Immigration Article of the Day: Threat of Arrest and Punishment May Not Deter Illegal Immigration by Emily Ryo
Neither the threat of arrest nor punishment may significantly deter Mexicans from trying to enter the United States illegally, according to a new USC Gould School of Law study in the August issue of the American Sociological Review.The study examined a variety of factors — economic and non-economic — that may influence decisions to migrate illegally from Mexico to the U.S., and it found that people’s perceptions of the certainty of arrest and the severity of punishment are not significant determinants of their intentions to migrate illegally, once other relevant factors are taken into account.“This suggests that perhaps there is very little that immigration enforcement alone might be able to do to affect changes in people’s intentions to migrate illegally,” said study author Emily Ryo, USC law professor and a research fellow at Stanford Law School’s Program in Law & Society.
Titled, “Deciding to Cross: Norms and Economics of Unauthorized Migration,” the study relies on data from the 2007 and 2008 Mexican Migration Project (MMP) and Becoming Illegal Survey (BIS). MMP is a unique source of data that enables researchers to track patterns and processes of contemporary Mexican migration to the United States. Each year, a random sample of 150 to 200 households is drawn from a selected number of communities in Mexico and interviewed during the winter months. The BIS is an individual survey of 15 to 65-year-old men from these households who work or intend to work in Mexico or the U.S. in the next year. More than 1,600 men participated in the BIS.
KJ