Border and interior enforcement, legal penalties, and the market for smugglers distinguish undocumented migration from legal migration and introduce a number of challenges for migrants, employers, law enforcement, and policymakers. This chapter reviews the theoretical models and empirical...

Two prominent features of globalization in recent decades are the remarkable increase in trade and in migratory flows between industrializing and industrialized countries. Due to restrictive laws in the receiving countries and high migration costs, the increase in international migration has...

As of 2004 California employed almost 30% of all foreign born workers in the U.S. and was the state with the largest percentage of immigrants in the labor force. It received a very large number of uneducated immigrants so that two thirds of workers with no schooling degree in California were...

Many migrations are temporary – a fact that has often been ignored in the economic literature on migration. Such omission may be serious in that expected migration temporariness can impart a distinct dynamic element to immigrants’ economic behavior, generating possible consequences for...

During the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), the US maintained an open border, absorbing 30 million European immigrants. Prior cross-sectional work on this era finds that immigrants initially held lower-paid occupations than natives but experienced rapid convergence over time. In...

This paper demonstrates that low-skilled Mexican-born immigrants' location choices in the U.S. respond strongly to changes in local labor demand, and that this geographic elasticity helps equalize spatial differences in labor market outcomes for low-skilled native workers, who are much less...

The migration of young Chinese scientists to undertake graduate studies in U.S. universities is arguably one of the most important recent episodes of skilled migration. Using a new data set covering around 16,000 Ph.D. graduates in 161 U.S. chemistry departments, we show that Chinese students...

In October 2003, the United States drastically reduced the number of H-1B visas available for foreign-born workers. Such restrictions could make U.S. colleges less attractive to foreign students considering an American education as a pathway to U.S. employment. Citizens from five countries are...

Seasonal migration programs are widely used around the world, yet there is little evidence as to their development impacts. A multiyear prospective evaluation of New Zealand's Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) seasonal worker program allows us to measure the impact of participating in this...

This paper studies the effect of top tax rates on inventors' mobility since 1977. We put special emphasis on "superstar" inventors, those with the most and most valuable patents. We use panel data on inventors from the United States and European Patent Offices to track inventors' locations over...