Recent changes in immigration policy and U.S. naturalization patterns
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Recent changes in immigration policy and U.S. naturalization patterns Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes
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Mary Lopez2
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Received: 5 May 2020 / Accepted: 21 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Naturalization bestows economic benefits to immigrants, their families, and communities through greater access to employment opportunities, higher earnings, and homeownership. It is the cornerstone of immigrant assimilation in the United States. Yet, less than 720,000 of the estimated 8.5 million legal permanent residents (LPRs) eligible to naturalize do so on a yearly basis. Using data from the 2008–2018 American Community Survey, we analyze how the expansion of interior immigration enforcement impacts the decision to naturalize. We find that the adoption over an entire year of one enforcement initiative, or of two enforcement initiatives for half a year, raises the naturalization hazard by 2 percent. The effect is more pronounced among LPRs who are Mexican, women, or reside in non-mixed status households. Finally, the impact is driven by police-based, as opposed to employment-based, interior immigration enforcement. In sum, immigrants who naturalize in response to intensified enforcement may be doing so out of fear or uncertainty about their ability to secure their citizenship status and rights in a rapidly changing immigration policy environment increasingly hostile towards immigrants. Keywords Immigration enforcement Naturalization United States ●
JEL codes F22 J15 K37 ●
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* Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes [email protected] 1
University of California Merced, Merced, CA, USA
2
Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA, USA
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C. Amuedo-Dorantes, M. Lopez
1 Introduction Naturalization is the cornerstone of immigrant assimilation and provides several economic and political benefits.1 Naturalized immigrants can obtain access to government benefits and jobs requiring citizenship, sponsor immediate relatives for visas, participate in the formal electoral process, and are guaranteed the right to remain permanently in the United States protected from deportation. The University of Southern California’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) has estimated that 8.5 million immigrants are currently eligible to naturalize.2 Yet in the past 8 years, an average of just 716,457 immigrants have become naturalized citizens annually (USCIS 2017). While the literature has emphasized the importance of personal characteristics, country of origin traits, and host country circumstances in influencing the costs and benefits associated with naturalization (Chiswick and Miller 2008), institutional factors, such as immigration policies can also play a role (e.g., Jones-Correa 2001; Bloemraad 2002). In this study, we examine the extent to which the formidable expansion of interior immigration enforcement has impacted naturalization patterns. Between 2003 and 2016, funding for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency—the federal agency responsible for inte
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