A new paper in the latest issue of State Politics & Policy outlines research supported by the Russell Sage Foundation on shifts in state-level immigration policies during the Great Recession. The article draws from a 2012 study by Gabriel Sanchez, Jillian Medeiros, and Kimberly Huyser that analyzed the effects of the Great Recession on minority and immigrant communities. In particular, the investigators explored whether black and Latino populations experienced increased racial hostility, perceptions of competition, and increased residential segregation during the economic downturn.

Some of their findings appear in a new article co-authored by Vickie Ybarra, Lisa Sanchez, and RSF grantee Gabriel Sanchez. In State Politics & Policy, the authors examine how increases in immigrant populations during the economic hardship of the Great Recession may have exacerbated anti-immigrant anxieties among the public and prompted legislators to pass more restrictive immigration policies. The abstract states:

The Great Recession of late 2007 through 2009 had profound negative economic impacts on the U.S. states, with 49 states experiencing revenue decreases in their 2009 budgets representing more than $67.2 billion USD. Also during this period, states enacted a record number of laws related to immigrants residing in their states. We make use of data from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) to examine punitive immigration policy enactment from 2005 to 2012 and conduct a state comparative study using cross-sectional time-series analysis to examine the potential ways in which the economic recession and changing demographics in the states have impacted punitive state immigration policy making. We hypothesize that although anti-immigrant anxieties are driven in part by economic insecurity, they are also impacted by the presence of a large or growing proportion of racialized immigrants. We find that increases in state Hispanic populations and state economic stressors associated with the recession have both led to a greater number of enacted punitive state immigration policies. In addition, we find that changes in the non-Hispanic white populations in the states are also impacting the expression of anti-immigrant attitudes in state policy during this period.

Visit State Politics & Policy to read the article in full.