The DOI matches its Crossref record; 72 of the 72 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Why Border Enforcement Backfired
Open accessAbstract
In this article we undertake a systematic analysis of why border enforcement backfired as a strategy of immigration control in the United States. We argue theoretically that border enforcement emerged as a policy response to a moral panic about the perceived threat of Latino immigration to the United States propounded by self-interested bureaucrats, politicians, and pundits who sought to mobilize political and material resources for their own benefit. The end result was a self-perpetuating cycle of rising enforcement and increased apprehensions that resulted in the militarization of the border in a way that was disconnected from the actual size of the undocumented flow. Using an instrumental variable approach, we show how border militarization affected the behavior of unauthorized migrants and border outcomes to transform undocumented Mexican migration from a circular flow of male workers going to three states into an eleven-million person population of settled families living in 50 states.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.82.6.878 · Cited by 7,364
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (2013) · World Scientific Handbook in Financial Economics Series · doi:10.1142/9789814417358_0016 · Cited by 5,320
The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences
Lamont, M., & Molnár, V. (2002) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.141107 · Cited by 5,059
Moffitt, R. A. (2009) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.99.2.660 · Cited by 4,694
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Hauhart, R. C. (2011) · Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews · doi:10.1177/0094306111419111 · Cited by 2,732
Angrist, J. D., & Krueger, A. B. (2001) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.15.4.69 · Cited by 2,355
The new economics of labor migration
Stark, O., & Bloom, D. E. (1985) · American Economic Review · Cited by 2,211
Punishment and inequality in America
(2007) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.44-4178 · Cited by 2,064
The Migration of LaborPreprint
Stark, O. (1991) · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · Cited by 1,556
The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory
Wimmer, A. (2008) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/522803 · Cited by 1,427
Cited by
Angrist, J. D., & Krueger, A. B. (2001) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.15.4.69 · Cited by 2,355
International Migration: Trends, Determinants, and Policy Effects
de Haas, H., Czaika, M., Flahaux, M., Mahendra, E., Natter, K., Vezzoli, S., & Villares‐Varela, M. (2019) · Population and Development Review · doi:10.1111/padr.12291 · Cited by 357
Drouhot, L. G., & Nee, V. (2019) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-073117-041335 · Cited by 283
International migration and climate adaptation in an era of hardening borders
McLeman, R. (2019) · Nature Climate Change · doi:10.1038/s41558-019-0634-2 · Cited by 126
From IIRIRA to Trump: connecting the dots to the current US immigration policy crisis
Kerwin, D. (2018) · Journal on Migration and Human Security · doi:10.1177/2331502418786718 · Cited by 75
Metadata
- Authors
- Massey, D. S., Durand, J., & Pren, K. A.
- Venue
- American Journal of Sociology
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 2016-03
- Volume
- 121
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1557-1600
- ISSN
- 0002-9602 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5390
- OpenAlex
- W2294663883
- Cited by
- 414
- References
- 72
- FWCI
- 106.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Why Border Enforcement Backfired. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/684200
- The paper
- Massey, D. S., Durand, J., & Pren, K. A. (2016). Why Border Enforcement Backfired. American Journal of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1086/684200
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.