The Effect of Migrant Regularization on Labor Exploitation

Francesco Amodio, Elia Benveniste, Mario Francesco Carillo and Marc Riudavets Barcons

No 20750, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This paper shows that granting migrants legal status reduces labor exploitation. We study Spain’s 2005 large-scale regularization program, which granted legal status to 600,000 undocumented migrants. We proxy labor exploitation with hospitalizations for heat-related illnesses among working-age individuals, capturing exposure to hazardous working conditions in outdoor occupations. We implement a triple-difference design that exploits cross-provincial variation in pre-reform shares of undocumented migrants and temporal variation in extreme temperatures. Our results show that the incidence of heat-related hospitalizations during heatwaves declined significantly in provinces with greater exposure to the amnesty. Specifically, an additional day above 35◦C became 3.3 percentage points less likely to result in heat-related hospitalization in highly exposed provinces, representing a 9.4% reduction relative to the pre-reform mean. Our findings demonstrate that migrant regularization is a powerful policy for improving worker well-being and reducing their vulnerability to extreme climatic events.

JEL-codes: I12 J46 J47 J61 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10
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