September 11 and the Rise of Necessity Self-Employment among Mexican Immigrants

Chunbei Wang and Magnus Lofstrom

No 12555, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Since the September 11 attacks (9/11), the U.S. has seen a tightening of immigration policies. Previous studies find that stricter immigration enforcement has the unintended effect of pushing undocumented immigrants into self-employment. This paper builds on the literature to better understand the changes in the types of self-employment among Mexican immigrants triggered by the tightened immigration enforcement after 9/11. Using a difference-in-differences approach, and the recently developed measures by Fairlie and Fossen [2018] to distinguish between necessity and opportunity self-employment, we find that both necessity and opportunity self-employment increased among Mexican immigrants after 9/11. However, the effect is most prominent on necessity self-employment, consistent with the hypothesis that they are pushed into self-employment as a survival alternative.

Keywords: 9/11; self-employment; mexican immigrants; tightened immigration policies; necessity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2019-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Eastern Economic Journal, 2020, 46 (1), 5 - 33

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12555.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: September 11 and the Rise of Necessity Self-Employment Among Mexican Immigrants (2020)
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:iza:izadps:dp12555

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().