or on local firm creation. Chapter 2 turns to the unintended effects of immigration enforcement and examine the impact of deportations on health care access for immigrants themselves. I combine hospital inpatient discharge records from Florida and Arizona with information on immigration enforcement under the Secure Communities (SC) program to examine the consequences of immigration enforcement for the use of health care services and admissions for preventable diagnoses. This is a particularly important question given the high costs of health care in the US: if fear deters immigrants from receiving regular outpatient and preventive care, they may fall back on the emergency room when minor ailments get more serious, thus using a much higher cost service. While prior literature finds significant impacts of immigration enforcement on health outcomes, this paper does not find convincing causal evidence that an increase in immigration enforcement affected the prevalence of ambulatory-sensitive conditions or total inpatient admissions. It may be the case that the group affected by SC was already delaying health care, avoiding hospitals, and finding other avenues of care, and enforcement did not change behaviors or outcomes further. Differential trends in health by ethnicity, combined with confounding factors such as the Great Recession that occurred simultaneously with increases in immigration enforcement, suggest caution in extrapolating meaningful effects from the impact of immigration policies on health outcomes. Chapter 3, joint work with Michel Grosz, examines the impact of a reduction in college tuition targeted at undocumented immigrants in Colorado. We study the effects of this effective decrease in college tuition on college application and enrollment behavior. Specifically, we use student-level data to analyze a Colorado law that granted in-state tuition to certain undocumented students. We find an increase in the credit hours and persistence of newly enrolled and likely undocumented students. Leveraging application-level data, we show that the policy induced more students to enroll in college due to an increase in applications, rather than an increase in the acceptance rate or the enrollment rate. We do not find evidence of changes in the persistence or credit hours of continuing students.