Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: State and Local Policies Toward Immigrants and Their Consequences

(Population and Migration Issues)

During decades of Congressional stalemate on immigration reforms, state and local governments have passed bills to expand or retract the rights of legal and undocumented immigrants within their jurisdiction. This has led to a situation in which the rights afforded to immigrants in states such as Arizona and Alabama are very different than the rights afforded to immigrants in states such as California and New York. These state and local policies toward immigrants likely have strong implications for the well-being of immigrant and US-born families and for the economic and social well-being of states and communities overall. This panel will shed light on the broad consequences of state and local policies toward immigrants, through four papers that focus on different aspects of the issue. The first presentation, by Ann Morse of the National Conference of State Legislatures, will provide a comprehensive overview of trends in state policies toward immigrants since 2010, including emphasis on immigration enforcement in 2010-2012; supportive responses to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in 2012-2014; and the return of enforcement bills after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. She will then highlight state action toward immigrants in the first half of 2016. The second presentation, by Lynn Karoly and Francisco Perez-Arce from RAND, will present a cost-benefit framework that can be used to assess the likely impacts of state laws related to immigration. They will also review the evidence that can be used with their framework to assess the full range of potential policy impacts and for determining the costs and benefits of state laws. The third presentation, by a team from the Urban Institute, will describe a new publicly available database of state policies toward immigrants since 2000, including public benefits policies, enforcement policies, and policies that expand the rights of undocumented immigrants. They will then present analysis of how state policies toward immigrants are associated with levels of material hardship in immigrant families, using the Survey of Income and Program Participation. The final presentation by Stephanie Potochnick will focus in on the role of 287(g) immigration enforcement agreements, one of the largest state and local immigration enforcement policies, in shaping health care utilization and physical and mental health among immigrant residents. This paper employs the public use Current Population Survey and the restricted-use National Health Interview survey. Together, through multiple approaches and datasets, these papers provide a clear description of how state and local policies toward immigrants have varied across the country and over time; highlight new data sources that can be used to study the consequences of state and local immigration policies; and investigate a range of important consequences of these policies toward immigrants, from fiscal impacts to family material hardship to physical and mental health. The panel will draw out key considerations for local, state, and federal policymakers who are seeking information on the likely costs and benefits of policies that enforce immigration law and/or support the well-being of immigrant and native families alike.