Health, History, Demography and Development (H2D2)

Undocumented Immigrants and Labor Market Fluidity: Evidence in the Context of Equilibrium Unemployment Theory Abstract:
This paper proposes and tests the hypothesis that the presence of undocumented workers generates fluidity in U.S. low-skilled labor markets. Using instrumental variable approaches and a panel dataset constructed from the ACS and Quarterly Workforce Indicators, it finds that higher proportions of undocumented workers in metropolitan areas generate increased worker reallocation rates, churning rates, and employment rates. These findings are especially salient in industries where undocumented workers make up a larger share of the workforce. In order to place these empirical results in a tractable context, this paper develops a search model of the local labor market with heterogeneous agents, building upon the work of Chassamboulli and Peri (2015). Augmenting these models by allowing for endogenous job destruction and on-the-job search generates accurate predictions for the response of gross worker flows to increased proportions of undocumented workers. Further analysis of individuals in the Current Population Survey (CPS) demonstrates that job-to-job transitions drive the market-level results.

The Economic Consequences of Immigrant Disenfranchisement: Evidence from the United States Abstract:
What are the effects of disenfranchisement on immigrants? This paper studies a little-known episode in United States history in which twenty-three states and territories disenfranchised non-citizen immigrants between 1864-1926. This disenfranchisement represented a significant shock to the political equilibrium of the time: mayoral and gubernatorial vote shares fell immediately by 13 and 7 percentage points, respectively. There is no evidence that disenfranchisement affected the immediate labor market outcome for affected immigrants, but there were intergenerational effects. Children of immigrants exposed to disenfranchisement at a young age had worse educational outcomes, and earned less, as adults, than comparable children of natives. The results are robust to controlling for two sets of non-linear trends that account for, respectively, the changing composition of immigrant sending countries and changing conditions within state of residence (short run) or state of birth (intergenerational). I find support for two countervailing mechanisms for the intergenerational results: upon disenfranchisement, states reduced public spending toward immigrants – particularly, in public employment - but immigrants were also more likely to complete naturalization proceedings, possibly signaling their value of assimilation and thus mitigating adverse effects.