Irregularly staying migrants are more likely to face material deprivation, instability and are more vulnerable to exploitation and crime than legal residents (FRA, 2011). Ultimately, they may face deportation to their country of origin. The fear of detection and deportation can lead to...

This paper examines the effects of a government regularization program offered to half a million Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. For this purpose, 2,232 surveys of refugee families were collected and used to compare refugees who arrived in Colombia around a specified eligibility date in 2018....

In this paper, we examine the impact of government enforcement of the U.S.-Mexican border on wages in the border regions of the United States and Mexico. The U.S. Border Patrol polices U.S. boundaries, seeking to apprehend any individual attempting to enter the United States illegally. These...

We examine how increasing the number of visas available to potential migrants would affect unauthorized immigration from Mexico to the U.S. Current U.S. policy bans people who are deported from receiving legal status for a period of time. This policy aims to serve as an additional deterrent to...

Very few labor-based pathways for regular migration are available for people in Northern Central America, often called the 'Northern Triangle' of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. This note briefly summarizes the state of labor-based migration channels in the region. It then argues that...

Irregular migration to Europe through the sea, though risky, remains one of the most popular migration options for many Sub-Saharan Africans even after the pandemic crisis. This study examines the determinants of irregular migration decisions using an incentivized lab-in-the field experiment in...

As of 2021, 16 U.S. States and the District of Columbia have implemented laws allowing undocumented migrants to acquire a driver's license. In this paper, I hypothesize that lower barriers to work caused by the ability to obtain driving licenses can affect undocumented migrants' fertility...

Irregularly staying migrants are more likely to face material deprivation, instability and are more vulnerable to exploitation and crime than legal residents (FRA, 2011). Ultimately, they may face deportation to their country of origin. The fear of detection and deportation can lead to...

This paper analyses the relationship between regular and irregular migration taking into account the migration network effect and the network creation mechanism. We assume that migrants can obtain a high payoff only if a critical mass of migrants is reached in the destination country. If...

The 2011 Arab Spring marked the opening of the Central Mediterranean Route for irregular border-crossings between Libya and Italy, which produced heterogeneous reductions of bilateral smuggling distances between African-European country pairs. We exploit this source of spatial and temporal...

Policy projections and recent research suggest that large numbers of irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa will continue to attempt to make their way to Europe over the next few decades. In response, European countries have made and continue to make significant investments in information...

With the background of the Syrian crisis, irregular migration, and authoritarianism - strengthened by the collapse of the Peace Process of the Turkish state with the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK) in 2015 and the 2016 coup attempt - the Turkish government has amended the Citizenship Law,...

Conditional Cash Transfers are increasingly used by development aid agencies to reduce the incentives for migration from low-income countries. The evidence to date suggests that such transfers typically increase the rate of migration when they are conditional on investment, such as investment in...

This paper establishes a new fact about immigration policies: legalization has long-term effects on formal employment of undocumented immigrants and their assimilation. We exploit the broad amnesty enacted in Italy in 2002 together with rich survey data collected in 2011 on a representative...

This paper explores the impact of refugees on the size of the underground economy in 28 European Union countries over the period from 1998 to 2017. It applies a nonlinear methodology by employing dynamic panel threshold estimations. The main findings uncover a nonlinear connection between...

Irregular migration from West Africa to Europe across the Sahara and Mediterranean is extremely risky for migrants and a key policy concern. A cluster-randomized experiment with 3,641 young men from 391 settlements in The Gambia is used to test three approaches to reducing risky migration:...

Irregular migration from Africa to Europe attracts substantial policy attention. Although international migration can enable people from developing countries to dramatically increase their incomes, the absence of legal channels and the chance of higher incomes can induce people to take part in...

This paper studies whether undocumented immigrants change their crime-reporting behavior after receiving a regular migratory status. It exploits a natural experiment of a massive amnesty program that gave a regular migratory status to over 281,000 undocumented Venezuelan immigrants in Colombia....

Canonical models of migration feature border enforcement as a strategy to contain undocumented immigration by effectively exacting a mobility cost. This paper revisits the role of border enforcement policy in a task-based model of the labor market where employers simultaneously hire circular...

