We estimate the effects of permanent legal status on the health of children born to immigrants in the United States using variation from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). Our empirical approach compares trends in birth outcomes for foreign-born Mexican mothers across...

Do general amnesty programs lead to reductions in the crime rate among immigrants? We answer this question by exploiting both cross-sectional and time variation in the number of immigrants legalized generated by the enactment of repeated amnesty programs between 1990 and 2005 in Italy. We...

Australia invests heavily throughout the Asia-Pacific region in mechanisms to control irregular people movements. Information has been leaked about conditions in the notorious detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island, and aspects of the Bali Process are well known and publicised, but the...

I examine the effects that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized almost 3 million immigrants, had on crime in the United States. I exploit the IRCA's quasi-random timing as well as geographic variation in the intensity of treatment to isolate causal impacts. I find...

For the past two decades the United States, a country with a strong tradition of limited government, has been pursuing a widely popular initiative that requires one of the most ambitious expansions of government power in modern history: securing the nation’s borders against illegal...

Immigration policy reform has reached an impasse because of disagreement over whether to create a pathway to legal permanent residence and eventual U.S. citizenship for unauthorized immigrants. The United States first — and last — offered a large-scale amnesty as part of the Immigration...

The closing of the United States to immigrants is arguably the most economically and socially significant policy shift in American history. The U.S. had virtually open borders until 1879, when the first of a series of federal laws prohibiting or limiting immigration of particular groups was...

In this article, I draw upon economic theory and recent empirical work on the economic and fiscal effects of immigration to evaluate some recent proposals for immigration reform in terms of their effects on the economic welfare of natives in the United States. In particular, I consider the...

This article assesses the impact of immigrant and asylum seeker in ows on the size of the informal sector in host countries from a macroeconomic perspective. We use two indicators of informality provided by Medina and Schneider (2019) and Elgin and Oztunali (2012) combined with migration data...