Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Mexican Immigration to the United States

(Population and Migration Issues)

Mexican immigration the United States has profound effects on the economy and society at large. It is also one of the most contentious areas of public policy. This session brings together four papers that study important aspects of Mexican migration, including legalization policies, employment verification programs, crime, and migration networks. Each of these studies are highly relevant to current policy debates. The study of immigration to the United States is especially hampered by inadequate data and each of these paper contributes in important ways to developing new data sources and integrating existing data sources.

Elizabeth Casio and Ethan Lewis (both of Dartmouth College) study the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) to understand how granting legal status to previously undocumented immigrants affects participation in the Earned Income Tax Credit, Food Stamps, and state tax receipts. An especially noteworthy aspect of this research is that there is so little follow-up data on those legalized under IRCA.  The authors develop an approach to circumvent this limitation and estimate individual-level impacts.

Shalise Ayromloo, Benjamin Feigenberg, and Darren Lubotsky (all of the University of Illinois at Chicago) study state E-Verify mandates, which require some or all employers in a state to verify a potential employee’s ability to work in the United States, on immigrants’ employment and location choices. Their work is the first to use administrative data on E-Verify usage at the county level, which they combine with survey data from the American Community Survey and administrative employment records from the Quarterly Workforce Indicators file.

Maria Esther Caballero (Carnegie Mellon), Brian C. Cadena (University of Colorado), Brian K. Kovak (Carnegie Mellon) first show how to use administrative data from the Matrícula Consular de Alta Seguridad (MCAS) identification card program in Mexico to measure local migration networks. They then use the networks they uncover to estimate the effect of Arizona’s Legal Arizona Workers Act (an early state E-Verify law) on emigration and labor markets in particular places in Mexico.

Finally, Aaron Chalfin (a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania) and Monica Deza (University of Texas at Dallas) study the same Legal Arizona Workers Act to understand the effect of immigration, especially undocumented immigration, on crime.