Admissions Policy
Partial Legalization and Parallel Markets: The Effect of Lawful Crossing on Unlawful Crossing at the US Southwest Border
Michael Clemens
George Mason University Working Paper, April 2024
Abstract:
Legal and illegal markets often coexist. In theory, marginal legalization can either substitute for the remaining parallel market, or complement it via scale effects. I study migrants crossing without prior authorization at the US southwest border, where large-scale unlawful crossing coexists with substantial, varying, and policy-constrained lawful crossing. I test whether lawful and unlawful crossing are gross substitutes or complements, using lag-augmented local projections to analyze a monthly time-series on the full universe of 10,658,497 inadmissible migrants encountered from October 2011 through July 2023. Expanded lawful crossings cause reduced unlawful crossings, an effect that grows over time and reaches elasticity -0.3 after approximately 10 months. That is, in this case, expanded activity on the lawful market substitutes for the parallel market, even net of scale effects. This deterrent effect explains approximately 9 percent of the overall variance in unlawful crossings. In an ancillary finding, I fail to reject a null effect of depenalizing unlawful crossings on future attempted unlawful crossings.
Immigration's Effect on US Wages and Employment Redux
Alessandro Caiumi & Giovanni Peri
NBER Working Paper, April 2024
Abstract:
In this article we revive, extend and improve the approach used in a series of influential papers written in the 2000s to estimate how changes in the supply of immigrant workers affected natives' wages in the US. We begin by extending the analysis to include the more recent years 2000-2022. Additionally, we introduce three important improvements. First, we introduce an IV that uses a new skill-based shift-share for immigrants and the demographic evolution for natives, which we show passes validity tests and has reasonably strong power. Second, we provide estimates of the impact of immigration on the employment-population ratio of natives to test for crowding out at the national level. Third, we analyze occupational upgrading of natives in response to immigrants. Using these estimates, we calculate that immigration, thanks to native-immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6% on wages of less educated native workers, over the period 2000-2019 and no significant wage effect on college educated natives. We also calculate a positive employment rate effect for most native workers. Even simulations for the most recent 2019-2022 period suggest small positive effects on wages of non-college natives and no significant crowding out effects on employment.
Secure communities as immigration enforcement: How secure is the child care market?
Umair Ali, Jessica Brown & Chris Herbst
Journal of Public Economics, May 2024
Abstract:
Immigrants comprise nearly 20% of the child care workforce in the U.S. This paper studies the impact of a major immigration enforcement policy, Secure Communities (SC), on the structure and functioning of the child care market. Relying on the staggered introduction of SC across counties between 2008 and 2014, we find that the program reduced children's participation in center-based child care programs. The estimated reductions are substantially larger among advantaged children and in jurisdictions with a greater fraction of undocumented individuals. We also find that SC reduced the equilibrium supply and wages of immigrant and native workers in the center-based sector as well as the number of center-based facilities. There is no compensating increase in the home-based or private household sectors. Our findings suggest that immigrants and natives are likely to be complements in child care service production.
Mental Health in Nursing Homes: The Role of Immigration in the Long-Term Care Workforce
Hankyung Jun & David Grabowski
Social Science & Medicine, June 2024
Abstract:
One-fourth of nursing home residents are diagnosed with anxiety disorders and approximately half live with depression. Nursing homes have long struggled with staffing shortages, and the lack of care has further heightened the risk of poor mental health. A key solution to both problems could be immigration. Prior studies have documented how immigrant labor could strengthen the long-term care workforce. We add to this picture by exploring the impact of immigrant inflows on the mental health outcomes of nursing home residents. Using a nationally representative dataset and a shift-share instrumental variable approach, we find empirical evidence that immigration reduces diagnoses of depression and anxiety, the use of antidepressant and antianxiety drugs, and self-assessed symptoms of depression. The results are robust to several sensitivity tests. We further find that the effect is more substantial in facilities with lower direct care staff hours per resident and with likely more immigrants without citizenship. Language barriers tend to be a minor issue when providing essential care. The findings suggest that creating a policy framework that directs immigrant labor to the long-term care sector can mutually benefit job-seeking immigrants and nursing home residents.
Effects of occupational license access on undocumented immigrants: Evidence from the California reform
Bobby Chung
Journal of Regulatory Economics, June 2023, Pages 64-83
Abstract:
In 2014, California lifted its legal work status requirement for dozens of occupational licenses -- a major obstacle for undocumented immigrants in the US to access professional jobs. This paper assesses this policy's effects on the employment outcome of undocumented immigrants in the state. Analyzing likely undocumented immigrants in the American Community Survey, I find that the policy increased their employment, particularly in lower-education and blue-collar licensed occupations and for older and Hispanic workers. The effects were not driven by job switchers but by the unemployed transiting into employment. I also find that the law did not crowd out documented workers.
