The effects of tougher enforcement on the job prospects of recent Latin American immigrants

Abstract

Attempts to enforce immigration laws in the U.S. interior have proliferated in recent years, yet the effects of these laws on immigrants are largely unknown. This paper examines whether increases in immigration-related law enforcement since 2001 have adversely affected the labor market outcomes of low-education male immigrants from Latin America, a group that comprises the bulk of undocumented workers in the U.S. The crackdown on the use of fraudulent Social Security numbers, increased requirements for government-issued identification, and other changes associated with greater focus on national security likely lowered the demand for undocumented foreign-born workers in the years following the 9|11 terrorist attacks. Using Current Population Survey data and a difference-in-differences estimation technique, we find strong evidence of worse labor market outcomes among recent Latin American immigrants in the post-9|11 period relative to natives and prior Latin American immigrants. The results indicate a decline in employment, hours worked, and earnings among recent male Latin American immigrants relative to similarly low-skilled black and Hispanic natives and vis-�-vis Latin American immigrants who have been in the U.S. longer. Our findings are consistent with firms increasingly substituting legal workers for undocumented labor in the years following 9|11. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Enforcement and Immigrant Location Choice

“…There are also several papers exploring the impacts of local enforcement on immigrant labor market outcomes. For example, see Davila and Pagan (1997), Bansak (2005), and Orrenius and Zavodny (2009). 2 Watson (2010) documents impacts of enforcement on Medicaid participation among children of non-citizens.…”

Creating Cohesive, Coherent Immigration Policy

“…This was policy inconsistency: potential unauthorized immigrants outside the country faced far more barriers than unauthorized immigrants already in the country. Interior enforcement in the Hart-Celler era only began in earnest after 9/11, when the federal government enacted a number of measures aimed at bolstering national security that also made life more difficult for unauthorized immigrants (Orrenius and Zavodny 2009). 2 Before that, policy seemed almost Darwinian -border enforcement kept out the poorest, least-educated immigrants since they were the ones who could not afford to hire a smuggler or manage to get a tourist or temporary visa they could later overstay. Once someone made it in, they could largely live and work in the United States without fear of being deported, so many stayed.…”

“…Such flexibility could be built in via automatic adjustment mechanisms, such as a formula that increases the number of temporary and permanent employment-based visas when the unemployment rate is low and falling and GDP growth is rising and reduces it when the opposite occurs. If a formula is too rigid for policymakers, they could instead use market-based mechanisms to allocate employment visas, such as auctioning off permits to hire temporary foreign workers (Orrenius and Zavodny 2010). Automatically creating more family-based visas for migrants from a given country in response to larger legal inflows from that country might also make sense, although a simpler solution is to just remove the country cap on permanent visas.…”

Immigrants’ time use: a survey of methods and evidence

“…Immigrants face institutional constraints that can be different from those of native-born people. For example, Orrenius and Zavodny (2009) have examined how immigration restrictions that the U.S. put in place after the As this discussion indicates, research on immigrants' time use holds the promise of both deepening economists' understanding of immigrants' behavior and improving economists' models generally. However, much of that promise remains to be realized.…”