Employment of Undocumented Immigrants and the Prospect of Legal Status: Evidence from an Amnesty Program
52 Pages Posted: 5 Jul 2014
There are 2 versions of this paper
Employment of Undocumented Immigrants and the Prospect of Legal Status: Evidence from an Amnesty Program
Employment of Undocumented Immigrants and the Prospect of Legal Status: Evidence from an Amnesty Program
Date Written: June 2014
Abstract
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 date of arrival. We find that the prospect of legal status significantly increases the employment probability of immigrants that are potentially eligible for the amnesty relative to other undocumented immigrants. The size of the estimated effect is equivalent to about two thirds of the increase in employment that undocumented immigrants in our sample normally experience in their first year after arrival in Italy. These findings are robust to several falsification exercises.
Keywords: Illegal immigration, Natural experiment, Legalization
JEL Classification: F22, J61, K37
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation