USF St. Petersburg campus Faculty Publications

Undocumented immigration and host-country welfare: Competition across segmented labor markets.

SelectedWorks Author Profiles:

Thomas J. Carter

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2005

ISSN

0022-4146

Abstract

In this paper’s model, undocumented workers are endogenously sorted into secondary labor markets. When further illegal immigration occurs, some new migrants follow their fellows into already migrant-dominated jobs, lowering migrant wages and raising real incomes of host-country labor and capital. Some submarkets switch from employing legal workers to employing migrants, lowering demand for and wages of legal workers. Undocumented immigration is Pareto-improving when enforcement reserves primary-sector jobs for legal workers. Pareto-dominant policies target the number of migrant-dominated submarkets, not the number of migrants. This appears consistent with U.S. enforcement practices. The effects of deportations, employer sanctions, and amnesties are explored.

Comments

Citation only. Full-text article is available through licensed access provided by the publisher. Members of the USF System may access the full-text of the article through the authenticated link provided.

Publisher

Wiley-Blackwell

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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