Guest Worker Programs and Human Capital Investment

Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion

“…The United States and Mexico made a set of three bilateral agreements to regulate Mexico-U.S. ows of temporary low-skill labor, spanning almost the entire period from 1942 through 1964. 3 At rst this bracero program supplied Mexican labor to a mix of manual jobs in U.S. agriculture, railroads, mining, and construction, raising remittance receipts and human capital investment in Mexico (Kosack 2016). After World War 2 the program evolved to focus almost entirely on agriculture, and grew to supply almost half a million seasonal workers each year to U.S. farms, with contracts typically lasting between six weeks and six months (Salandini 1973, 158).…”

“…Very recently the immigration literature has turned to evaluating labor-market effects of real-world changes to immigration policy restrictions (e.g. Beerli and Peri 2015;Kennan 2017), but evidence remains scant, and the bracero program in particular remains little-studied (Kosack 2016). 2 This is in part because immigration policies-like licensing restrictions in trade policy-are inherently di cult to quantify (Beine et al 2015).…”

Tattoo discrimination in Mexico motivates interest in tattoo removal among structurally vulnerable adults

“…For many decades, Mexico has been a major migrant sending country to the U.S. due to diverse social and economic ties that have supported migrant flows between both countries ( 61 , 62 ). Return migration is not uncommon and our research demonstrates that tattoos are pervasive among persons with histories of U.S. migration.…”

Selective Migration and Economic Development: A Generalized Approach

“…Shocks that increase the expected utility of college graduates abroad (W i,h ) have a positive effect on human capital formation (H i ) and on the positive selection of emigrants (as reflected by the ratio of high-skilled to low-skilled emigration rates, ρ i ) (e.g., Abarcar and Theoharides, 2021, Khanna and Morales, 2017, Shrestha, 2017, Theoharides, 2018. Shocks that increase the expected utility of the less-educated abroad (W i,l ) have a negative effect on both variables (e.g., de Brauw and Giles, 2017, Kosack, 2021, Pan, 2017. This establishes the micro-foundations of the link between emigration rates and pre-migration human capital formation in a multi-destination framework.…”