The 1986 US Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was directed at tackling the problem of growing unauthorized migration through legalization of unauthorized immigrants, increasing border security and sanctioning employers who hired unauthorized immigrants. Our paper investigates how the...

Using height as a proxy for physical productivity of labour, this paper estimates the selection of Mexican migration to the United States at the beginning of the flow (1906-08), and it exploits a natural experiment of history to evaluate the impact of random shocks on short-run shifts in...

Migration networks are usually captured by the number of people from the migrant's country in the host region. Using Mexican migration data, we analyze the effects of the usual network variable and two additional origin-village-specific variables on migrants' location choice.

Using the NLSY, we find that young Mexican women earn 9% less than young White women while young Black women earn 15% less than young White women. Although young Mexican women earn less than young White women, they do surprisingly well compared to young Black women. We show that it is crucially...

We present the first evidence that international emigrant selection on education and earnings materializes through occupational skills. Combining novel data from a representative Mexican task survey with rich individual-level worker data, we find that Mexican migrants to the United States have...