Enforcement of Immigration Law

This chapter discusses the role of each agency and examines not only the effectiveness of immigration-law enforcement in the manner in which it is being conducted but also the side effects of that enforcement. It also discusses to what extent prior illegal immigration helps an individual become a legal immigrant and the extent to which policies designed to mitigate hardships for undocumented immigrants encourage further illegal immigration. The chapter utilizes a method of random allocation to place all nations into either the control group, where current immigration-law and current immigration-law enforcement would prevail, where there would be no restrictions on immigration into the United States (US). An impediment occurs because we need to measure the volume of net immigration to the US. The activities of the US Border Patrol produce certain side effects in immigration-law enforcement.