Return Migration and Human Capital Flows
Naser Amanzadeh, Amir Kermani & Timothy McQuade
NBER Working Paper, April 2024
Abstract:
We bring to bear a novel dataset covering the employment history of about 450 million individuals from 180 countries to study return migration and the impact of skilled international migration on human capital stocks across countries. Return migration is a common phenomenon, with 38% of skilled migrants returning to their origin countries within 10 years. Return migration is significantly correlated with industry growth in the origin and destination countries, and is asymmetrically exposed to negative firm employment growth. Using an AKM-style model, we identify worker and country-firm fixed effects, as well as the returns to experience and education by location and current workplace. For workers in emerging economies, the returns to a year of experience in the United States are 59-204% higher than a year of experience in the origin country. Migrants to advanced economies are positively selected on ability relative to stayers, while within this migrant population, returnees exhibit lower ability. Simulations suggest that eliminating skilled international migration would have highly heterogeneous effects across countries, adjusting total (average) human capital stocks within a range of -60% to 40% (-3% to 4%).
Loss of Peers and Individual Worker Performance: Evidence From H-1B Visa Denials
Prithwiraj Choudhury et al.
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study how restrictive immigration policies that result in the unexpected loss of coworkers affect the performance of skilled migrants employed in organizations. Specifically, we examine the impact of the loss of team members on their coworkers' performance in response to the unexpectedly increased denials of extensions of H-1B work visas in the United States beginning in 2017. Losing a team member generally has a positive, albeit economically insignificant, effect on the performance of workers left behind. However, we find that individuals who lost peers of the same ethnic background experience a substantial decrease in their performance. To confirm that our results are not plagued by the presence of unobservable team or individual features that might impact visa denial decisions, we build an instrumental variable that exploits the fixed duration of the H-1B visa. Heterogeneity analyses suggest that our result is driven by workers in small teams, teams working on atypical tasks, and ethnically homogeneous teams. These analyses hint at the fact that ethnic ties may boost individual performance through preferential channels of knowledge and information spillovers.
Socioeconomic Attainments of Second-Generation South Asian Americans: Evidence from the American Community Survey, 2014-2018
Fizza Raza & Arthur Sakamoto
Population Research and Policy Review, April 2024
Abstract:
Using data from the American Community Survey for 2014-2018, we provide empirical evidence about the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of South Asian Americans. Our study investigates not only Indians, but also provides the first multivariate analyses for Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Pakistani, and Sri Lankans. The focus is on second-generation South Asians, but some descriptive statistics are shown for first-generation immigrants. In comparison to Whites, the educational distributions of first-generation immigrants are bimodal to varying degrees across the South Asian groups. However, with the exception of the Nepalese, all of the native-born South Asian groups obtain higher levels of education than Whites. Poverty among South Asian groups tends to reflect their educational levels so that poverty rates decline between the first-generation and the native-born, but second-generation Bangladeshi and Pakistani have somewhat higher than expected poverty due to family size and composition. Second-generation Indians, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans are more likely to be affluent than Whites, and these differences are partly but not fully explained by educational and other demographic characteristics. Other findings provide no support for the popular claim that the wages of second-generation South Asian groups are disadvantaged in comparison to Whites.
Leaving the Enclave: Historical Evidence on Immigrant Mobility from the Industrial Removal Office
Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan & Dylan Shane Connor
Journal of Economic History, June 2024, Pages 352-394
Abstract:
The Industrial Removal Office funded 39,000 Jewish households to leave enclave neighborhoods in New York City from 1900 to 1922. Compared to neighbors with the same baseline occupation, program participants earned 4 percent more ten years after relocation. These gains persisted to the next generation. Benefits increased with more years spent outside of an enclave. Participants were more likely to speak English, and married spouses with less Jewish names. More Jewishly-identified men (as measured by own names) were more likely to return to the city. We contextualize these results with new national evidence on Jewish economic and cultural assimilation.
Information and immigrant settlement
Toman Barsbai et al.
Journal of Development Economics, September 2024
Abstract:
We study a randomly-assigned program providing information on U.S. settlement for new Filipino immigrants. The intervention, a 2.5-hour pre-departure training and an accompanying paper handbook, has no effect on employment, settlement, and subjective wellbeing, but leads immigrants to acquire substantially fewer social network connections. We rationalize these findings with a simple model, showing that information and social network links are substitutes under reasonable assumptions. Consistent with the model, the treatment reduces social network links more when costs of acquiring network links are lower. Offsetting reductions in the acquisition of social network connections can hence reduce the effectiveness of information interventions.