How Does Stricter Immigration Enforcement Impact the Economic Lives of Immigrant Women?

This study asks how stricter immigration enforcement affected the employment, wages, and job quality of immigrant women in the United States. Using data from the American Community Survey, O*NET, and deportation records from 2008 to 2014, the authors examined changes across cities and immigrant groups. They found no decline in total employment, but average hours worked and annual wages both fell. A one standard deviation increase in deportation intensity reduced wages by about 5.8 percent. Many women shifted into lower-paid, less-educated, and more hazardous occupations, suggesting that fear of detection pushed them toward less visible and lower-quality work.

The Policy Scientist’s Perspective

This study addresses a policy issue of broad significance by quantifying how intensified immigration enforcement reshapes the economic behavior of immigrant women—a subject relevant to current debates over internal enforcement and its collateral effects on lawful labor participation. The analysis is timely, given renewed national attention to immigration enforcement’s labor market implications. Building modestly on East and Velásquez (2022), the study provides credible empirical evidence that stricter enforcement reduces wages and shifts employment toward lower-quality occupations. The data set is large, detailed, and geographically diverse, permitting cautious generalization to other advanced economies. While the methods are correlational, the findings are robust and policy-relevant.

Full Citation and Link to Article

Bansak, C., Pearlman, S., & Sparber, C. (2025). The impact of Secure Communities on the labor market outcomes of immigrant women. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 44(3), 917–942. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22649

Extended Summary

Central Research Question

The study investigates how intensified interior immigration enforcement in the United States—specifically through the Secure Communities (SC) program—affected the labor market outcomes of immigrant women. It seeks to determine whether stricter enforcement policies influenced immigrant women’s employment, work hours, earnings, and occupational characteristics. The authors ask whether deportation activity indirectly shaped labor behavior among women who were not deported themselves but lived in communities heavily affected by deportations between 2008 and 2014 .

Previous Literature

Prior studies on Secure Communities have primarily focused on effects for native-born Americans or aggregate labor markets. East and Velásquez (2022) and East et al. (2023) examined how the policy influenced employment and wages among both native- and foreign-born workers, concluding that SC modestly reduced employment and wages, particularly among low-educated men. Other research, including Alsan and Yang (2022), Wang and Kaushal (2018), Kohli (2011), and Valdivia (2019), highlighted the psychological and social consequences of immigration enforcement, such as fear and stress in immigrant communities. Additional studies found that enforcement programs like E-Verify (Orrenius & Zavodny, 2009; Amuedo-Dorantes & Bansak, 2012) and 287(g) (Bohn & Santillano, 2017) induced sectoral shifts in employment or altered patterns of labor demand.

This study distinguishes itself by focusing exclusively on immigrant women, a demographic that comprised only 5% of deportees yet faced substantial indirect effects through partners or community members. It also diverges methodologically by measuring variation in deportation intensity across both cities and countries of origin, rather than relying on staggered rollouts of the program across time. Unlike earlier studies that measured short-term, local effects, this paper assesses long-term impacts on wages, employment, and occupational quality across diverse metropolitan statistical areas. Its contribution lies in identifying gender-specific “chilling effects,” where fear of detection led women to adjust employment behaviors rather than exit the labor market altogether .

Data

The authors combine three major data sources. First, they use individual-level data from the American Community Survey (ACS) for 2005–2007 (pre-SC period) and 2015–2017 (post-SC period), focusing on foreign-born women aged 20–64 living in metropolitan statistical areas. This dataset provides measures of employment status, annual wages, and hours worked. Second, they incorporate occupational attributes from the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET database to assess job characteristics—such as exposure to hazards and frequency of interpersonal contact. Third, they use deportation records from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, which reports deportations by city of arrest and country of origin.

Together, these datasets allow the authors to measure labor outcomes across 3,909 unique “country-by-city” immigrant communities spanning 187 cities and 114 countries. They restrict the sample to groups with at least five women in both periods to reduce measurement error. On average, immigrant women were employed 59% of the time, worked about 38 hours weekly, and earned below the median occupational income percentile. The authors supplement these data with derived variables such as distance from home country capitals, the likely share of unauthorized immigrants (using Borjas’ 2017 residual method), and a Bartik (1991) labor demand instrument to control for local economic shocks during the Great Recession .

