section_path: Crime and law enforcement/Impact of immigration enforcement
section_name: Impact of immigration enforcement
paragraph_text: Impact of immigration enforcement
  
  Research suggests immigration enforcement deters unauthorized immigration but has no impact on crime rates. Immigration enforcement is costly and may divert resources from other forms of law enforcement. Tougher immigration enforcement has been associated with greater migrant deaths, as migrants take riskier routes and use the services of smugglers. Tough border enforcement may also encourage unauthorized immigrants to settle in the United States, rather than regularly travel across the border where they may be captured. Immigration enforcement programs have been shown to lower employment and wages among illegal immigrants, while increasing their participation in the informal economy.
  
  Research finds that Secure Communities, an immigration enforcement program which led to a quarter of a million of detentions, had no observable impact on the crime rate. A 2015 study found that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized almost 3 million immigrants, led to "decreases in crime of 3–5 percent, primarily due to decline in property crimes, equivalent to 120,000–180,000 fewer violent and property crimes committed each year due to legalization".
  
  A 2017 review study of the existing literature noted that the existing studies had found that sanctuary cities—which adopt policies designed to avoid prosecuting people solely for being an illegal immigrant—either have no impact on crime or that they lower the crime rate. A second 2017 study in the journal Urban Affairs Review found that sanctuary policy itself has no statistically meaningful effect on crime. The findings of the study were misinterpreted by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a July 2017 speech when he claimed that the study showed that sanctuary cities were more prone to crime than cities without sanctuary policies. A third study in the journal Justice Quarterly found evidence that the adoption of sanctuary policies reduced the robbery rate but had no impact on the homicide rate except in cities with larger Mexican illegal immigrant populations which had lower rates of homicide. Two studies have found that local cooperation with ICE adversely affect public safety by reducing local reporting of crime by Latino communities.
  
  According to a study by Tom K. Wong, associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, published by the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank: "Crime is statistically significantly lower in sanctuary counties compared to nonsanctuary counties. Moreover, economies are stronger in sanctuary counties—from higher median household income, less poverty, and less reliance on public assistance to higher labor force participation, higher employment-to-population ratios, and lower unemployment." The study also concluded that sanctuary cities build trust between local law enforcement and the community, which enhances public safety overall. The study evaluated sanctuary and non-sanctuary cities while controlling for differences in population, the foreign-born percentage of the population, and the percentage of the population that is Latino."
  
  A 2018 study found no evidence that apprehensions of illegal immigrants in districts in the United States reduced crime rates.
  
  After the Obama administration reduced federal immigration enforcement, Democratic counties reduced their immigration enforcement more than Republican counties; a paper by a University of Pennsylvania PhD candidate found "that Democratic counties with higher non-citizen population shares saw greater increases in clearance rates, a measure of policing efficiency, with no increase in crime rates. The results indicate that reducing immigration enforcement did not increase crime and rather led to an increase in policing efficiency, either because it allowed police to focus efforts on solving more serious crimes or because it elicited greater cooperation of non-citizens with police." A 2003 paper by two Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas economists found "that while the volume of illegal immigration is not related to changes in property-related crime, there is a significant positive correlation with the incidence of violent crime. This is most likely due to extensive smuggling activity along the border. Border enforcement meanwhile is significantly negatively related to crime rates. The bad news is that the deterrent effect of the border patrol diminishes over this time period, and the net impact of more enforcement on border crime since the late 1990s is zero."
  
  According to Cornell University economist Francine Blau and University of California at Berkeley economist Gretchen Donehower, the existing "evidence does not suggest that... stepping up enforcement of existing immigration laws would generate savings to existing taxpayers." By complicating circular migration and temporary work by migrants, and by incentivizing migrants to settle permanently in the US, the 2017 National Academy of Sciences report on immigration notes that "it is certainly possible that additional costs have been created to the economy by the increased border enforcement, beyond the narrow costs of the programs themselves in the federal budget."
  
  It has been argued that enhanced border enforcement drives illegal immigrants to cartels, which have the means to elude immigration authorities, such as trucks, with negative consequences including the rape, torture, and blackmail of the smuggled immigrants, and high profits for the cartels. "The militarization of the border has made it so difficult and so expensive for migrants to cross that the potential profits have incentivized international cartels.... Homeland Security Investigations estimates that cartel profits from smuggling migrants jumped from $500 million in 2018 to $13 billion today."