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CRYSTAL YANG: I
was always somebody
very interested in
understanding inequality
in poverty and opportunity.
And I always viewed legal
institutions and policies
as playing a really critical
role in understanding
those key questions.
I'm also very much
an advocate of sort
of evidence-based
policy, which is often
lacking in a lot of parts
of the legal system.
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Whether it's cash welfare,
health insurance programs,
or food stamps,
Hispanics in particular
are less likely to
participate in those programs,
even relative to other
racial and ethnic groups.
There's been a big literature
in the fields of economics
and public health
trying to understand
why people, in general,
don't take up these programs.
And the standard
explanations have been things
like lack of
information about how
to sign up for the programs
or high transaction costs.
And there's also the phenomenon
that a lot of these programs
are highly stigmatized, which
means that people may not
participate.
There's also growing
work suggesting
that social networks really
matter for people when they
sign up for programs because
you learn how to sign up,
or it becomes less
stigmatizing when
you see other co-ethnics in
your network participating
in these programs.
But we wanted to
explore the phenomenon
of whether these social
networks could sometimes
not just increase take-up,
but actually inhibit
take-up via the spread of fear.
And the fear that we speculated
might be happening more
in recent times is fear that's
invoked by tougher immigration
enforcement.
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This was a program that was
rolled out in October, 2008,
and really expanded
under President Obama's
administration.
And it represented
a really big change
in federal immigration
enforcement,
whereby, because of
fingerprint matching databases,
it all of a sudden
became much easier
to figure out
whether an arrested
individual was, for
instance, unlawfully present
in the country.
We looked at this rollout of
the Secure Communities program
across various
counties in the US,
to look at whether
Hispanic citizens then
started to reduce their
take-up of programs
like food stamps and SSI.
And we found dramatic reductions
of up to 20% to 40% reductions
in take-up of these programs.
And again, that's coming
from Hispanic citizens,
who are themselves
immune from deportation.
And yet because the prevalence
of mixed status families,
they themselves are now forgoing
private benefits for which they
are eligible because
of this fear that's
coming from potentially
others in their network who
may be susceptible to
immigration enforcement.
Participation in programs
like food stamps and SSI
has very beneficial, long-term
impacts for health outcomes.
So for instance, participation
in food stamps among children
substantially decreases
metabolic syndrome
in adulthood.
It substantially reduces
things like child poverty.
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I think one part of our
findings here is, in many ways,
potentially this was an
unintended spillover effect
of immigration enforcement.
Did policymakers
anticipate that by having
more intensive
immigration enforcement,
it would have this
spillover effect
to safety net participation?
I'm not sure that they
necessarily anticipated that.
But we think that's really
important for government
policies moving forward,
because it suggests that if it's
the same entity that is viewed
by residents and citizens
as both a benefactor
to some extent--
because it's the government
that provides these benefits--
as well as an enforcer of
things like immigration policy,
then it might be really
important to account
for how the government
interacts with citizens
in different parts of their
lives to better understand
how we should design and craft
different types of policies.
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Secure Communities, which was
temporarily suspended in 2014,
has since been reactivated
by President Trump in 2017.
Compared to the last couple
of years prior to 2017,
there's definitely
been an increase
in the number of
detainers and removals
under the Secure
Communities program.
So that does represent a
more recent ramp-up, in terms
of immigration enforcement.
A second feature is that a
greater share of removals
are for individuals
who've been arrested
for low-level misdemeanor
and petty offenses.
So for instance, if you look at
the types of offenses that then
trigger the fingerprint
match and ultimate removal,
the number one
category of offenses
under the Trump administration
is traffic-related offenses.
In our work, we
actually have found
that the fear that might
be induced by immigration
enforcement seems to
be larger in parts
of the country in which a
greater share of the detainers
or removals are coming from
these lower-level offenses.
And so we think that if our
results could be extended
to a more recent time period,
that the fact that the current
administration has really
prioritized removal
of individuals arrested for
these lower-level offenses,
that may only intensify fear--
even relative to the
previous iteration
of Secure Communities-- and
could further reduce take-up
of these safety net programs.
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