“Secure Communities”? Professors Evaluate Immigration Enforcement
Immigration is one of the most contentious political issues, and a new study by Professor Thomas J. Miles and Professor Adam B. Cox of New York University School of Law questions whether the federal government’s leading immigration enforcement program has achieved its goals.
The program, called Secure Communities, enables the federal government to check the immigration status of every person arrested by local police. Since its establishment in 2008, the federal government has detained more than 250,000 people pursuant to it, most of whom will eventually be deported. The Department of Homeland Security explains the program in large degree as a crime-control effort, one that allows more ready identification and removal of immigrants who commit serious offenses, beyond any violation of immigration laws. Accordingly, the government argues that the program should make communities safer. In their study, Miles and Cox evaluated this claim and found that the program had no impact on rates of violent or property crime.
The Journal of Law and Economics will publish the study later this year, and it has already attracted significant media attention, including coverage in the New York Times. Several newspapers—including the New York Times, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram—promptly editorialized about the study’s implications for immigration policy.
In recent years, the criminal justice and immigration systems have become increasingly enmeshed, a phenomenon that some legal scholars have dubbed the “crimmigration system.” In Secure Communities, Miles – who is the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics and the Walter Mander Research Scholar – and Cox spied the rare opportunity to study this system with large datasets and sophisticated econometric methods.
The Secure Communities program was rolled out across 3,000 counties on a staggered basis over several years, and in this, Miles and Cox saw the chance to test whether the program affected crime rates. “From the perspective of a social scientist, that’s awesome,” Cox said. “It gives you this really unique ability to study a federal policy that you otherwise wouldn’t have the ability to study very well.”
In addition, the professors obtained under the Freedom of Information Act tallies of the number of people detained and deported through the program in each county and month. “The data obtained through FOIA allowed us to measure directly the times and places where the program’s intervention was largest,” Miles said. “In a manner of speaking, we saw where the policy experiment’s ‘dosage’ was largest.” The data also helped understand why the program has not had an impact of crime rates – many of the people detained and deported under the program thus far were not the most serious offenders.
The research topic was well matched to Miles’ and Cox’s expertise. Miles teaches criminal law and holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University, as well as a J.D. Empirical studies of the criminal justice system are a core research activity for him. Cox teaches immigration law, and prior to joining NYU, he was a member of Law School’s faculty.
The research on Secure Communities was not the duo’s first high-impact empirical collaboration. They previously wrote several articles on how judges decide voting rights cases. The study of judicial behavior is another specialty of Miles’, and Cox also teaches voting rights law. Briefs to the Supreme Court in the litigation over the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act two years ago repeatedly cited their work.
Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement defended Secure Communities to the New York Times, noting that with a recidivism rate of just under 50 percent, the program likely prevented more than 100,000 people from committing another crime.
But Miles noted that the risk of criminal victimization as measured by crime rates, not numbers of offenses, is the relevant outcome. He also argued that their study offers a more accurate assessment: “Rather than making that hypothetical calculation, we looked at what in fact happened to crime rates in places where the program was rolled out, and in those places where the most detentions and deportations occurred.”
He hopes the research has an impact on policy. “Government policies should be based on facts and evidence rather than based on rhetoric,” he said.
Miles and Cox’s study of Secure Communities can be read in full here:
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/miles/securecommunities.