Unintended Consequences of Immigration Enforcement: Household Services and High-Educated Mothers’ Work

Immigration enforcement has intensified in the U.S., however, there is little evidence on its effect on U.S.-born individuals’ labor outcomes. Exploiting the staggered rollout of a large, federal enforcement policy–Secure Communities (SC)–across local areas, we estimate a difference-in-differences model with time and location fixed effects. We find that SC reduced the labor supply of collegeeducated U.S.-born mothers with young children. If SC exposure occurred when children are below age 3, the negative effects on labor supply persist over time. We further show increased cost of outsourcing household production, due to reduced undocumented immigrants’ labor supply, is an important mechanism. ∗We are grateful to Patricia Cortes, Delia Furtado, Gaurav Khanna, Brian Kovak, Emily Lawler, Michelle Marcus, Terra McKinnish, Kathleen McGarry, Anita Mukherjee, Emily Nix, Pia Orrenius, Analisa Packham, Sandra Rozo, Sarada, Na’ama Shenhav, Jenna Stearns, Sebastian Tello-Trillo, Jose Tessada, Alisa Tazhitdinova, and seminar participants at the University of Colorado Denver, Hawaii Applied Micro Oneday Conference, First Annual Colombian Economics Conference, Census Bureau, University of Houston, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, University of Essex, ICESI, University of Connecticut, Texas A&M University, University of North Carolina Greensboro, University of Sao Paulo, the Brookings Institute, UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration and the UCSD Center for Comparative Immigration Studies Emerging Immigration Scholar Workshop, Institute of Behavioral Science and the CU Population Center, Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, Southern Economic Association, CSWEP sessions at the Western Economic Association, and the Population Association of America. We are also grateful to Reid Taylor, Tyler Collinson, Evan Generoli and Gabrielle Toborg for excellent research assistance. We obtained the TRAC data from Syracuse University as TRAC Fellows. Chloe East was supported by funding from the Office of Research Services at the University of Colorado Denver. As always, all errors are our own. Previous versions of this work were circulated under the titles: “The Effect of Increasing Immigration Enforcement on the Labor Supply of High-Skilled Citizen Women” and “Unintended Consequences of Immigration Enforcement: Household Services and High-Skilled Women’s Work” †University of Colorado Denver and IZA Institute of Labor Economics, email: chloe.east@ucdenver.edu ‡University of Colorado Denver, email: andrea.velasquez@ucdenver.edu