Book Description

This dissertation examines immigration enforcement within the interior of the United States. Each of the three empirical chapters employs a distinct geographical unit of analysis, state, county, and town. Immigration laws and policies is not simply a matter of national governance, but one that extends well into the interior of the United States. Neither can immigration matters be exclusively the domain of southern border regions and towns. Multi-jurisdictional examination of immigration highlights how borders have extended across states, counties and towns throughout the country. Over the last forty years, the United States has legislated and built an expansive immigration enforcement regime that extends far beyond these border regions well within the country's interior. This dissertation extends empirical, theoretical, and sociological study of U.S. interior immigration enforcement.The first chapter examines restrictive state-level omnibus immigration laws (OILs), using original data to uncover the effects of these laws on compositional change for undocumented, Foreign-born, and Hispanic/Latino populations from 2005 to 2017. Using a quasi-experimental design, I show that by passing omnibus immigration laws, states shape demographic patterns of foreign-born populations. Specifically, I find that states that pass omnibus immigration laws experience a decrease in undocumented and Foreign-born populations relative to states that did not pass similar laws. Effects are estimated each year after the passage of OILs, providing additional insight into the temporal impact of omnibus immigration laws on the settlement patterns of these groups. This paper takes a critical approach by providing theoretical justification to center the role of the subnational in U.S. immigration matters. I find evidence that OILs legislate a unique form of social exclusion within immigrant and undocumented communities living in their jurisdictions. Amid the boom in the late 1980s, there was a rapid increase in the opening of immigrant detention centers. While long-standing legal doctrine deems immigrant detention a civil matter, scholars and activists assert that modern immigrant detention is a form of punishment, effectively erasing the line between the criminal and civil nature of immigration law. Chapter 2 uses data from FOIR (Freedom of Information Requests) to provide a comprehensive historical and spatial analysis of immigrant detention and its connections with the prison boom since 1980. I draw on multiple data sources that, over time, identify that immigrant detention centers are more likely to be opened in towns with prisons. Findings from this study show that towns with detention centers are more likely to have a proximate prison, have greater numbers of Hispanic/Latino populations living in these detention center towns, and worsening economic characteristics over time. By mapping the inequality of place, this paper extends research on how legal violence manifests spatially across towns in the United States. The final chapter advances the literature on the causes, conditions, and consequences of immigrant detention. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2016 recommended an increase in the use of private sector involvement in immigrant detention center management. Scholarly empirical research does not fully understand the complex connection between private prison building and immigrant detention center placement in the United States. This study is the first of its kind to examine the likelihood of a county placing an immigrant detention center if a private prison opens from 1980 to 2010 across region and rurality. Findings show that the odds of a county opening an immigrant detention center significantly increase if a prison is present and even more significantly when a private prison is present. In addition, these counties are more likely to attract Hispanic/Latino populations and have more high school graduates than places without immigrant detention centers.