Immigration
Working Papers
Little attention has been paid to immigrants’ impact on the labor productivity in the destination country. While some believe that immigrants, particularly low-skilled immigrants, hurt the destination country’s economy, economic theories are divided on predicting immigration’s impact on labor productivity. I empirically test these theories using the Bracero program that brought millions of Mexican workers into the United States as a natural policy experiment that resulted in state-level variation in the exposure to immigrant Bracero workers. The results suggest that the inflow of Bracero farm workers increased the average agricultural labor productivity by around 24 percentage points in the most impacted states compared to states with no Bracero farm workers, which supports the presence of the complementarity effect between native and low-skilled Bracero immigrant workers. Therefore, restrictive immigration policies can hinder productivity growth, even when the immigrants are low-skilled.
How Good Are Proxies for Legal Status? Evidence from the Legalization of Two Million Mexicans (with Elizabeth Cascio and Ethan Lewis)
Two million Mexicans were granted lawful permanent residency in the U.S. under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). We find that occupation and program use variables in a prominent proxy for legal status poorly detect this change. A decade after legalization, the share of Mexicans who are likely legal according to these variables shows little absolute change in survey data, with estimates ruling out changes of three and eight percentage points relative to comparison groups of Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic Blacks, respectively. In contrast, an actual measure of status, citizenship, does change in line with administrative facts.
Work in Progress
Legalization’s impact on broader labor market outcomes, such as education, employment, and wages, for both the previously unauthorized and authorized populations, using evidence from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (with Elizabeth Cascio and Ethan Lewis)