Naturalization bestows economic benefits to immigrants, their families and communities through greater access to employment opportunities, higher earnings, and homeownership. It is the cornerstone of immigrant assimilation in the United States. Yet, less than 800,000 of the estimated 8.8 million...

Tougher immigration enforcement has been responsible for 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone, most of them involving fathers and heads of household. We exploit the geographic and temporal variation in intensified enforcement to gauge its impact on children's propensity to live...

This article investigates the medium to long-term effects on refugee labour market outcomes of the temporary employment bans being imposed in many countries on recently arrived asylum seekers. Using a newly collected dataset covering almost 30 years of employment restrictions together with...

Programs aimed at reducing the presence of unauthorised immigrants are often at the core of the migration policy debate in host countries. In recent years, a growing body of empirical literature has attempted to understand the effect of lacking legal status on immigrants' outcomes and behaviour....

Do general amnesty programs lead to reductions in the crime rate among immigrants? We answer this question by exploiting both cross-sectional and time variation in the number of immigrants legalized generated by the enactment of repeated amnesty programs between 1990 and 2005 in Italy. We...

We use novel survey data to assess the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the Libyan population. In our sample, 9.5% of respondents report that a household member has been infected by COVID 19, while 24.7% of them have suffered economic damages and 14.6% have experienced negative health effects due...

This paper estimates the causal effect of the prospect of legal status on the employment outcomes of undocumented immigrants. Our identification strategy exploits a natural experiment provided by the 2002 amnesty program in Italy that introduced an exogenous discontinuity in eligibility based on...

Do migrants send remittances as a way of obtaining insurance? While this motive is theoretically suggested in the literature, the question of identifying this relationship empirically has only begun to be explored. Using a unique representative survey of 1500 immigrants in the Greater Dublin...

This study investigates the effects of the macroeconomic context on attitudes to immigration. Earlier studies do in most cases not provide significant empirical support for the existence of important such effects. In this article it is argued that this lack of consistent evidence is mainly due...

We study the impact of asylum waiting, exploiting a rapid increase in processing times for asylum seekers to Sweden. Longer waiting slows down integration. Accumulated earnings during the first four years after application are 2.3 percent lower per added month of waiting. The impact is due to...