Chiara Galli, University of Chicago
Tatiana Padilla, Cornell University
Worldwide, more children than ever before are crossing international borders alone to seek asylum in rich receiving countries in the Global North (UNHCR 2014). In the past ten years, the US has seen nearly a half-million unaccompanied minors -children under age 18 who migrate without their parents or legal guardians- arrive at its border with Mexico (CBP 2020). This project aims to understand the access to legal council among this particularly vulnerable population. In other words, what is the association between individual-level characteristics and access to counsel among unaccompanied minors, accounting for adjudicator and contextual characteristics?
Tatiana Padilla, Cornell University
Adriana Reyes, Cornell University
State policy and the climates they create have become increasingly important for health outcomes and the proliferation of inclusionary and exclusionary immigration related state policies has led to varying state climates for immigrants. We use this divergence in state policy climates to test the relationship between state-level immigration policies and three health outcomes. We include 22 state policies related to immigration enforcement, integration and health to capture the state climate for immigrants. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a nationally-representative study of households in the U.S., we estimate multilevel regression models to assess the role of state policy climate for the healthcare access of immigrants. We also examine differential effects of the policy climate among immigrants, by examining differences by citizenship status and race. We find that more exclusionary immigration policies may be detrimental to healthcare access for all residents regardless of legal status– but ultimately noncitizens see the greatest benefits from inclusive policy climates.
Through increased border enforcement, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act changed US-Mexico migration flows. Motivated by the rise in utilization of coyotes and soaring coyote fees, I hypothesize that the burden of migration costs due to border enforcement is unequally distributed among migrants.
I leverage the Mexican Migration Project data to operationalize migration cost through payments for human smuggling services. Implementing a Heckman Model to correct for selection on coyote usage, this paper investigates: (1) how has coyote pricing changed in a post-IRCA era; (2) what role does demographic composition of migration flows and social networks play in explaining fees paid to coyotes; (3) what role does immigration enforcement play in explaining coyote payments; (4) how have the relationships between migration costs and human capital, social capital and enforcement changed post-1986?
This paper quantitatively analyzes which type of migrants is most vulnerable to “indebted crossings”, a phenomenon recently exposed by qualitative research. This paper offers a first step towards addressing concerns of debt, wealth transfers and intergenerational inequality in Mexican sending communities.
Supports Dr. Galli by cleaning, merging and managing large administrative data set documenting US immigration cases from 2008-2019. Data was obtained from TRAC, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, through a series of FOIA requests.
Supports Dr. Garip with the COPING project, a study that seeks to understand the impacts of Covid-19 among the immigrant community in the New York City area. Responsible for developing interview documents and team training materials, conducting structured interviews, proofreading translations in Spanish and English.
Supported Dr. Reyes by producing reviews of relevant literature, cleaning and merging a working data set that draws from the Health and Retirement Survey and the Census, executing spatial analysis and preliminary data analysis.
Supported Dr. Bonner-Tompkins in Montgomery County's Racial Equity and Social Justice initiative. Responsible for quantitative and qualitative data management, executing analysis, producing visualizations of findings, field interviews of focus groups in Spanish and English, and creating deliverables.
Supported Dr. Haskins with Systems and Schools project which investigates schools as surveillance institutions and implications for parents involved with Child Protective Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and prisons. Responsible for semi-structured interviews, creating materials and proofreading translations in Spanish and English.