Abstract
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 IRCA affected the migration dynamics of male Mexican immigrants focusing on their age of onset of migration and the duration of their first trip. We find that the IRCA reduced unauthorized migration to the US while it does not seem to have had a significant effect on the return rate from the US to Mexico of undocumented male immigrants.
Highlights
Immigration policies restrict the entrance of persons from other countries
We assume that individuals do not migrate before age 15 and we model the duration until first migration as the age of onset minus 14.7 We focus on unauthorized migration and migration with an legal permanent resident (LPR) document and specify the age of onset of migration in a competing risk model to allow for dependence in an individual’s hazard rates of unauthorized and legal migration
We measure the effects of an immigration reform, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), on the male migration rate from Mexico to the US and the return migration rate from the US to Mexico
Summary
Immigration policies restrict the entrance of persons from other countries. There is a range of these policies from quotas that establish a maximum number of work and residence permits to be issued to foreigners to admission criteria that limit access (Boeri and van Ours 2013). A policy change may have an effect through both migrant inflow and outflow which in turn depend on the propensity to migrate to the country, the duration of stay, and the average number of trips each immigrant makes. Reyes (2001) and Li (2016) find that the duration of Mexican migrants trip increased for those who moved after the IRCA, while Quinn (2014) finds no change This analysis does not take into account the effect of the IRCA on the many migrants whose trip started before the policy but lasted long enough to be affected by it. The IRCA did not affect the legal migration rate or the return from a legal trip by Mexican immigrants.
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