1.
Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion.
Am Econ Rev
; 108(6): 1468-1487, 2018 Jun.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-30008480
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.