Illegal immigration and infections: Evidence from two modern pandemics
Lucas Shen
Economic Modelling, 2025, vol. 145, issue C
Abstract:
The predominant attention on the global transmission of pandemics has centered on official travel. This study shifts the lens to the role of illegal immigration in the H1N1 and COVID-19 pandemics using trafficking inflow risk. The empirical strategy exploits cross-country differences in coastline lengths as a measure of porosity to instrument for trafficking risk, with fatality rates used as falsification tests. The findings show that countries with higher trafficking risk experience higher infection rates, but not higher fatality rates. Combining an augmented epidemiological model of transmission dynamics with high-frequency COVID-19 data, this study identifies early increases in contact rates as a key mechanism driving transmission. These results underscore the importance of early lockdowns in curbing transmission and expose possible gaps in public health systems for vulnerable populations during pandemics.
Keywords: Propagation of diseases; Pandemics; Illegal immigration; Human trafficking; Health economics; Public health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 I12 I18 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999324003201
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:145:y:2025:i:c:s0264999324003201
DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2024.106963
Access Statistics for this article
Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly
More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().