Suchergebnisse

In the US, the weight of immigration enforcement falls disproportionately on immigrants from Haiti and Central America. How can we tell? I use deportations and immigrant population data to compare which origin countries account for an unexpectedly high number of deportations – after taking into account their share of the nation's unauthorized immigrant population. These data sources help us see whether deportations by nationality are uneven. In recent years, immigrants from select countries of origin (especially Haiti and Central America) are overrepresented among deportees when considering each origin country's contribution to the United States' unauthorized immigrant population.

AbstractNoncitizens seeking to make sense of US immigration systems encounter a labyrinth of information and deception. This paper is the first national study of scams targeting noncitizens seeking immigration legal services. I construct a county‐year database (N = 3135 over a four‐year time period, 2011–2014) across secondary data sources to analyze the correlates of immigration scam complaints submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). I find that welcoming counties have more immigration scam complaints, while counties with exclusionary contexts tend to have fewer complaints. The results do not suggest that scams are more prevalent in welcoming contexts, because the actual number of scams is unknown. Instead, we can conclude that noncitizens tend to come forward to report immigration scams in welcoming contexts of reception, even after accounting for exclusionary policies. A robust safety net proved the most reliable predictor of immigration scams reported to the FTC. The concentration of immigration attorneys, legal aid services, and language access was also positively associated with the number of FTC scam reports. Taken together, these results suggest that immigrant‐serving capacity and access to key services support noncitizens who report immigration scams, while hostility toward immigrants may deter them from exercising those same rights.

As deportations from the United States rose to unprecedented levels, a nationwide immigration enforcement program Secure Communities helped identify deportable noncitizens under arrest in county jails. Examining county‐level variation in deportation activity between 2008 and 2013, this paper contributes to immigration policy research by examining how county officials in some locations facilitated exceptionally restrictive deportation outcomes while others exercised the discretion to turn noncitizens over for deportation sparingly. Consistent with a hypothesized "tiered influence" relationship, but contrary to a "racial threat" hypothesis, Hispanic concentration predicts the highest levels of exercised discretion where Hispanic concentration is neither too small nor too large. Noncitizens under arrest seem to have benefited from above‐average Hispanic concentrations, except in counties where Hispanics exceed about 40 percent of the population.

Presentation made at Latinos in the Heartland (10th : 2012 : Kansas City, Mo.) and published in the annual conference proceedings. ; America's Heartland is now home to surging immigrant populations that buoy state and local communities. Rather than explore how to integrate foreign-born newcomers, state and local leaders (e.g., legislators, law enforcement agencies) accelerated immigration enforcement experiments after the collapse of comprehensive immigration reform during 2006-2007. Immigration control advocates in the Heartland have joined or led efforts to repel unauthorized immigrants. Efforts include restrictive laws and increased arrests and deportations. This paper discusses how restrictive policies and programs foster a culture of fear in immigrant communities, even as they fail resolutely, to achieve their central goal of reducing the number of immigrants, including the unauthorized, in new communities.