Immigration Article of the Day: Police Trust and Domestic Violence among Immigrants: Evidence from VAWA Self-Petitions by Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Esther Arenas-Arroyo

Today’s immigration article of the day is Police Trust and Domestic Violence among Immigrants: Evidence from VAWA Self-Petitions by Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Esther Arenas-Arroyo. It’s a working paper published with the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University. Here is the executive summary:

Domestic violence often goes unreported. In the United States, about 20 people are abused by an intimate partner every minute. For immigrant women, reporting domestic violence poses additional challenges. For example, immigrant women frequently depend on their partners economically or to adjust their immigration status. To address this problem, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994. The legislation allows battered immigrants to petition for legal status without relying on the sponsorship of an abusive U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident spouse.

In recent years, increases in immigration enforcement may have affected immigrant women’s willingness to apply for protection under VAWA by making them less likely to trust police officers who often work with federal immigration agencies. In this paper, economists Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Esther Arenas-Arroyo consider how immigration enforcement changes affect applications for protection through VAWA.

The study shows that adopting welcoming policies towards immigrants increases VAWA self-petitions. Specifically, adopting a policy that limits how local police enforcement works with federal immigration officials, usually called a sanctuary policy, increases VAWA petitions from battered women by 2.24 percent.

A key contribution of this study is providing evidence that sanctuary policies work by increasing trust between local law enforcement and immigrants. To explore this, the authors look at the effects of sanctuary on divorce rates as VAWA and sanctuary create a path for battered women to leave abusive spouses. They find an increase in divorce rates for non-citizens but no similar effect for natives. This provides evidence that a sanctuary policy increases victims’ willingness to come forward and divorce their abusers by seeking protection through VAWA.

By highlighting another advantage of sanctuary policies, this research suggests that policymakers considering how to protect vulnerable populations should take the possibility of adopting sanctuary policies seriously. Related research on sanctuary suggests that sanctuary policies either have no effect on crime rates or may reduce some types of crime. All of this makes it clear that there is much to be gained from adopting more welcoming immigration policies.

-KitJ