Politics, Unemployment, and Immigration Enforcement

The Clemson School of Business and Behavioral Sciences put out a nice press release about my 2014 paper with Thomas Stratmann looking at the political determinants of immigration audits. The paper is a year old, but the subject has been made relevant recently thanks to a particularly awful presidential candidate whom I will not name. Suffice it to say, there is no shortage of ways for politicians to blame immigrants for our ills. And, as our paper seeks to demonstrate, immigration enforcement presents  another opportunity for enforcement agent discretion to be internalized by government principals and transformed into political capital.