A Delicate Dance: Municipal Enforcement of Immigration Laws

When President Bill Clinton declared that the “era of big government is over” in 1996, a major centerpiece of his State of the Union address was the decentralization of welfare reform through block grants. That same year, the practice of devolution, where many federal responsibilities were redistributed to state and local governments, also was extended to the enforcement of national immigration laws with the Illegal Immigration Reform & Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA).

Within the past decade, another added responsibility in local immigration enforcement has been the passage of a number of strict state and local immigration laws, such as Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070. When Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 in 2010, she attempted to qualm concerns that the legislation would lead to racial profiling by saying, “We have to trust our law enforcement.” A question that Brewer’s statement deflects is whether elected local and state officials influence how immigration federalism is mandated in police activities and whether police forces are fully autonomous in implementing laws like SB 1070.

Authors Paul G. Lewis, Doris Marie Provine, Monica W. Varsanyi, and Scott H. Decker attempt to answer this question in “Why Do (Some) City Police Departments Enforce Federal Immigration Law? Political, Demographic, and Organizational Influences on Local Choices.” They find that a disparity in implementation has emerged as a consequence of more political actors entering into the intergovernmental arena of immigration enforcement. Police officers in some areas regularly and aggressively enforce laws targeting undocumented immigrants while other police forces have rebuffed considerations of a suspect’s immigration status, according to the Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory article.

To study government and political influence on local immigration enforcement, Lewis et al. distributed surveys to police chiefs of American cities with populations of at least 65,000 people. Out of the original 452 that were sent, the authors analyzed data from 237 returned surveys by scoring what option chiefs chose from a list of supplied answers to the following questions: 1) Which options “best describe” the local government’s current attitude toward the jurisdiction of the police department “on unauthorized immigration?” 2) Despite what law enforcement is expected to do, what generally happens when an officer comes across an undocumented immigrant?

The authors find that a variety of factors ranging from the “presence of a Hispanic police chief” to the structure of local government (mayor-council versus council-manager) and level of voter participation can influence the intensity of police immigration enforcement. Despite the wide array of answers, Lewis et al. determine that when elected officials had specific policy set in place, it clearly established “important bounds of the practices of police departments.” Thus, governments with strict statutes like SB 1070 are more inclined to have aggressive police activity toward people who may be deemed undocumented immigrants as compared to areas where no clear policy is set in place.

Given these findings, Lewis et al. conclude that more research – especially using qualitative methods such as case study analysis – is needed to fully disentangle how immigration law is implemented on the local level and what actors should be held accountable for those decisions.

In the intergovernmental system, decision-making and bureaucratic action is often an entangled, delicate dance involving multiple political actors and levels of government. With the expansion of devolution practices today through the rise of social entrepreneurship and use of contractors, the complexity of implementing federal law has swelled while transparency has diminished. As policymakers aim to navigate this interwoven terrain and look to who should be entrusted to ensure that constitutional rights are not violated when enforcing immigration laws, this article can serve as a guide as well as answer why inconsistencies in immigration federalism exist.

Feature Photo: cc/(jvoves)