Research

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 from October 2015 through March 2026 and isolate a cleaned measure of interior enforcement, separating it from the administrative processing of the 2021–2022 border surge. I identify effects with a shift-share design that interacts each metro’s pre-determined, Obama-era enforcement exposure with two national shocks: the Biden de-escalation of January 2021 and the Trump-2 escalation of January 2025. The shocks move enforcement on different margins, and replacing realized arrests with pre-determined exposure reverses the sign of their naive correlation with employment: under the escalation, employment falls in immigrant-intensive sectors, while the de-escalation mirrors this with a lag. Though power-limited, the estimates point to spillovers onto the documented and native-born workforce through labor-market complementarity, implying that enforcement’s costs fall partly on the workers it is often meant to protect.