Previous research has reached mixed conclusions about whether higher levels of immigration reduce the wages of natives. This paper reexamines this question using data from the Current Population Survey and the Immigration and Naturalization Service and focuses on differential effects by skill...

Border crime rates lie consistently below the national average. In the 1990s, however, while there as a large decline in property-related crime along the U.S.-Mexico border, violent crime rates began to converge to the national average. At the same time, legal and illegal immigration from Mexico...

Because Latinos comprise a large and growing share of the low-skilled labor force in the U.S., Latinos may be disproportionately affected by minimum wage laws. We compare the effects of minimum wage laws on employment and earnings among Hispanic immigrants and natives compared with non-Hispanic...

The transformation of the U.S. border economy since the 1980s provides a fascinating backdrop to explore how migration to the U.S-side of the Mexican border has changed vis-a-vis migration to the U.S. interior. Some long-standing patterns of border migrants remained unchanged during this period...

Recent media and government reports suggest that immigrants are more likely to hold jobs with worse working conditions than U.S.-born workers, perhaps because immigrants work in jobs that "natives don’t want." Despite this widespread view, earlier studies have not found immigrants to be in...

In this paper, we examine network capital usage and migration patterns in a theoretical model. Networks are modeled as impacting the migration decision in many ways. When young, larger networks reduce the time lost moving from one region to another. In addition networks decrease the time spent...

This paper examines whether the economic aftermath of 9/11 had an adverse impact on the labor market outcomes of male immigrants from Latin America, who compose the bulk of undocumented foreign-born workers in the U.S. The crackdown on use of fraudulent Social Security numbers, increased...

This study examines how minimum wage laws affect the employment and earnings of low-skilled immigrants and natives in the U.S. Minimum wage increases might have larger effects among low-skilled immigrants than among natives because, on average, immigrants earn less than natives due to lower...