In this paper, we explore employers’ decisions regarding the employment of legal and illegal immigrants in the presence of endogenous adjustment cost, minimum wages and an enforcement budget. We show that increasing the employment of legal foreign workers will increase the number of illegal...

We develop a general model of legal and illegal immigration to understand the basic tradeoffs faced by a government in the decision to implement an immigration amnesty in the presence of a selective immigration policy. We show that two channels play an important role: an amnesty is more likely...

Organized crime (Note 1) has a global character and is one of the most serious threats in the modern societies for decades. This phenomenon because of the characteristics that govern modern societies and economies, namely globalization, transnational flows, reduction of distances due to the...

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...

Border enforcement of immigration laws attempts to raise the costs of illegal immigration, while interior enforcement also lowers the benefits. Border and interior enforcement therefore reduce the net benefits of illegal immigration and should lower the probability that an individual will decide...