This article assesses the claim that sanctuary cities—defined as cities that expressly forbid city officials or police departments from inquiring into an individual’s immigration status—are associated with post hoc increases in crime. We employ a causal inference matching strategy to compare similarly situated cities where key variables are the same across the cities except the sanctuary status of the city. We find no statistically discernible difference in violent crime, rape, or property crime rates across the cities. Our findings provide evidence that sanctuary policies have no effect on crime rates, despite narratives to the contrary. The potential benefits of sanctuary cities, such as better incorporation of the undocumented community and cooperation with police, thus have little cost for the cities in question in terms of crime.

Building upon existing literature, we offer a particular model of network policy diffusion—which we call sustained organizational influence. Sustained organizational influence necessitates an institutional focus across a broad range of issues and across a long period of time. Sustaining organizations are well‐financed, and exert their influence on legislators through benefits, shared ideological interests, and time‐saving opportunities. Sustaining organizations' centralized nature makes legislators' jobs easier by providing legislators with ready‐made model legislation. We argue that sustaining organizations uniquely contribute to policy diffusion in the U.S. states. We evaluate this model with a case study of state‐level immigration sanctuary policy making and the role that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) played in disseminating model legislation. Through quantitative text analysis and several negative binomial state‐level regression models, we demonstrate that ALEC has exerted an overwhelming influence on the introduction of anti‐sanctuary legislative proposals in the U.S. states over the past 7 years consistent with our particular model of network policy diffusion. Implications are discussed.

Considerable interest among academics and practitioners alike centers around identifying ways to improve voter turnout and voting parity across various subgroups in the U.S. population. Many scholars have investigated convenience voting and found mixed results in terms of its effects on turnout and its composition. A relatively new but unstudied method of voting is via ballot drop box, a method states and voters have increasingly turned to. We exploit the placement of over 30 new drop boxes in King County, Washington, the home of Seattle, during the 2016 election to investigate their effect on turnout. We find that distance to the closest ballot drop box increases one's probability of voting but primarily in off-year elections and primaries. We find mixed results for heterogeneous treatment effects. Implications are discussed.

Objective This article examines the impact that reducing the distance to a voter's nearest ballot drop box has on turnout. Methods The placement of five new ballot drop boxes was randomized among six potential sites identified based on similar criteria. The randomization of the five boxes across the six sites created natural Treatment (those sites that received a new box) and Placebo (the site that did not receive a new box) groups. We then employed a difference‐in‐difference design to determine whether voters in the Treatment group were more likely to vote in the 2017 general election compared to those in the Placebo group. Results We find that a decrease of one mile to the nearest drop box increased the probability of voting by 0.64 percent. Conclusion Our finding indicates that drop boxes have a positive effect on voter turnout and that decreasing the distance to these boxes can lead to an increased likelihood of voting.

Significant research indicates that attitude change is often a product of partisan learning. However, as the party system continues to rearrange around issues of race and immigration, and as new racial policy issues thrust onto the agenda, it is unclear whether voters learn to adopt racial policy attitudes more based on race/ethnicity or on party identification. We evaluate the partisan-learning model versus a racial-learning model with regards to public opinion on sanctuary cities/policies among survey respondents in CA and TX. Given President Trump's public antipathy toward sanctuary cities, we argue and show that negative partisanship is the most plausible vehicle for sanctuary city attitude change between 2015 and 2017. In this particular case, we find no support for a racial/ethnic-learning model.

On January 25, 2017, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13768, which marked the first federal action targeting American sanctuary cities and fulfilled one of Trump’s key campaign promises. Sanctuary cities, which do not permit local officials to inquire into immigration status and may decline ICE detainer requests, have been in existence since the early 1980s, but the shooting of Kathryn Steinle in 2015 brought them renewed attention. Ms. Steinle’s accidental shooting by an undocumented immigrant, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, ignited a firestorm of controversy over these policies. Garcia Zarate had been released by the SFPD based on San Francisco’s sanctuary policy, leading then-candidate Donald Trump to make a promise to “end” sanctuary cities a key part of his campaign for president. Yet many Americans know very little about sanctuary policies despite their growing importance in the debate over undocumented immigration and the incorporation of immigrant communities. In this work, Drs. Collingwood and Gonzalez O’Brien provide the first comprehensive examination of sanctuary cities in the United States. Analyzing the historical evolution of these policies, the tone and tenor of media coverage, public opinion, state-level sanctuary legislation, and the effect these policies have on crime rates and Latino political incorporation, the authors hope to provide researchers, members of the public, and lawmakers with the tools to objectively assess the value of sanctuary legislation.

This chapter summarizes the preceding five chapters and discusses the implications of our findings for sanctuary policies and immigration policy more broadly.

No abstract