In economics, graduate students going on the job market present a single job market paper (that is supposed to showcase their skills and work).
As I did last year, I’ve gathered all the migration-related job market papers from the top 150 economics departments1 (as ranked by RePEc) and top 10 ag econ departments (as ranked by RePEc).2 I have also cross-checked via econ.now for papers involving “migrants”, “migration”, and “immigration”.
Economists are, of course, not the only people who study migration; political scientists and sociologists do valuable work here. Since job market papers are relatively rare in those disciplines (and frankly, looking for every working paper written by a job market candidate in any discipline would take approx. the next year), this post only includes economists. If you are a political scientist with a JMP on migration, please email me at lagilbert@gmail.com!
This post contains all the international migration papers; my next post will focus on domestic migration.
Last year, I organized papers by the country studied. This year, I’ve organized by topic instead.
The topics are listed below:
Assimilation & Integration
Economic History
Entrepreneurship
External Shocks
Health Systems
International Students
Refugee Integration
Tax Policy
Temporary Migration
Undocumented Migration
Assimilation & Integration
Between Arab and White: Syrians and the U.S. Naturalization Law
Donia Kamel (PSE)
This paper examines how legal inclusion shapes immigrant assimilation. I study the 1915 Dow v. United States ruling, which classified Arabs as white and thus eligible for naturalization. Using U.S. Census data, I show that Arab children born after 1915 received significantly less foreign-sounding names, with within-family estimates indicating effects comparable to the naming assimilation typically associated with decades of additional parental residence in the United States. Difference-in-differences analyses relative to Poles and other immigrant groups corroborate these findings. Among first-generation immigrants, intermarriage with natives increased following the ruling, while residential integration lagged behind. These cultural shifts translated into economic payoffs: post-Dow cohorts with less foreign names earned about 37 percent higher hourly wages and were significantly less concentrated in immigrant-intensive manufacturing jobs. Finally, I assemble a new corpus of Arab-American newspapers (1890–1940) to study identity debates, providing the first systematic text-based evidence of how migrants internalized legal reclassification. Together, the findings show that access to naturalization both encouraged and rewarded assimilation—an insight of enduring relevance as contemporary pathways to citizenship narrow worldwide.
Choosing Distance: How Natives Reduce Migrant Exposure in Daily Life
Artur Obminski (PSE)
Interactions with natives are critical for migrants’ economic and social integration, yet segregation often limits such interactions. This paper asks whether natives adjust their choices of restaurants, stores, and other consumption locations in ways that change their exposure to migrants. I address this question using granular data on 43,000 individuals’ consumption across Poland, exploiting the sudden arrival of over one million Ukrainian refugees in 2022. I find that natives shifted away from locations with higher migrant presence, especially those that facilitate social mixing. New establishment openings reinforced this pattern, underscoring how individual choices can constrain the potential benefits of intergroup contact.
Networks, Sorting, and the Productivity Implications of Immigrant Assimilation
Luke Rawling (Queen’s University)
I study how barriers to labor market integration shape immigrant outcomes and the aggregate economy. Using matched employer–employee data from Canada, I document new and detailed differences between immigrants and natives in terms of earnings, labor market dynamics, and sorting patterns across firms. Guided by these facts, I develop and estimate a search model with two-sided heterogeneity, sorting, referral networks, and immigrant assimilation. A quarter of the gap in earnings and half of the gap in firm sorting is driven by allocational barriers--a combination of lower effective job search, higher job instability, and segmented referral networks--rather than differences in human capital. Eliminating these barriers would raise immigrant output by 8.4% and total output by 1.1% by increasing immigrant employment and allowing them to reallocate into higher productivity firms. Feasible integration programs that combine human capital investments with search assistance deliver similar output gains. These gains are achieved without harming native workers due to firms’ endogenous job-creation response. The counterfactuals highlight that integration programs should target unemployed low-skill immigrants.
