Employment of Undocumented Immigrants and the Prospect of Legal Status: Evidence from an Amnesty Program

Carlo Devillanova, Francesco Fasani and Tommaso Frattini

No 8151, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper estimates the causal effect of the prospect of legal status on the employment outcomes of undocumented immigrants. Our identification strategy exploits a natural experiment provided by the 2002 amnesty program in Italy that introduced an exogenous discontinuity in eligibility based on date of arrival. We find that the prospect of legal status significantly increases the employment probability of immigrants that are potentially eligible for the amnesty relative to other undocumented immigrants. The size of the estimated effect is equivalent to about two thirds of the increase in employment that undocumented immigrants in our sample normally experience in their first year after arrival in Italy. These findings are robust to several falsification exercises.

Keywords: natural experiment; illegal immigration; legalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J61 K37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2014-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Published - published in: Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 2018, 71 (4), 853-881

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Related works:
Working Paper: Employment of Undocumented Immigrants and the Prospect of Legal Status: Evidence from an Amnesty Program (2014)
Working Paper: Employment of Undocumented Immigrants and the Prospect of Legal Status: Evidence from an Amnesty Program (2014)
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