This paper examines the impact of the legal status of overseas migrants on their wages upon return to the home country. Using unique data from Egypt, which allows us to distinguish between return migrants according to their type of international migration, documented versus undocumented, we...

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of increasingly provocative anti-immigrant politicians in both Europe and the United States. We examine whether the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who made illegal immigration and border enforcement a centerpiece of his campaign, reduced illegal...

This chapter investigates the impact of the imposition of sanctions for employing illegal migrants on the welfare of native laborers. In response to such sanctions, managers in a firm may be reassigned from the supervision of production to the verification of the legality of the firm's labor...

This discussion paper investigates the impact of the imposition of sanctions for employing illegal migrants on the welfare of native laborers. In response to such sanctions, managers in a firm may be reassigned from the supervision of production to the verification of the legality of the firm's...

We explore whether fear of apprehension affects immigrants' labor market engagement by examining how ICE removals due to immigration violations and increased awareness of immigration raids impact their labor market outcomes. We find that ICE deportations are associated with reductions in the...

This chapter investigates the impact of the imposition of sanctions for employing illegal migrants on the welfare of native laborers. In response to such sanctions, managers in a firm may be reassigned from the supervision of production to the verification of the legality of the firm’s labor...

This paper examines the labor market effects of ending the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for undocumented immigrants in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 required that tax filers have a valid Social Security number to claim the EITC, thus disqualifying undocumented immigrants...

Irregular migrants are commonly supported financially by friends or family; as migration from a society becomes common, a ‘culture of migration’ may emerge in communities of origin which drives further migration. Many people who migrate irregularly use the services of smugglers or agents,...

A critical element of any future immigration reform will be the legalization of illegal immigrants. Previous immigration reform proposals have failed, largely because policymakers disagreed over whether and how to legalize illegal immigrants. Future immigration reform proposals must be different...

How can the regularization of approximately half a million migrant's impact crime reports in hosting areas? To identify the effects of this large amnesty, we match confidential administrative data on the location of undocumented migrants with department-monthly data from crime reports and...

We analyze the effect of immigrants’ legal status on their consumption behavior using unique survey data that samples both documented and undocumented immigrants. To address the problem of sorting into legal status, we propose two alternative identification strategies as exogenous source of...

This paper investigates the effect of U.S. border enforcement on the net flow of Mexican undocumented migration. It shows how this effect is theoretically ambiguous, given that increases in border controls deter prospective migrants from crossing the border illegally, but lengthen the duration...

We use a version of the Meade model to consider the effects of interdependent import tariffs in the presence illegal immigration. First, we consider the small union case and derive the Nash tariff equilibrium for two potential members of a Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA). We analyze...

A number of developed countries have implemented guest-worker programs in recent decades. Its basic feature is the temporary presence of the foreign guest-workers. The problem with such programs is that there is little to prevent these guest-workers from entering the illegal job market and...

This paper analyzes how enforcement along the U.S.-Mexican border has affected the market for migrant smugglers. Using a unique dataset that links border crossing histories from illegal Mexican migrants to aggregate enforcement and punishment statistics, we find that the effect of enforcement on...

We introduce financial constraints in a theoretical analysis of illegal immigration. Intermediaries finance the migration costs of wealth-constrained migrants, who enter temporary servitude contracts to pay back the debt. These debt/labor contracts are more easily enforceable in the illegal than...

This paper presents a first attempt at understanding some of the many issues involved in the granting of an amnesty to illegal immigrants. We consider government behavior with respect to allocations on limiting infiltration (border control) and apprehending infiltrators (internal control) and...

This paper looks at the situation of legal immigrants who employ illegal immigrants to provide them with various services. This enables the legal immigrants to allocate more time to other work, thereby increasing their earnings. Illegal immigrants employed by legal immigrants may specialize in...

The debate on the immigration policies in OECD countries has turned its attention towards illegal migrants. Given that migration flows are determined by immigration laws, the probability of potential detection, penalties for unauthorised migrants and their employers, and on income differences...