Economic History
Immigration, job sorting, and health: Evidence from 1920s US immigration policy
Patrick Szurkowski (Pitt)
This project examines how an exogenous decline in immigration flows induces sorting across the distribution of health conditions in the local labor market adjustment process and documents significant changes in the community health indicators. In the 1920s, a set of immigration laws in the United States imposed quotas based on national origin and restricted immigrant flows. These policies cut immigration flows from constrained countries to around 150,000 individuals a year. The effects of this policy change are identified in a difference-in-difference framework utilizing the LIFE-M, historical labor survey, and full count census data. Results indicate that individuals in areas facing larger declines in immigration are observed transitioning into occupations and industries with worse associated health measures. Increasing native-born employment in high health cost (HHC) positions offset lost immigrant labor leading to no change in HHC employment share. Further, policy exposure was associated with declining average lifespan and increasing mortality rates among counties’ working age US-born population.
Immigration Raids and Immigrant Assimilation: Evidence from the 1920 Palmer Raids
João Tampellini (Vanderbilt)
How do immigration raids affect immigrant assimilation? This paper studies the Palmer Raids, a nationwide campaign in 1920 that arrested thousands of immigrants suspected of radicalism but resulted in few deportations. I digitize government records for over 4,000 arrested individuals and link them to the 1920 Census, which allows me to determine their neighborhood of residence. I compare immigrants in neighborhoods where at least one resident was arrested to immigrants in other neighborhoods in the same city. I show that exposure discouraged assimilation in both the short- and long-run. In the short-run, treated fathers gave their children significantly more foreign-sounding names. In the long-run, treated immigrants were less likely to naturalize, more likely to marry a spouse from the same birthplace rather than U.S.-born spouses, and more likely to live in ethnic enclaves. These choices had lasting economic consequences: immigrants in treated neighborhoods had slower occupational upgrading and lower rates of entrepreneurship. These findings show that immigration raids can undermine assimilation.
Entrepreneurship
Curbing Tax Flight? Aggregate Effects of Taxing Entrepreneur Migration
Christine Blandhol (Princeton)
This paper examines the trade-offs policymakers face when imposing out-migration taxes with the goal of preventing tax flight. I use Norway as a laboratory—a small open economy where tax flight is a key policy concern. Exploiting a recent increase in the wealth tax rate at the top of the wealth distribution, I document a significant migration response. The out-migration rate of affected households increased from 0.2% in the pre-period to more than 2% in the year of the reform. In addition to out-migration reducing the size of the tax base, 40% of out-migrating households are firm owners. Firms of out-migrating owners experience on average a 12.6% decrease in firm revenue compared with firms where the owners stay. To analyze the aggregate effects of the reform and the effectiveness of out-migration taxes, I develop a dynamic equilibrium model where heterogeneous entrepreneurs make forward-looking savings and migration choices. Entrepreneurs who choose to operate their firm in a different location than they are currently residing may suffer a hair-cut to their productivity. I estimate the key model parameters using the quasi-experimental evidence from the tax reform. In the aggregate, the wealth tax reform decreases aggregate output in the long-run by 1.3%. Introducing a tax on the market value of the firm when the entrepreneur out-migrates reduces tax flight, especially for more productive entrepreneurs, and increases aggregate output.
Creating Opportunity: The Impact of Immigration on Native Entrepreneurship
Gabriel Chaves Bosch (Queen Mary University of London)
This paper examines the impact of immigration on native entrepreneurship using rich social security data and a unique immigration episode in Spain. Using variation across local labour markets and employing a shift-share instrumental variable for identification, I find that immigration has a positive effect on native entrepreneurship. The effect is primarily driven by wage workers who transition into entrepreneurship following the immigration episode. To rationalise these findings, I propose and calibrate a model of occupational choice and immigration. The model shows the empirical results are consistent with an opportunity channel: an immigration-induced labour supply expansion lowers immigrant wages but has a limited impact on native wages. As a result, immigration lowers labour costs, enabling the creation of businesses that would not otherwise be profitable.
