The perverse side effects of America’s harsh immigration policies

By C.K.

IN JANUARY last year President Donald Trump signed an executive order reviving Secure Communities, a programme that empowers the federal government to check the immigration status of anyone arrested by local police. Launched in the last year of the George W. Bush administration and expanded under President Barack Obama, Secure Communities was axed in 2014 amid protests that it might be unconstitutional and that it discouraged migrants from co-operating with local law enforcement. Two new papers look at the effects of the programme in its earlier incarnation. They find that it succeeded in its stated goal of removing undocumented workers—but it also reduced access to jobs, health care and nutrition for migrants and citizens alike.

Secure Communities saw a staggered rollout out across America between 2008 and 2012. Some 43m sets of fingerprint were collected and more than 400,000 people deported by the time the Obama administration cancelled the programme in 2014. Towards the end, a number of jurisdictions, called “sanctuary cities”, were refusing to pass on fingerprint data to the federal authorities. The multi-year rollout of Secure Communities and the varying levels of enforcement allow researchers to identify its impacts. Chloe East from the University of Colorado and colleagues examined employment effects while Marcella Alsan of Stanford University and Crystal Yang of Harvard University looked at access to welfare and health-care enrollment.