Large-Scale Deportations May Have Unintended Consequences

In destination and transit countries around the world and across the political spectrum, debates about migration have been dominated by calls for increasing deportations of unauthorized migrants. These policies are often justified by three main arguments: that they will deter future irregular migration, enhance public safety, and improve socioeconomic outcomes for the native-born population. Yet despite these policies’ significant fiscal costs, surprisingly little attention has been paid to evaluating them in terms of these particular objectives. What are the actual intended and unintended outcomes of forced returns, both in deporting countries and in migrants' countries of origin?

Research shows that increasing removals and returns may deter some irregular migration in the short term. Nonetheless, without addressing the underlying drivers of migration, these policies may lead to a change only in individuals’ migration strategies rather than a noticeable reduction of irregular migration overall. Also, there is little evidence to support the notion that enforced returns enhance public safety in destination countries. Studies have shown that deportations did not lead to lower crime rates in the United States, reflecting the fact that U.S. immigrants, including those without authorization, tend to have lower conviction and incarceration rates than the native born. In addition, deportations have been shown to negatively affect U.S.-born workers by significantly reducing their employment opportunities.

Narratives surrounding forced removals typically take the perspective of the deporting country, neglecting impacts on migrants, their families, and their communities of origin. Many deportees return with significant debt accrued from financing their migration, have difficulty finding jobs and re-establishing footholds upon return, and often feel shame and experience stigma for having been removed. Moreover, the heightened vulnerability that comes with forced returns has fed into dynamics of violent crime in Mexico and Central America. These negative effects may come back to haunt deporting countries, too; if forced returns lead to instability, social isolation, inability to find work, or other negative effects in communities of origin, this could generate new migration that would counteract the original deterrence intentions of return policies. Partly due to these outcomes, authorities in the European Union have placed a greater emphasis on return and reintegration assistance than those in the United States.

This article provides an overview of the connection between deportations and deterrence of future irregular migration, security, and labor market conditions. It is limited to these aspects and does not seek to evaluate the merits of deportations in other regards. Based in part on the authors’ research into various dimensions of the connection, it focuses primarily on deportations from countries’ interiors—known formally as removals in the United States and forced returns in the European Union (see Definitions box)—with an emphasis on those from the United States to Latin America. In particular, a significant amount of research uses data related to the U.S. Secure Communities program, an information-sharing system that has been credited for more than 750,000 deportations between its rollout in 2008 and end in 2021. Secure Communities was implemented across the United States on a staggered and gradual basis, enabling researchers to make comparisons between districts and study its causal effects on different indicators. 

A Longstanding Focus on Deportations

Forced removals have long been an important part of the migration policy toolkits of destination countries. The United States carried out 7 million removals from fiscal year (FY) 2000 through May 2024 (not counting enforcement returns or pandemic-era expulsions at U.S. borders). European Union countries registered 2.2 million returns between 2008 and 2021, according to Eurostat, including forced and voluntary returns. Elsewhere, other countries heavily engage in deportation practices, too. For instance, Saudi Arabia deported 500,000 Ethiopians from 2017 through 2022, and Pakistan has threatened to deport a large number of Afghans, prompting more than 650,000 to return over the last year. 

A U.S. Focus on Removals

One of the most significant shifts in U.S. immigration policy has been the emphasis on interior enforcement, after a long period of focusing primarily on the borders, and empowering state and local authorities to initiate processes in coordination with the federal government that lead to deportation. While attention has shifted back to the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years, amid a period of record arrivals since FY 2021, interior enforcement had been the central focus of U.S. immigration enforcement for several years. As of mid-2022, an estimated 11.3 million people in the United States lacked legal status, according to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), making them potentially vulnerable to removal. The tools used for interior enforcement can generally be traced to passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996, which opened the door to partnerships between state and local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. For instance, the 287(g) program included in IIRIRA allowed federal immigration authorities to deputize designated state and local law enforcement partners to carry out some immigration screening and custodial functions. The establishment of Secure Communities in 2008 enhanced information-sharing between local law enforcement agencies and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) so that removable noncitizens could be identified, detained, and deported. These and other changes led to a significant increase in deportations, with a record 400,000 formal removals in FY 2013 (see Figure 1). Amid pushback, Secure Communities was replaced in 2014 by the narrower Priority Enforcement Program that gave U.S. jurisdictions greater leeway to tailor their cooperation with ICE. Secure Communities was reactivated by executive order during the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021 and then shelved when the Biden administration took office.

