We estimate the effect of granting legal status to immigrant women on voluntary abortions. We exploit the 2007 EU enlargement as an exogenous shock to legal status for Romanian and Bulgarian women, considering Italy as a destination country. Using a standard Difference-in-Differences model, we...

This study examines the impact of having a clear path to lawful permanent resident status, or a "green card," and naturalized citizenship on marital status and spousal characteristics among Chinese immigrants in the United States. A series of U.S. policy changes in the early 1990s made all...

This study examines the impact of having a clear path to lawful permanent resident status, or a "green card," and naturalized citizenship on marital status and spousal characteristics among Chinese immigrants in the United States. A series of U.S. policy changes in the early 1990s made all...

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...

Dass auf Dauer in Deutschland lebende Zuwanderer und ihre Nachkommen die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit erwerben, ist nicht nur in ihrem eigenen Interesse. Auch für die gesamtgesellschaftliche Entwicklung ist es wichtig, dass nicht größere Bevölkerungsgruppen entstehen, die von den...

Aufenthaltstitel zur Arbeitsplatzsuche können nicht nur Fachkräften den Zuzug zur Stellensuche ermöglichen, sondern bilden auch Brücken für den Übergang zwischen Ausbildungsende und Berufseinstieg sowie Phasen der Arbeitslosigkeit von Erwerbsmigranten. Dabei ist für die...

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...

We compare winning and losing firms in lotteries for H-1B visas, matching administrative data on these lotteries to administrative tax data on U.S. firms and to approved U.S. patents. Winning one additional H-1B visa crowds out about 1.5 other workers at the firm. Additional H-1Bs have...

Recent immigration policies have created massive uncertainty for international students to obtain F-1 visas. Yet, before the COVID-19 pandemic, student visa applicants already faced an approximately 27 percent refusal rate that varies by time and region. Using data on the universe of SAT takers...

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 studies how the introduction of a novel residence permit for working purposes - the so-called Blue Card introduced in August 2012 - has affected entry-level wages of non-EU migrants in Germany. The Blue Card was targeted at non-EU university graduates with degrees received or...

Self-employment is an important aspect of the immigrant experience in the labor market. Self-employment rates for immigrants exceed 15 percent for some national groups. This paper addresses three related questions on the self-employment experience of immigrants. First, how do self-employment...

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...

Although the "tragic choice" framework has not been applied in the context of U.S. immigration law, current immigration policy is rife with tragic choices, defined as a commitment by policy elites to maintaining certain illusions which shield from public view tough policy choices that offend...

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...

Regulatory agencies overseeing the labor market often rely on worker complaints to direct their enforcement. However, if workers face differential barriers to complain, this system could result in ineffective targeting and create disparities in working conditions. To investigate these...

We follow 3,512 (of 1.4 million) applicants to a government lottery that randomly allocated visas to Bangladeshis for low-skilled, temporary labor contracts in Malaysia. Most lottery winners migrate, and their remittance substantially raises their family's standard of living in Bangladesh. The...

We follow 3,512 (of 1.4 million) applicants to a government lottery that randomly allocated visas to Bangladeshis for low-skilled, temporary labor contracts in Malaysia. Most lottery winners migrate, and their remittance substantially raises their family's standard of living in Bangladesh. The...

Many countries are experiencing increasing inflows of immigrant students. This raises concerns that having a large share of students for whom the host country language is not their first language may have detrimental effects on the educational outcomes of native children. However, the evidence...

U.S. immigration enforcement policy seeks to change the behaviors and views of not only individuals in the United States but also those of prospective migrants outside the United States. Yet we still know relatively little about the behavioral and attitudinal effects of U.S. enforcement policy...

This paper contains three important contributions to the literature on international migrations. First, it compiles a new dataset on migration flows (and stocks) and on immigration laws for 14 OECD destination countries and 74 sending countries for each year over the period 1980-2005. Second, it...

A province's immigration laws are a set of federal rules, guidelines, and applicable laws adopted by the federal government to control the operation of foreign national entrance and departure. Over the last few years, there has been an upsurge in uncertainty in the United States concerning the...

