Adam B. Cox

Does Immigration Enforcement Reduce Crime? Evidence from 'Secure Communities'

Prior research investigates whether immigrants commit more crimes than native-born people. Yet the central policy used to regulate immigration—detention and deportation—has received little empirical evaluation. This article studies a recent policy innovation called Secure Communities. This program permits the federal government to check the immigration status of every person arrested by local police and to take the arrestee into federal custody promptly for deportation proceedings. Since its launch, the program has led to a quarter of a million detentions. We utilize the staggered rollout of the program across the country to obtain differences-in-differences estimates of its impact on crime rates. We also use unique counts of the detainees from each county and month to estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to confined immigrants. The results show that the Secure Communities program has had no observable effect on the overall crime rate.

A Property Rights Approach to Temporary Work Visas

Rules for temporary labor visas in the United States are criticized on three grounds: for failing to allocate visas efficiently, for failing to adequately protect domestic workers, and for exposing migrant workers to exploitation. We argue that it is possible to address all three problems by reconfiguring the property rights associated with the visas and carefully designing the mechanism for allocating those rights. Our core insight is to unbundle the two rights that today are typically combined: the firm’s right to employ a foreign worker and the worker’s right to reside and work in the country during that time. A three-pronged approach—auctioning abstract precontract visas to firms, allowing their trade on a secondary market, and transferring the visa’s ownership to the worker upon signature of the employment contract—has the potential to improve the efficiency of visa allocation, to better shield domestic workers, and to protect foreign workers from exploitation.