Marriage and immigration enforcement: The impact of Secure Communities on immigrant women

Abstract

We investigate if increased deportations under the Secure Communities (SC) program impacted the marriage patterns of immigrant women in the United States. We focus on country of origin-MSA deportation rates, arguing this is appropriate given the dominance of endogamous marriage among immigrants and large heterogeneity in removal rates. We find that rising deportations increased marriage rates and endogamous marriage, decreased exogamous marriage to immigrants from other countries, and had no impact on marriage to native-born men. This is striking because SC likely reduced same ethnicity partners in marriage markets. We find some evidence that increased network effects may explain these results.

The value of a green card in the U.S. marriage market: A tale of chain migration?

“…Bansak and Pearlman (2022) find that stricter immigration enforcement in the form of increased deportations also appears to increase immigrants' likelihood of being married to a co-ethnic despite reducing the number of co-ethnics, suggesting that immigrants' networks become more focused on co-ethnics when immigration enforcement is more strict.…”