Immigration, Employment Opportunities, and Criminal Behavior*

There is little consensus on the effects of immigration on crime. One potential explanation for the conflicting evidence is heterogeneity across space and time in policies toward immigrants that affect their status in the community and their incentives to engage in illegal activity. In this paper, we take advantage of provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which granted legal resident status to longtime illegal residents but created new obstacles to employment for more recent immigrants, to explore how employment opportunities affect criminal behavior. Exploiting unique administrative data on the criminal justice involvement of individuals in San Antonio, Texas, we find evidence of an increase in felony charges filed against Hispanic residents of San Antonio after the expiration of the IRCA amnesty deadline. We then use detailed census data on neighborhood characteristics to show that this increase in crime is driven by Hispanic people living in enclaves where new immigrants are most likely to locate, and not by changes elsewhere or by other groups whose labor market opportunities were not directly affected by IRCA. Our results suggest a strong relationship between access to legal jobs and criminal behavior. JEL Codes: F22, J15, J61, K42, R10