External Shocks
Are Recent Immigrants More Resilient to Job Loss? Evidence from Mass Layoffs in Canada
Olivier Gagnon (McGill)
This paper measures the effect of job loss on the subsequent labor market outcomes of immigrants as a function of the time spent in the host country at the time of displacement. The evidence comes from yearly employer-employee administrative data from Canadian taxes (2001-2019), linked to immigration records. I look at immigrants displaced during mass layoffs, which provide plausibly exogenous job separations. I estimate the impact of displacement in two distinct ways. First, through an event study approach. Second, through a regression-based approach that allows me to quantify how differences in the composition of pre-displacement characteristics contribute to the heterogeneous treatment effects and how the heterogeneity in earnings loss is linked to specific differences in post-displacement outcomes. I find that recent immigrants experience smaller and less persistent earnings losses from displacement, with a 21% decrease in earnings one year after displacement, compared to 26% for those who have been in the host country longer. Recent immigrants also display better post-displacement outcomes in other dimensions, such as lower time spent nonemployed and higher geographic mobility. I show that differences in pre-displacement characteristics account for 50% of the heterogeneous treatment effects on earnings: each additional year in Canada results in 0.8 percentage points larger earnings losses, but only 0.4 percentage points when controlling for pre-displacement characteristics. Age at displacement alone explains half of this difference. Differences in post-displacement outcomes account for an additional 40% of the heterogeneity in earnings losses, with time spent nonemployed being the most important mechanism.
The impact of the 2015 earthquake on internal and international migration in Nepal
Shailee Manandhar (Rutgers)
This study examines the impact of the 2015 earthquake on internal and international migration in Nepal. Using ground shake intensity and district-level death rates as measures of earthquake impact, I analyze two datasets with two-way fixed effects, difference-in-differences, and synthetic difference-in-differences models. The results show a significant decline in international migration from affected districts, particularly among men, with the probability of male migration declining by 3–6 percentage points (a 28-57% decrease relative to pre-earthquake mean) and male labor permits issued for employment in countries other than India declining by 8%. In contrast, internal migration and the low female migration were largely unaffected. These findings provide insight into the labor market dynamics and sensitivity of migration to large shocks, emphasizing the need for stronger social protection systems and creation of domestic employment opportunities to support recovery and resilience.
Health Systems
Quality and Location Choice of Immigrant Doctors
Jason Chen (Columbia)
Doctor shortages are a widespread and growing concern in the healthcare systems of many developed countries, including in the United States. Allowing for immigration of working doctors is a common policy in such by which to expand doctor supply. In the US however, such immigration is bottle-necked by licensing requirements that require domestic retraining, ostensibly due to quality concerns. I study the quality of domestic vs. immigrant emergency medicine doctors in the US. I find quality premiums associated with care provided by immigrant doctors, both within a given hospital and across the entire distribution of ER doctors. Notably, I do not find such quality premiums for US citizen medical students educated abroad. I also find immigrant doctors are significantly more likely to work in locations with worse patient outcomes and in designated health provider shortage areas. Estimates of doctor location preferences suggest that this affinity cannot be explained by initial location or vertical matching. My results imply that current licensing restrictions on doctor immigrants are too strict, and policies allowing for alternative licensing pathways for doctor immigrants could alleviate doctor shortages in the areas of greatest need at no cost to healthcare quality.
International Students
International Undergraduate Student Inflows and College Pricing Strategies
Sheng Qu (CU Boulder)
This paper examines how growth in international undergraduate enrollment affects both sticker-price and net-price tuition at U.S. PhD-granting institutions. Leveraging the relaxation of U.S. visa policy and the appreciation of the Chinese yuan as natural experiments that drove a rise in Chinese undergraduate enrollment beginning in 2005, I use institution-level panel data from 2000 to 2019 and employ difference-in-differences and instrumental variable approaches to identify the causal effects of rising international undergraduate enrollment on tuition outcomes. I find that increases in international undergraduate enrollment raise out-of-state sticker-price tuition at public PhD-granting universities but reduce it at private PhD-granting institutions. Private PhD-granting institutions with greater exposure to international undergraduate enrollment growth also experience reductions in average net-price tuition, while public PhD-granting institutions show no significant change. These divergent responses highlight differing institutional priorities: private universities appear to prioritize school quality and student subsidization, while public institutions emphasize in-state access and budget stability. The findings suggest that domestic students at private universities benefit more from international undergraduate student growth than their counterparts at public institutions.