California today is widely considered to be a staunchly pro-immigrant state. That, however, has not always been the case. In fact, the Golden State in the late 1800s experienced widespread anti-Chinese agitation and frequent violence directed at Chinese immigrants and businesses. Political...

The objective of this paper is to describe and understand the determinants of changes in the number and quality of new legal immigrants to the United States over the last 25 years. Our main interest is in understanding the behavioral response of potential immigrants to changes in the U.S....

This article is part of a collection of racial justice articles in national law reviews.From as far back as the anti-Chinese laws of the 1800s, immigration has been a place of racial contestation in the United States. Even though today’s immigration laws are color-blind, their enforcement have...

In this paper, I selectively review recent literature on illegal migration from Mexico to the United States. I begin by discussing methods for estimating stocks and flows of illegal migrants. While there is uncertainty about the size of the unauthorized population, new data sources make it...

For over a century, American immigration law has provided that an alien is deportable for “crimes involving moral turpitude” (CIMT). For nearly as long, observers have lamented the persistence of the phrase, complaining of its antiquarianism and imprecision. These criticisms have ripened in...

Most labor scarce overseas countries moved decisively to restrict their immigration during the first third of the 20th century. This autarchic retreat from unrestricted and even publicly-subsidized immigration in the first global century before World War I to the quotas and bans introduced...

Germany and Canada stand at polar ends of the scientific debate over language integration and ascension to citizenship. German naturalization, as of January 2000, contains an explicit language criterion for naturalization. The first German immigration act that will presumably come into effect on...

This paper is concerned with the determinants and consequences of intercontinental migration over the past four centuries. It begins with a review of the history of primarily trans-Atlantic migration to the New World during the period of Colonial settlement. The contract and coerced migration...

This paper is concerned with the determinants of English language proficiency (speaking, reading and writing) among immigrants. It presents a model of immigrant destination language acquisition based on economic incentives, exposure to the destination anguage, and efficiency in second language...

This paper is concerned with the determinants of English language proficiency among immigrants in a longitudinal survey for Australia. It focuses on both visa category and variables derived from an economic model of the determinants of destination language proficiency among immigrants. Skills...

Based on the ideas developed in the literature on the evaluation of active labor market policy, this paper provides a framework for the evaluation of key elements of immigration policy. To this end, the fundamental ingredients of evaluating policy interventions are explained and the specific...

Census data for 1990/91 indicate that Australian and Canadian immigrants have higher levels of English fluency, education, and income (relative to natives) than do U.S. immigrants. This skill deficit for U.S. immigrants arises primarily because the United States receives a much larger share of...

Starting in the 1980s, the composition of immigrants to the U.S. shifted towards less-skilled workers partly due to the influx of Latin American immigrants in the past few decades. Around this time, real wages and employment of younger and less-educated U.S. workers fell. Some believe that...

Two separate cohorts of immigrants to Australia are compared in order to assess the potential role of immigrant selection criteria, labor market conditions, and income-support policy in facilitating the labor market adjustment of new arrivals. Although these two cohorts entered Australia only...

The pay-as-you-go social security system, which suffers from dwindling labor force, can benefit from immigrants with birth rates that exceed the native-born birth rates in the host country. Thus, a social security system provides effectively an incentive to liberalize migration policy. The paper...

Many European countries restrict immigration from new EU member countries. The rationale is to avoid adverse wage and employment effects. We quantify these effects for Germany. Following Borjas (2003), we estimate a structural model of labor demand, based on elasticities of substitution between...

European Union economies are pressed by (i) a demographic change that induces population ageing and a decline of the workforce, and (ii) a split labour market that is characterized by high levels of unemployment for low-skilled people and a simultaneous shortage of skilled workers. This lack of...

Many countries are placing a greater emphasis on productive skills in the immigrant selection policies as a way of achieving national objectives regarding immigration. These changes stem primarily from the belief that skill-based immigrants do better in some sense and provide greater economic...

In this paper we model the demand for immigrants as a trade-off native voters face between having services, produced by unskilled and non-assimilated immigrants, and experiencing disutility due to the immigrant workers having a culture different from the native culture. Immigrants decide whether...