The Border Within by Tara Watson;Kalee Thompson; & Kalee Thompson

Author:Tara Watson;Kalee Thompson; & Kalee Thompson [Watson, Tara & Thompson, Kalee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL000000 Political Science / General, SOC007000 Social Science / Emigration & Immigration, HIS036070 History / United States / 21st Century, SOC000000 Social Science / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

The Impact of Enforcement on Immigrant Earnings and Employment

Since jobs are a key magnet for unauthorized migration, it is not surprising that internal enforcement has often been focused on the workplace. As discussed earlier, it is illegal for firms to knowingly hire undocumented immigrants. Higher rates of enforcement may make undocumented workers less likely to try to find work in the formal sector and might make employers more cautious about who they hire. For example, in a 2015 paper, economists Pia Orrenius of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Madeline Zavodny (then of Agnes Scott College, now at the University of North Florida) examine the impact of E-Verify. They find reductions in male wages among the likely unauthorized after E-Verify goes into effect, suggesting that employers shy away from hiring the undocumented when stricter policies are enacted. Interestingly, likely unauthorized women increase their labor-force participation at the same time, perhaps because women are more likely to work in the informal sector and are able to compensate for the lower wages of their male family members.130

Other researchers—Sarah Bohn and Magnus Lofstrom at the Public Policy Institute of California, working with Steven Raphael at the University of California, Berkeley—find similar effects of LAWA, the 2007 Arizona law that required the use of E-Verify, and show that likely undocumented workers have worse employment prospects after its implementation.131 Both studies lend credence to the idea that worksite enforcement pushes undocumented workers out of the formal workforce and toward the underground economy.

On the flip side of the coin, DACA offers temporary employment eligibility, and studies on the effects of DACA find a positive impact on labor-market outcomes for DACA-eligible individuals. The NURP study described earlier in this section reveals that approximately 60 percent of DACA recipients obtained a new job, and 45 percent increased their incomes after receiving the status. Not surprisingly, DACA increases labor-force participation while decreasing the unemployment rate for those eligible; an estimated fifty thousand to seventy-five thousand DACA recipients were moved into employment because of the program.132 Another study finds that households headed by individuals who qualify for DACA were 38 percent less likely to be living in poverty after the program was implemented (the oldest DACA recipients are now in their late thirties).133

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.