The Effect of Legal Status on Immigrant Wages and Occupational Skills

Quinn Steigleder () and Chad Sparber
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Quinn Steigleder: Department of Economics, Colgate University

No 2015-05, Working Papers from Department of Economics, Colgate University

Abstract: Native and foreign-born workers with a high school degree or less educational attainment provide unique occupational skills to the US labor force. This regularity might be driven, in part, by limited access to occupations for immigrants lacking legal rights to work in the US. This paper exploits exogenous policy change induced by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) to perform triple-difference estimation examining whether legal status causes immigrants to work in occupations that use skills more similar to those of native-born workers. We find that legal status decreases the manual skill intensity of Mexican immigrants by two percentiles. It increases communication skill intensity by an equivalent amount. This effect reduces the skill gap between Mexican-born and native-born American workers by 13%.

Keywords: Immigration; Occupational Skills; Natural Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J24 J31 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07-31, Revised 2015-08-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ger and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The effect of legal status on immigrant wages and occupational skills (2017)
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