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on Economics of Human Migration |
| By: | Amuedo-Dorantes, Catalina (San Diego State University, California); Puttitanun, Thitima (San Diego State University, California); Martinez-Donate, Ana (University of Wisconsin-Madison) |
| Abstract: | The recent impetus of tougher immigration-related measures passed at the state-level raises concerns about the impact of such measures on the migration experience, trajectory and future plans of unauthorized immigrants. In a recent and unique survey of Mexican unauthorized immigrants interviewed upon their voluntary return or deportation to Mexico, almost a third reports experiencing difficulties in obtaining social or government services, finding legal assistance or obtaining health care services. Additionally, half of them report fearing deportation despite all of them being unauthorized. When we assess how the enactment of punitive measures against unauthorized immigrants, such as E-Verify mandates, has impacted their migration experience, we find no evidence of a statistically significant association between these measures and the difficulties reported by unauthorized immigrants in accessing a variety of services. However, the enactment of these mandates infuses deportation fear and reduces inter-state mobility among voluntary returnees during their last migration spell, and helps curb deportees' intent to return to the United States in the near future. |
| Keywords: | immigration, policy, undocumented, illegal, unauthorized, Mexico |
| JEL: | F22 O15 |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7134&r=mig |
| By: | Duleep, Harriet (College of William and Mary) |
| Abstract: | Two issues have taken center stage in the recent debates about U.S. immigration policy: one, illegal immigration and more generally the entrance of poorly educated individuals into the U.S. economy and two, whether the U.S. should continue its family-based admissions system or move towards a skills-based system. This paper analyzes these issues culling evidence from the history of U.S. immigration policy, the experiences of different types of U.S. immigrants, and cross-national comparisons. |
| Keywords: | immigration, illegal immigration, effect on poorly educated natives, entrepreneurship, human capital investment, skill transferability, opportunity cost, learning transferability, family-based admissions, permanence |
| JEL: | J15 J24 J39 J61 L26 |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7136&r=mig |
| By: | Lunn Pete |
| Keywords: | migration/recession/qec |
| Date: | 2012–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:esr:wpaper:rn2012/2/3&r=mig |
| By: | Valentina Bosetti; Cristina Cattaneo; Elena Verdolini |
| Abstract: | This paper analyses the effect of skilled migration on two measures of innovation, patenting and citations of scientific publications, in a panel of 20 European countries. Skilled migrants positively contribute to the knowledge formation in host countries as they add to the pool of skills in destination markets. Moreover, they positively affect natives' productivity, as new ideas are likely to arise through the interaction of diverse cultures and diverse approaches in problem solving. The empirical findings we present support this prediction. Greater diversity in the skilled professions are associated with higher levels of knowledge creation, measured either by the number of patents applied for through the Patent Cooperation Treaty or by the number of citations to published articles. This finding is robust to the use of different proxies for both the explanatory variables and the diversity index in the labour force. Specifically, we first measure diversity with a novel indicator which uses information on the skill level of foreigners’ occupations. We then check our results by following the general literature, which measures skills by looking at the foreigners’ level of education. We show that cultural diversity consistently increases the innovation performance of European Countries. Keywords: cultural diversity, innovation, skilled migration, knowledge production function, Europe JEL: F22, J24, O31 |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:igi:igierp:469&r=mig |
| By: | Jennifer Hunt |
| Abstract: | Using the American Community Surveys of 2009 and 2010, I examine the wages of immigrants compared to natives among engineering workers. Among workers in engineering occupations, immigrants are the best and brightest thanks to their high education level, enjoying a wage distribution shifted to the right of the native distribution. Among workers with an engineering degree, however, immigrants underperform natives, despite somewhat higher education. The gap is particularly large in the lower tail, where immigrants work in occupations not commensurate with their education. In the upper tail, immigrants fail to be promoted out of technical occupations to management, handicapped by imperfect English and their underrepresentation among older age groups. In both samples, immigrants from the highest income countries are the best and brightest workers. |
| JEL: | J61 |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18696&r=mig |
| By: | Malchow-Møller, Nikolaj (University of Southern Denmark); Munch, Jakob R. (University of Copenhagen); Seidelin, Claus Aastrup (University of Southern Denmark); Skaksen, Jan Rose (Copenhagen Business School) |
| Abstract: | Many developed countries have recently experienced a significant inflow of immigrants in the agricultural sector. At the same time, the sector is still in a process of structural transformation resulting in fewer but bigger and presumably more efficient farms. In this paper, we exploit detailed matched employer-employee data for the entire population of Danish farms in the period 1980-2008 to analyze the micro-level relationship between these two developments. We find that farms that employ immigrants tend to be both larger and at least as productive as other farms. Furthermore, an increased use of immigrants is found to be associated with an improvement in farm performance as measured by job creation and revenue, and this seems at least in part to reflect a causal effect of the immigrants. |