Notably, more than 97 percent of the 6.4 million migrants removed from the United States between FY 2000 and FY 2020 were returned to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Mexico was the top destination for removals, followed by Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Intended and Unintended Effects of Deportations

Deportations come with significant financial costs to taxpayers. U.S. removals cost nearly $10,900 per deportee as of FY 2016, ICE has said, which can include fees for detention, legal proceedings, and transport back to the origin country. With more than 179,000 removals carried out in FY 2023, that estimate would translate into more than $1.9 billion in spending, without accounting for inflation. Given the considerable resources spent on removals, what are the intended and unintended effects of these policies? 

The Deterrent Effect

Responding to widespread concern about uncontrolled arrivals, policies to deter irregular migration have taken center stage both in policymaking and academic research. Most of the research about the United States has evaluated the deterrence effects of U.S. enforcement policies generally, examining both border hardening and removals from the interior, which makes it difficult to isolate impacts of removals. As a form of deterrence, both strategies follow a similar rationale of making unauthorized immigration less attractive by increasing its risks and costs. Researchers have found that fear of removal may curb deportees’ intent to return to the United States to some degree, at least in the near term. However, overall decisions to migrate were shown to be surprisingly resilient to the increasing enforcement efforts witnessed since the early 1990s. One reason is that the potential economic gains for migrants from lower-income countries may simply be too large for deportation threats and border hardening to make a meaningful difference. In addition to economic incentives, high levels of violence have driven migration, in particular from northern Central America, and violence itself may have been fueled in part by deportations (see more below).

With the underlying drivers of migration unchanged and in some cases worsening amid rising displacement, deportation threats and border enforcement have been shown to have led to a change in migration strategies rather than to an overall reduction in irregular immigration. A study by Manuela Angelucci, for instance, finds that high levels of enforcement deterred unauthorized migrants, but the increased costs of migration as migrants turned to riskier routes and relied increasingly on smugglers also undermined patterns of circular and return migration. As a result, unauthorized migrants remained in the United States for longer periods of time, adding to the overall stock of individuals without legal status.

Labor Market Impacts

Research has also highlighted unintended effects on the labor market. Analysis by a team of scholars including one of the authors, for instance, found that Secure Communities reduced the overall employment share and wages of U.S.-born workers. This happened for two main reasons: First, any advantages U.S.-born workers might gain from decreased job competition could be offset by a reduction in labor demand resulting from higher labor costs when the number of unauthorized immigrants in the workforce declines. Second, the decrease in the population and earnings of likely unauthorized immigrants may lead to lower local consumption, further reducing labor demand for U.S.-born workers.

As one illustration of this effect, many U.S.-born parents who work outside the home rely on immigrant child-care and domestic workers, many of whom lack legal status; policies that reduce this labor supply can drive up the cost of these services, potentially impacting the employment prospects of U.S.-born individuals who most rely on unauthorized immigrants. The cost of domestic services increased with the implementation of Secure Communities, leading highly educated U.S.-born mothers to reduce both their labor force participation and working hours. This reduction in women's labor participation could have significant long-term implications for the gender labor gap and their children.

Is Crime Reduction More a Slogan Than a Reality?

Even though evidence shows that U.S. immigrants—including the unauthorized—are less likely to commit crimes than native-born individuals, public safety has been a key theme in justifying deportation policies. Secure Communities was designed to prioritize removal of criminal offenders to enhance public safety. Yet evidence suggests it had no observable effect on the rates of overall crime, violent offenses, or property crimes. Despite the original intention that Secure Communities would only be used to identify violent offenders, just 26 percent of those deported as a result of the information-sharing program eventually rolled out across the nation’s 3,181 jurisdictions had been convicted of serious crimes, while 20 percent had no criminal conviction. While the program’s champions noted its ability to help ICE achieve record levels of removals, critics raised concerns about its indiscriminate nature, racial profiling, and the negative impact on migrant communities’ health and wellbeing. Law enforcement officials, advocates, researchers, and others also noted the program’s negative effect on community cooperation with police and willingness to report crimes, which ultimately undermined police effectiveness.

Effects of Deportations on Origin Communities

People deported from the United States go primarily to one of four countries: Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras. These are also the countries most exposed to deportations relative to their population size (see Figure 2). In Honduras and El Salvador, which received the largest number of deportees relative to population, the total number of deportees from the United States from FY 2000 to FY 2020 (470,000 and 315,000, respectively) is equivalent to almost 5 percent of their current populations; the number of deportees to Mexico and Guatemala (4.5 million and 580,000) is equivalent to between 3 percent and 4 percent of the population.

