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

Abstract

An important class of active labor market policy has received little impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to raise wages and employment by shrinking labor supply. Theories of endogenous technical advance raise the possibility of limited or even perverse impact. We study a natural policy experiment: the exclusion of almost half a million Mexican ‘bracero’ farm workers from the United States to improve farm labor market conditions. With novel archival data we measure state-level exposure to exclusion, and model the labor-market effect in the absence of technical change. We reject such an effect and fail to reject a null effect.

The Employment Effects of Mexican Repatriations: Evidence from the 1930's

“…where η ic is the share of total employment of city c in industry i as of 1930; ∆E i is the nationallevel change in the log of total employment in the same industry between 1930 and 1940. 15 The second concern is the differential intensity of local police. This may be a signal of local criminal activity.…”

“…Table 4 shows that there is no significant correlation between the Mexican communities in 1930 and pre-1930 trends of the outcome variables for native workers. Table 5 tests whether our imputed IV, constructed to predict the negative change in Mexican 15 We use sixteen broadly defined industries according to Census industrial code in 1950 (the variable "ind1950" in IPUMS). 16 The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms in the 1930's caused by severe droughts and failure to apply dryland farming to prevent wind erosion.…”

Welfare Magnets and Internal Migration in China

“…As a result, the poor portability of welfare benefits in the destination contributes to rising income inequality by preventing relatively disadvantaged people from migrating for better jobs. Last but not least, this study proposes a novel approach to capture variation in the portability of welfare benefits at the city level from 2002 to 2015, which is also useful for investigating the causal impact of an active labor market policy on other outcomes such as wage and technology adoption (Clemens, Lewis, and Postel 2018).…”

“…This paper also contributes to the growing literature on quantifying the effects of the Hukou System in China (Sun, Bai, and Xie 2011;Kinnan, Wang, and Wang 2018;Fan 2019;Tian 2019). In particular, this paper proposes a novel approach to capture variation in the portability of welfare benefits at the city level from 2002 to 2015, which is also useful to investigate other consequences of an active labor market policy in the context of China such as wage and technology adoption (Clemens, Lewis, and Postel 2018).…”

Revisiting Mexican migration in the Age of Mass Migration: New evidence from individual border crossings

“…Lee et al (2017) analyze the impact of Mexican repatriations on labor market outcomes of US natives during the period 1930-40. Also, Clemens et al (2018) Borjas (2007) for additional literature on the selection and assimilation of Mexican immigrants in the United States. 2 Although Gamio (1930) does not develop a strictly cliometric research, he presents a study -based on quantitative evidence-of money sent back to Mexico by immigrants from 1919 to 1926. Furthermore, our knowledge about Mexican migration from 1884 to 1910 relies on the historical research of Cardoso (1980); Chacón (2009) ;Clark (1908); Durand (2016); Fogel (1978); González (2010); and Verduzco (1995).…”