No abstract

Does immigration enforcement actually reduce crime? Surprisingly, little evidence exists either way-despite the fact that deporting noncitizens who commit crimes has been a central feature of American immigration law since the early twentieth century. We capitalize on a natural policy experiment to address the question and, in the process, provide the first empirical analysis of the most important deportation initiative to be rolled out in decades. The policy initiative we study is "Secure Communities," a program designed to enable the federal government to check the immigration status of every person arrested for a crime by local police. Before this program, the government checked the immigration status of only a small fraction of arrestees. Since its launch, the program has led to over a quarter of a million detentions. We exploit the slow rollout of the program across more than 3,000 U.S. counties to obtain differences-indifferences estimates of the impact of Secure Communities on local crime rates. We also use rich data on the number of immigrants detained under the program in each county and month-data obtained from the federal government through extensive FOIA requests-to estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to incapacitated immigrants. Our results show that Secure Communities led to no meaningful reductions in the FBI index crime rate. Nor has it reduced rates of violent crime-homicide, rape, robbery, or aggravated assault. This evidence shows that the program has not served its central objective of making communities safer.

No abstract

Should federal courts police partisan gerrymandering? This question has lurked in the background of voting rights cases ever since the Supreme Court first waded into the political thicket in Baker v Carr. 1 For nearly two decades the Court has been explicitly divided over the answer to the question, and commentators have been similarly split. Despite these deep divides, however, both courts and commentators are united on one point-that congressional gerrymanders and state legislative gerrymanders should be treated identically by courts. Both constitutional jurisprudence and legal scholarship have uniformly assumed that these two types of gerrymanders pose the same problems and are subject to the same solutions. This past Term the Supreme Court entrenched this assumption in constitutional doctrine when it decided Vieth v Jubelirer. 2 Vieth, a partisan gerrymandering case from Pennsylvania, represented the Court's first crack at resolving the question whether federal courts should police partisan gerrymandering since a fractured Court said "yes" eighteen years ago in Davis v Bandemer. 3 The Court treated Vieth as a referendum on Bandemer. And over the disagreement of four justices, it reaffirmed Bandemer's basic holding that federal constitutional challenges to partisan gerrymandering are justiciable. 4 In a strange omission, however, not one of the five opinions in Vieth mentioned a central distinction between Bandemer and Vieth-that the former concerned a challenge to state legislative