Does Immigration Enforcement Reduce Crime? Evidence from Secure Communities

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.

Deporting the American Dream: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Foreclosures

“…Compared to the more widely studied Secure Communities initiative (e.g., Miles and Cox 2014;Watson 2013), the 287(g) program data better suit our purposes for three reasons. First, although Secure Communities was first piloted in late 2008 in a handful of counties, it was mainly implemented from 2010 to 2013, too late to cause foreclosures in 2006 to 2010.…”

“…Second, the rollout of 287(g) was uneven across counties in various states without relation to the United States-Mexico border. In the case of Secure Communities, time and distance from the border were correlated: it was rolled out first in border regions and then slowly into the rest of the interior United States (Miles and Cox 2014).…”

A Cost-Benefit Framework for Analyzing the Economic and Fiscal Impacts of State-Level Immigration Policies

“…A body of empirical research has examined the relationship between immigration and crime in the United States (see Miles and Cox, 2014, for a recent review). The evidence from the studies with the most rigorous designs to capture causal relationships consistently find no statistically significant or policy relevant relationship.…”

“…Yet one motivation for policies like the 287(g) program or the subsequent Secure Communities program is to make communities safer. Miles and Cox (2014) use the variation in the roll-out of the Secure Communities program to assess the effects of the program on overall crime rates and rates of specific types of crime. They find no effect of Secure Communities on the overall crime rate or the violent crime rate.…”

Economics of Immigration: A Case for the United States

“…This law allows the Federal government to deport the non-citizens who committed crime. Miles and Cox (2014) used data from 3000 U.S. counties and found "Secure Communities" program did not reduce FBI crime index significantly. The study did not find any evidence of reduction of violent crimes such as, homicide, rape, robbery, or aggravated assault although, a quarter million immigrants were detained under this law.…”