Forced returns have an impact not only on individual migrants, but also others in their communities of origin. While such broader effects of deportations are not yet well understood, recent studies suggest the arrival of deportees has important negative social and economic consequences. A study on El Salvador by Antonella Bandiera and colleagues showed that formal wages decreased in municipalities receiving many deportees, presumably due to increased competition among laborers. Similar patterns have been observed in Mexico by Thomas Pearson. Other research by María Esther Caballero suggests that deportations have negative effects on schooling outcomes in Mexico; when migrants become more exposed to deportation risks, school dropouts tend to increase in their municipalities of origin. This is likely because of a drop in remittances, which migrants often send to help finance education for family members left behind, among other purposes. For many deportees globally, the situation flips; instead of being a pillar of financial support, they may return with outstanding debt from their migration. They also may face stigma and isolation due to their status as deportees.

Deportees’ Vulnerability Feeds into Dynamics of Violence

It is a paradox of deportation policies that forced removals may not improve security at destination and yet seem to increase violence and crime back in origin countries. One well-documented outcome from deportations has been the spread of violent youth gangs in Central America. The two dominant gangs in northern Central America—Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13) and 18th Street (also known as Barrio 18, Mara 18, or M-18)—first appeared in Los Angeles more than 40 years ago, before the city became home to a large Salvadoran diaspora. Large-scale deportations of young adults led the gangs to propagate in El Salvador and ultimately elsewhere in Central America. Although returning migrants did not constitute the bulk of gang membership, those with gang ties had a strong influence as leading gang figures. Attracting new members from the streets and in prisons, MS-13 and M-18 gradually supplanted, marginalized, or absorbed older native gangs.

Quantitative studies have confirmed that deportations contributed to the gangs’ growth in El Salvador. For instance, one of the authors has traced the contagion of gang violence to migration corridors between Salvadoran municipalities of origin and migrants’ settlement patterns in the United States, showing that gangs spread in Salvadoran municipalities in which migrants had been more exposed to violent crime in the United States. Another study by Maria Micaela Sviatschi shows that Salvadoran children who were more exposed to the arrival of deportees at a critical age had a higher probability of ending up in prison as adults.

Negative effects of deportations on dynamics of violent crime have been observed in other countries, too. In Mexico, criminal groups have been documented to specifically target deportees, who can easily be coerced into committing crimes due to the economic precariousness and stigma they face upon return. Homicide rates increased in Mexican municipalities whose migrants were more exposed to deportation risk at their U.S. destination, as one of the authors found in a recently published study. Another study by Sandra Rozo and coauthors found that murder rates also rose around repatriation centers, the first points of arrival for deportees.

These unintended consequences of deportation policies can trigger new cycles of migration that can backfire on the deporting countries. For example, research by Michael Clemens suggests that surges in violence in northern Central America led to higher rates of irregular migration by unaccompanied minors from 2011 to 2015. And the aforementioned gang violence associated with the deportation of convicts to El Salvador led to new emigration in subsequent years. If deportations cause increased violence that pushes other people to leave the country, this may undermine the deterrent effect.

Hidden Costs and Illusory Promises

Deterrence, security, and jobs are key themes justifying deportation policies, yet research suggests that removals do not always make U.S. communities safer or better places to find a job. With respect to deterrence, evidence is mixed. Some studies have found that deportations and other enforcement policies can have a deterrent effect, but other research suggests that migrants merely change their strategies, rather than stop migrating in the first place. Moreover, the vulnerability and precariousness that deportations produce among migrants and their communities at origin may create new push factors for migration that counteract the original intention to deter irregular migration. At the same time, large-scale deportations seem to have had unintended outcomes on labor markets that might have harmed U.S. natives.

In addition to these effects, destination countries’ strong focus on border control and removals could also warp relationships between countries and affect broader geopolitical relations. For instance, an increase in forced removals coincides with a loss of trust and worsening of opinions of the United States among Latin American citizens, as one of the authors shows in his research with Covadonga Meseguer.

Research on deportation outcomes is still scarce and dominated by studies on the deportation corridors from the United States to Mexico and Central America. While these observations may not necessarily apply to other countries and regions, one general theme emerges: Large-scale removals risk generating unintended negative outcomes at origin and destination. Policymakers therefore would be well advised to weigh evidence on the declared goals of these policies (namely, whether they lead to deterrence, more security, and more or better jobs for natives) against their fiscal costs and real-world effects, both intended and unintended. Empirical evidence does not support the view that deportations are an easy fix to concerns about the size of unauthorized immigration, unsafe communities, or the lack of jobs.

Sources

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