The Impacts of Restrictive Interior Immigration Enforcement on Undocumented Immigrants’ Decisions: Self-Deportation Out of Fear?

Abstract

The Secure Communities (S-comm) program has allowed local law enforcement officers to identify deportable non-U.S. citizen arrestees in their local jails. The expansion of interior immigration enforcement is supposedly rooted in deterrence logic, aiming to encourage self-deportation or attrition through enforcement among undocumented immigrants. Using Mexican Migration Project (MMP) survey data, we examine whether the policy has achieved its stated goal of attrition through enforcement. Overall, we find that the S-comm enforcement does not encourage self-deportation among Mexican-born undocumented immigrants, the largest undocumented group in the United States. Instead, these immigrants’ personal and family situations significantly shape migrant decisions. Given the gap between the program’s public rationale and its observable effects, our findings suggest that S-comm may function less as an empirically grounded policy intervention and more as a form of symbolic politics.