Over the past two decades, the U.S. has seen a drastic growth in self-employment among Mexican immigrants, the largest immigrant population in the country. This is an interesting yet puzzling trend, in stark contrast to the stagnated growth of self-employment among other disadvantaged minority...

Domestic violence is a serious under-reported crime in the United States, especially among immigrant women. While the Violence against Women Act (VAWA) allows battered immigrants to petition for legal status without relying on abusive U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident spouses, we find...

We examine the fertility impact of a change in immigration policy granting temporary legal status to undocumented immigrants based on their offspring nationality. The policy, intended to facilitate family reunification, was enacted in a 2011 Royal Decree in Spain. It recognized the ability for...

This paper identifies intermarriage (between non-citizens and citizens) as an important response mechanism to intensified immigration enforcement, particularly among Mexican non-citizens. Exploiting the temporal and geographic variation in the implementation of interior immigration enforcement...

For the first time in U.S. history, approximately 10 percent of the U.S. House of Representatives is Hispanic. The greater engagement of Hispanics in national politics has occurred after unprecedented growth in interior immigration enforcement disproportionately impacting Latinos. Using...

Over the past two decades immigration enforcement has grown exponentially in the United States. We exploit the geographical and temporal variation in a novel index of the intensity of immigration enforcement between 2005 and 2011 to show how the average yearly increase in interior immigration...

Tougher immigration enforcement has been responsible for approximately 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone. Children enter the foster care system when their parents are apprehended, deported and unable to care for them. We find that the average increase in interior immigration...

This paper explores the labor market and schooling effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative, which provides work authorization to eligible immigrants along with a temporary reprieve from deportation. The analysis relies on a difference-in-differences approach that...

We explore the impact of authorization on the poverty exposure of households headed by undocumented immigrants. The identification strategy makes use of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provided a temporary work authorization and reprieve from deportation to...

Using the 2005-2014 waves of the American Community Survey –a period characterized by the rapid expansion of interior immigration enforcement initiatives across the United States, we evaluate the impact of a tougher policy environment on undocumented immigrants' fertility. We find that a one...