| Keywords: | immigration, agriculture, matched employer-employee data |
| JEL: | J61 J43 |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7133&r=mig |
| By: | Elsner, Benjamin (IZA); Zimmermann, Klaus F. (IZA and University of Bonn) |
| Abstract: | We study how the EU enlargement in 2004 and the Great Recession in the late 2000s have shaped the scale and composition of migration flows from the New Member States to Germany. We demonstrate that immigration increased substantially despite the restrictions on the German labor market, and that net flows decreased to zero at the outset of the recession. The cohorts arriving after 2004 had on average a lower education than the previous arrival cohort, but the wage gap compared to Germans became narrower over time. Almost 10 years after EU enlargement, we re-assess the transitional arrangements, and argue that Germany would have been better off, had it immediately opened its labor market. Finally, the Great recession allows us to study how effective migration within the EU is as an adjustment mechanism. Our data clearly show an increase in immigration from countries that were hit by the crisis, although the annual net flows are still too small to significantly reduce unemployment in the countries hit by the crisis. |
| Keywords: | EU enlargement, migration, Germany |
| JEL: | F22 |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7130&r=mig |
| By: | Mundra, Kusum (Rutgers University) |
| Abstract: | Using data from the 2009 American Housing Survey and Hazard Model, this paper provides empirical evidence that the homeownership experience during the recent housing boom and housing bust was not homogenous across all groups in the U.S. The recent deterioration of underwriting practices and a boom in mortgage lending did not benefit minorities and immigrant homeownership in the U.S. Blacks experienced significantly lower increase in homeownership than the whites but highest exit from homeownership particularly if they obtained the mortgage during subprime boom period from 2004 – 2006. Hispanics, on the other hand, did not experience significant increase in homeownership and neither did they face a higher exit from homeownership compared to whites. However, Hispanic immigrants were worse off in the recent housing market than Hispanic natives. Immigrants were worse off in the recent housing market than the natives, but naturalized immigrants fared better than the non-naturalized immigrants. |
| Keywords: | homeownership, exit, subprime, minorities, immigrants, citizenship, hazard model |
| JEL: | J15 J11 R21 |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7131&r=mig |
| By: | Jesus Fernández-Huertas Moraga |
| Abstract: | The productive characteristics of migrating individuals, emigrant selection, affect welfare. The empirical estimation of the degree of selection suffers from a lack of complete and nationally representative data. This paper uses a dataset that addresses both issues: the ENET (Mexican Labor Survey), which identifies migrants right before they leave and allows a direct comparison to non-migrants. This dataset presents a relevant dichotomy: it shows negative selection for urban Mexican emigrants to the United States for the period 2000-2004 together with positive selection in Mexican emigration out of rural Mexico to the United States in the same period. Three theories that could explain this dichotomy are tested. Whereas higher skill prices in Mexico than in the US are enough to explain half of the negative selection result in urban Mexico, its combination with network effects and wealth constraints fully account for positive selection in rural Mexico. |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fda:fdaddt:2013-02&r=mig |
| By: | Alberto Alesina; Johann Harnoss; Hillel Rapoport |
| Abstract: | The diversity of people has economic costs and benefits. Using recent immigration data from 195 countries, we propose an index of diversity based on people’s birthplaces. This new index is decomposed in a “size” (share of foreign born) and a variety (diversity of immigrants) component and is available for 1990 and 2000 and for the overall as well as for the high (workers with college education) and low-skill fractions of the workforce. We show that birthplace diversity is largely uncorrelated with ethnic and linguistic fractionalization and that—unlike fractionalization—it is positively related to economic development even after controlling for education, institutions, ethnic and linguistic fractionalization, trade openness, geography, market size and origin-effects. This positive association appears particularly strong for the diversity of skilled immigrants in richer countries. We make progress towards addressing endogeneity by specifying a gravity model to predict the diversity of immigration based on exogenous bilateral variables. The results are robust across various OLS and 2SLS specifications. |
| JEL: | F22 F43 O1 O4 |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18699&r=mig |
| By: | Ozgen, Ceren (VU University Amsterdam); Nijkamp, Peter (VU University Amsterdam); Poot, Jacques (University of Waikato) |
| Abstract: | To investigate econometrically whether cultural diversity of a firm's employees boosts innovation, we create a unique linked employer‐employee dataset that combines data from two innovation surveys in The Netherlands with administrative and tax data. We calculate three distinct measures of diversity. We find that firms that employ fewer foreign workers are generally more innovative, but that diversity among a firm's foreign workers is positively associated with innovation activity. The positive impact of diversity on product or process innovations is greater among firms in knowledge-intensive sectors and in internationally‐oriented sectors. The impact is robust to accounting for endogeneity of foreign employment. |
| Keywords: | immigration, innovation, cultural diversity, knowledge spillovers, linked administrative and survey data |
| JEL: | D22 F22 O31 |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7129&r=mig |