Essays on the Economic Impact of Immigration in North America
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Historically, immigration has had a major impact on North American culture and the economy. In recent years, immigration has remained an important part of the US society and economy, and has been a popular topic in political discourse. This dissertation explores the role of immigration alongside other twenty-first century, economic challenges. Chapter 1 introduces the dissertation and summarizes the three main chapters. Chapter 2 studies the impact of US minimum wage policy on workers, addressing differences by immigration status. Using exogenous shocks to state minimum wage policies, I find that an increase in the minimum wage reduces the likelihood of US citizens working in agriculture but does not impact the level of overall farm employment and does not impact the employment outcomes of non-citizen, immigrant workers or workers on the H-2A guest worker visa. Chapter 3 investigates the impact of immigration on origin communities by studying the affect of criminal violence and drought shocks on remittance flows into Mexico. Combining remotely-sensed and administrative data, I use a spatial model to ask whether remittances increase in response to drought shocks at the origin location and unpack the complicated role of criminal violence in the origin community. I find that remittances increase in response to drought shocks but decrease in communities with higher homicide rates and in communities that have both a drought and increase in violence. Chapter 4 evaluates motivations for undocumented migration from Mexico to the US, with a specific focus on the impact of generous and restrictive, state-level immigration policies. With administrative migration data and a policy index that captures all immigration-related laws in a state and year, I show that labor market conditions in both origin and destination locations as well as violence in origin locations impact undocumented migration but that more generous policy environments at the destination do not play a major role in the migration decision.
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Dillon, Brian
Kanbur, Sanjiv