State Immigration Enforcement Policies
The Trump administration promises a changed policy environment for immigrant families, including a renewed focus on detecting and removing unauthorized immigrants. In many ways, this is recreating the immigration policy context of 2005–10. To highlight potential implications of new policies, we studied how state policy choices in that period affected the well-being of US households. We found that as states increased immigration enforcement efforts, both legal and unauthorized low-income immigrant households with children experienced increased material hardship, with no countervailing benefits for US-citizen households. These findings have implications for the 1-in-10 US children who have a noncitizen parent.
Gelatt, J., Koball, H., Bernstein, H., Runes, C., & Pratt, E. (2017). State Immigration Enforcement Policies. Urban Institute. Retrieved from https://www.urban.org/research/publication/state-immigration-enforcement-policies/view/full_report