Refugee Integration
Refugees, Amenities, and the Skill Premium
Elif Basaran (Penn State)
This paper examines how intra-national native migration patterns and region-specific welfare respond to large inflows of immigrants. Leveraging the case of Turkiye, which experienced a substantial influx of Syrian refugees following the 2011 Syrian Civil War, I first provide reduced-form evidence on the effects of the influx on local labor markets and housing rents across skill groups. I then document an increase in native outmigration from refugee-concentrated areas, particularly among the high-skilled, alongside a significant deterioration in local amenities. These changes disproportionately burden the low-skilled natives, deepening pre-existing disparities between skill groups. Finally, to quantify the role of amenity changes in shaping native outmigration, I develop a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model in which amenities evolve endogenously and affect natives’ migration decisions through estimated, skill-specific amenity taste parameters. The model highlights amenity deterioration as a key mechanism behind native flight, and shows how differential mobility and amenity preferences reinforce rising skill premiums. It also provides a basis for counterfactual experiments that explore the effects of refugee reallocation policies and targeted subsidies. These demonstrate the potential for policy interventions to reduce regional distributional gaps and welfare losses.
Sheltering Refugees in Cities: Crime, Public Services, and Voting
Chris Brito (UC Davis)
An extensive literature documents that immigration flows frequently trigger native backlash, often reflected in heightened support for far-right parties. Yet, the mechanisms driving this response remain unclear, whether rooted in economic competition or cultural threat. Because these channels operate locally and through daily contact, identifying them requires granular data that are typically scarce. This paper examines how the reception of refugees affects local public education, crime, and ultimately voting behavior, exploiting detailed within-city data and plausibly exogenous variation from the quasi-random location of refugee shelters. Using a differences-in-differences strategy, I find that refugee shelters had no impact on crime or congestion in local public schools. However, they boosted natives’ support for far-right candidates and reduced votes for the incumbent. Effects are largely driven by shelters hosting culturally diverse refugees comprising different indigenous ethnicities. Using UN reports data, locals’ exposure to vulnerability - children outside of school, child labor, and homelessness - can be behind the results. Together, the results reveal that cultural perceptions can dominate economic channels in shaping local political responses to migration, and that aggregated data can miss essential nuances in locals’ attitudes towards migrants.
Employers and Refugee Economic Integration: The Effect of Early Employer Quality
Alessandro Caiumi (UC Davis) and Emil A.L. Simonsen (University of Copenhagen)
Drawing on matched employer–employee data from Denmark, we study the role of early employers in the labor market integration of refugees. First, using the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999), we estimate firm-specific wage premia that we use as a proxy for workplace quality. Second, we leverage the role of social connections and a dispersal policy implemented between 1986 and 1998, which quasi-randomly allocated refugees across municipalities, to obtain exogenous variation in their exposure to the quality of first potential employers. We find that placement in a municipality where, at arrival, co-nationals are employed by high-quality employers has positive and statistically significant effects on refugees’ employment and earnings for up to ten years. We also present a set of novel stylized facts on refugees and the firm ladder, highlighting the lasting influence of first employers for this group of workers and discussing potential implications for two-way fixed effects models. Incorporating our insights into a data-driven algorithm to optimally match refugees with Danish municipalities leads to a 46% increase in short-run employment probability relative to the status quo dispersal policy. Our results imply that the type of employers available upon refugees’ first entry is an important determinant of their success in host countries.
Migrant Networks, Liquidity Constraints, and Integration Frictions in the Venezuelan Exodus
Agustín Deambrosi (Penn State)
Forced migrants concentrate persistently in overcrowded border regions despite superior opportunities elsewhere. This paper shows that the interaction of liquidity constraints, network externalities, and location-specific integration capital creates powerful path dependence in refugee settlement, and that both the design and timing of assistance are first-order for policy effectiveness. I develop and estimate a dynamic structural model where credit-constrained migrants make forward-looking location decisions, networks endogenously reduce migration costs, and integration capital accumulates but resets upon relocation. Using data from specialized migrant surveys across four South American countries during the Venezuelan exodus, I show how these forces interact: binding liquidity constraints trap early migrants in proximate but unproductive locations; their presence generates network externalities drawing subsequent cohorts to the same destinations; accumulated integration capital then locks both groups in place even as savings permit moves to better locations. The model reveals that intervention timing dramatically affects program effectiveness. Early transport assistance---subsidies for reaching productive destinations deployed in the crisis’s first two years---increases welfare by 4.7% of lifetime consumption. The same budget deployed two years later generates only 2.7% gains, implying a timing multiplier of 1.7. This difference emerges because early assistance triggers compounding network effects that amplify program impact through successive cohorts. Critically, conditional transport assistance dominates unconditional cash transfers of equal value by leveraging positive network externalities that forward-looking migrants do not internalize. These findings speak directly to the refugee recognition debate: Venezuelans’ exclusion from UNHCR programs denies them access to coordinated mobility support, generating substantial welfare costs through spatial misallocation.
