A New Trend In Illegal Immigration

There's been a debate in labor economics about whether native workers respond to the negative wage impact of immigration by moving to areas that have fewer immigrants. Now we have another question to argue over: Do illegal immigrants move to states that are more willing to ignore their presence?

Illegal immigrants are flowing into Texas across its long borders. But they aren't just swimming across the Rio Grande from Mexico or making dangerous treks through the rugged desert.

Instead, a new rush of illegal immigrants are driving down Interstate 35 from Oklahoma or heading east to Texas from Arizona to flee tough new anti-illegal immigrant laws in those and other states.

The growing exodus is the result of dozens of new state and local laws aimed at curbing illegal immigration. The two toughest measures are in Oklahoma and Arizona.

The Oklahoma statute, which took effect in November, makes it a crime to transport, harbor or hire illegal immigrants. Effective Jan. 1, the Arizona law suspends the business license of employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers. On a second offense, the license is revoked.

''It's a wave that's happening across the United States," said Nelson Reyes, executive director of the Central American Resource Center in Houston, which has helped immigrants who recently relocated in Houston from Virginia and South Carolina. ''There is a migration, within the United States, to the states and cities more receptive to the reality of the undocumented immigrant."

A word of advice if you are a student looking for a research topic: Look no further; there's a great paper waiting to be written about this.

Comments

[MDT]

Dr Borjas

With all due respect, why is this a research topic?

Would it not be expected that people who have the choice will always move to where the pickings are easier and they will not be punished for their illegal actions? That is simply natural law.

Perhaps the research would be to study the long term impact on the quality of life, crime, environment, over-population, etc between the strict states and the sanctuary states - but that will not be apparent for years.

[T]

Seems like a good research topic to me. Difficult, but important. It would be important to study what the magnitude of the effect is (how much outmigration is there), how much the strict areas benefitted, etc. Some of those benefits would be pretty immediate (fewer kids in school, lower welfare payments). The comparison study between strict/sanctuary is what would take longer, in part because the illegals will be dispersed across many states and it will be hard to determine where they're going while the strict counties/states are a discrete set. "This county enacted this ordinance and enforced it. Within 5 months school population declined by X% and X% of those who left had a Spanish surname [obviously an imperfect measure but some proxy would have to be developed]. Welfare payments declined by X%." Harder to do with states. Even if most illegals in OK who left moved to TX and not other states (if that could even be known) they would a)probably disperse and not all settle in one city like Houston or Dallas and b)TX is a big state with a large population. 1,000 illegal aliens moving into one county of 100,000 is more noticeable than 1,000 into 20 million.

People think/thought welfare recipients would migrate to states with more liberal payments, but apparently that isn't as much the case as people thought. Sometimes good to study the obvious...

[T]

I meant "harder to do with destination states" (where the illegal aliens end up).

[steve]

To me, the more interesting question for academic study is, why the states that receive so many of the illegals are so receptive to them?

I mean, Texas is schools and hospitals are flooded. Citizens are getting terrible care.

yet Texas has not enacted any laws similar to the ones in Arizona.

The real mystery is, what are people in Texas thinking

Can someone study that

[T]

I know in Texas Hispanics are more assimilated than in CA. This isn't just perception, studies have shown this (I don't have time to find them). Perhaps Texans think the illegal Hispanics will turn out like the American Hispanics.

Maybe Oklahoma never had that history of citizen Hispanics and so they just see the illegal ones clogging their hospitals, schools, neighborhoods, getting drunk, being loud, etc. Same with the VA counties that have enacted ordinances.