Ashley Rojas
Ph.D. Candidate in Economics · University of South Carolina
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of South Carolina and will be on the 2026–27 job market. My research is in migration economics, the economics of health and inequality, and labor and public economics. My job market paper studies how interior immigration enforcement reshapes local labor markets, and whom those effects reach.
The Local Labor-Market Effects of Interior Immigration Enforcement:
Evidence from Recent Policy Swings
Interior immigration enforcement swung sharply between 2021 and 2025, yet its effects on local labor markets — and on whom — remain hard to measure. I assemble a new monthly panel of ICE arrests by metropolitan area and isolate a cleaned measure of interior enforcement, then identify effects with a shift-share design interacting each metro’s pre-determined enforcement exposure with two national shocks. Replacing realized arrests with pre-determined exposure reverses the sign of their naive correlation with employment, pointing to spillovers onto the documented and native-born workforce through labor-market complementarity.