The Deportation Threat Dynamic and Victimization of Latino Migrants: Wage Theft and Robbery

Abstract

Deportations have been increasing since the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, although the number of unauthorized migrants working in the United States has increased as well. These conditions enable the deportation threat dynamic, a social mechanism which plays out between unauthorized Latino migrants and those who seek to take advantage of them and exposes the migrants to the risk of wage theft and robbery. I use mixed methods to identify and describe this social mechanism and its consequences as it operated in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2007 to 2008 after Hurricane Katrina generated a construction boom. I find that Latino migrants who sought work as day laborers were more likely to experience wage theft but were equally likely to experience criminal victimization. These crimes occur because Latino migrants were visually identifiable by unscrupulous employers and criminals who assumed they were unauthorized and therefore felt confident that the migrants would not report them to law enforcement authorities.

A ‘master status’ or the ‘final straw’? Assessing the role of immigration status in Latino undocumented youths’ pathways out of school

“…Their lack of work authorization means that they have limited access to legal employment and will be underpaid, exploited, and exposed to unsafe working conditions (Fussell 2011;Gleeson 2010). Though they may have always feared and risked deportation (De Genova 2002), this risk is higher once they leave the protected status of childhood and they may limit their social participation (Sigona 2012).…”

“…Many studies have addressed how immigration status and low socioeconomic status work together to raise undocumented youths' financial barriers to higher education (Diaz-Strong et al 2011;Terriquez 2015). Attention to this intersection likely stems from the interconnected nature of these two statuses as undocumented immigrants are unable to work legally and have a heightened risk of wage theft (Fussell 2011;Gleeson 2010;Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark 2002). Some scholars also develop comparisons of undocumented students across other social locations, like gender (Flores 2010) and race (Enriquez 2016), but the impact of these have not been adequately investigated.…”

Walking ATMs and the immigration spillover effect: The link between Latino immigration and robbery victimization

“…As their numbers have grown, there are increasing reports of robbers targeting Latinos, especially undocumented Latino migrants, because of the latter's reliance on the cash economy. Indeed, Fussell (2011) finds that migrants are in fact being specifically targeted both because they carry cash and because they are reluctant to report crimes to the police.…”

“…Lastly, we examine this phenomenon with a nationwide sample of counties in order to make stronger inferences than those possible in previous studies which focus on a single city (e.g. Cancino et al, 2009;Fussell, 2011;Negi et al, 2013). We examine this issue for 2010 using American Community Survey and the National Incident-Based Reporting System data.…”

Day labor, informality and vulnerability in South Africa and the United States

“…Unscrupulous employers frequently exploit day laborers' need for work, abandoning workers at worksites and failing to pay them for their work. In addition, employers often threaten to report workers to federal immigration authorities, and engage in other forms of retaliation, if workers speak out against substandard conditions and violations of labor laws (Fussell, 2011;Mehta and Theodore, 2006). In South Africa, there is little evidence to suggest that day laborers experience such widespread violations of labor laws.…”