Methods

The study estimates the long-term relationship between deportation intensity and changes in labor market outcomes using a first-difference regression model across country-by-city cells. The dependent variable captures changes in average labor outcomes—employment rates, hours worked, wages, and occupational rankings—from the pre-SC to post-SC period. The key independent variable is the log of cumulative deportations for each immigrant group (by city and origin) during the SC era, weighted by intermarriage patterns across immigrant groups to capture social spillovers.

The regression specification includes city and country fixed effects to absorb regional enforcement variation and country-level differences in documentation status. It also controls for city-by-country characteristics such as proximity, estimated unauthorized share, and predicted labor demand shifts. The model identifies the effect of enforcement intensity on immigrant women’s outcomes by comparing communities that experienced different levels of deportations relative to their pre-existing immigrant populations.

This approach allows for a nuanced measure of enforcement exposure that goes beyond binary program adoption. However, the design remains correlational rather than causal, since it cannot rule out unobserved confounders correlated with both deportation intensity and labor market outcomes. Nevertheless, the authors emphasize that the fixed effects and control variables mitigate many potential biases, and their results align closely with prior quasi-experimental findings .

Findings/Size Effects

The authors find no statistically significant evidence that Secure Communities affected the total employment of immigrant women or caused them to relocate. The total number of employed immigrant women remained stable, indicating that most did not leave the labor force. However, significant effects emerged for hours, wages, and job quality. A one standard deviation increase in deportation intensity—equivalent to roughly 12 additional deportations within a community—reduced average weekly work hours by about 0.6 hours (1.5% of the pre-period average) and lowered annual wage growth by 5.8 percentage points.

Further analysis reveals a downward shift in occupational prestige and pay levels. Immigrant women in high-deportation areas moved into jobs with lower educational requirements, lower average pay, greater physical risk, and less interpersonal visibility. Occupational status, measured by the Nam-Powers-Boyd index, fell by approximately 2.6% relative to the pre-SC mean. O*NET-based measures indicate that women’s occupations became more hazardous and less interactive, suggesting a preference for positions that reduce public exposure or law enforcement contact.

The results are particularly strong for women from Latin America and the Caribbean, who experienced larger declines in occupational status and income. In contrast, the effects for Asian and European immigrants were smaller and statistically weaker, likely reflecting differences in documentation rates and community composition. Importantly, the findings suggest that enforcement’s impact operated through behavioral adjustments—reductions in visibility, hours, and occupational quality—rather than outright job loss or migration. This pattern supports the hypothesis of a “chilling effect,” in which fear of enforcement drives women to accept less favorable labor conditions to reduce perceived risk .

Conclusion

The study concludes that interior immigration enforcement indirectly harms immigrant women’s economic well-being, even though they are rarely the direct targets of deportation. Secure Communities did not shrink the overall female immigrant labor force but depressed earnings, reduced work hours, and pushed many into lower-quality occupations. These effects were most pronounced among women from Latin American and Caribbean origins, indicating that enforcement disproportionately affects communities with higher undocumented shares.

The authors interpret these findings as evidence that immigration policy can have substantial unintended spillover effects that extend beyond deportees to affect broader social networks and local labor markets. The results underscore the persistence of indirect costs from enforcement-driven insecurity, which alter both economic choices and labor allocation among vulnerable populations.

While the analysis is observational, its robustness across multiple specifications, controls, and alternative samples enhances its credibility. The large-scale, multi-source data set and innovative weighting by cross-ethnic networks provide strong descriptive power, even if not definitive causal identification. Overall, the study adds an important dimension to the literature on immigration enforcement and labor economics by systematically quantifying the collateral effects of deportation activity on immigrant women’s employment quality, wages, and occupational structure across U.S. metropolitan areas .