State characteristics and the decision to enact restrictive immigrant legislation

Restrictive state policies have been viewed as creating an atmosphere of distrust and fear that hinders immigrant assimilation into the larger community. While some public policies are meant to hinder safety-net service use by illegal immigrants or certain types of legal immigrants, research on federal laws such as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PWORA) has shown that the impact of such restrictive provisions will negatively affect all immigrant households to some extent. This project enumerates state laws that directly impact immigrants through the use of immigration status as an inclusionary, exclusionary, or screening categorization, and then assigns these laws as restrictive or non-restrictive of immigrant access. Additionally the laws are categorized as specifically addressing education, regulation, or social welfare. Applicable state laws were identified through the Lexis Nexus Federal and State Codes, Advanced Legislative Service. The analysis is restricted to states in the continental United States that (1) in 2000 and 2008 were at or above the U.S. average for percentage of foreign born population and (2) states that had the top 10 percent change in foreign born population from 2000 to 2008. The number of states included in the analysis based on these criteria is 20. Since such laws are not randomly distributed across states, the analysis seeks to identify factors that influence their enactment. To implement this analysis, logistic regression models of the likelihood that a state will adopt such legislation are examined. These models include state level economic, political and demographic characteristics hypothesized to affect the adoption of legislation for the years and states under consideration.