Refugees’ Right to Work: Efficiency and Equity in Host Country Labor Markets
Sarah Winton (LSE)
One in every 200 people in the world is a refugee. In most host countries, refugees face legal barriers to work, confining them to informal work or unemployment. This paper studies how granting refugees the right to work reshapes the allocation of refugee and host labor across occupations. I leverage a unique natural experiment – a large-scale work permit scheme for Syrian refugees in Jordan – and assemble a novel dataset to study how the policy impacted the labor market outcomes of both refugees and hosts. Using a shift–share measure of exposure to refugee competition, I document three main effects on Jordanian workers. First, Jordanians exit occupations that are highly exposed to refugees, re-sorting elsewhere. Second, consistent with a standard sorting model, this exit coincides with an increase in the average wage of Jordanians in exposed occupations. Third, re-sorting leads to occupational upgrading, as college-educated Jordanians move into less exposed, higher-paying jobs. To separate the effects of refugee entry from locals’ re-sorting, I build a model of occupational choice nested in general equilibrium. The estimated model implies Jordanians experience modest wage gains and a small rise in unemployment from the policy. Distributionally, the poorest Jordanian workers benefit the most from the work permit scheme, despite being those who lose in a benchmark without re-sorting. Aggregate output increases by nearly 11%, driven by improved utilization of refugee labor and translating into large wage gains for refugees. Work permits unlock aggregate efficiency gains and, through re-sorting, reduce host country income inequality.
Tax Policy
Elasticity of Taxable Income and Social and Cultural Norms: Evidence from immigrants in Canada
Kuot D. Manyang (University of Calgary)
Understanding how cultural and social norms shape taxpayer responses to changes in tax policy is vital to promoting tax compliance and morale. Exploiting exogenous variation in the tax rate from Canadian reforms and detailed administrative data, I estimate taxable income elasticity (ETI) and find that immigrants have a larger ETI (0.094) than non-immigrants (0.078). Then, I estimate the ETI for immigrants’ countries of origin separately and examine how it varies with its cultural norms. Immigrants from countries with cultural norms such as individualism, uncertainty avoidance, trust in others and government, and religiosity have lower elasticities. In contrast, those from countries with cultural norms such as high-power distance, masculinity, long-term orientation, and political corruption are highly sensitive to tax changes. These findings emphasize differentiating between pure and culturally induced behavioural responses for effective tax policy. In addition, promoting economic integration and trust in government initiatives within immigrant communities is essential to encourage compliance.
Temporary Migration
Development Effects of Social Eligibility Criteria for Temporary Migration
Daliah Al-Shakhshir (Stanford GSB)
Temporary migration offers a pathway to higher income, but can be disruptive to communities of origin. I investigate distortions in origin communities that arise in response to social eligibility criteria that gatekeep access to those opportunities. Specifically, I study the effects of age and marital status eligibility requirements in the case of commuting Palestinian migrant labor to Israel. Over time, the minimum age threshold dropped while holding marriage fixed. Using individual-level Palestinian census data and a record of work permit regulations, I employ a triple-differences design that leverages differential cohort and regional exposure to the policy change. First, I show that men bring forward their timing of marriage in line with changes in the minimum age threshold in more highly exposed areas. Second, I find that women, nonparticipants in the work permit program, are more likely to get married earlier, have children earlier, and register declines in educational attainment in those same areas. I do not find effects on their labor market status. These findings demonstrate how policies that condition labor market access on demographics can have potentially adverse consequences for non-target populations through general equilibrium dynamics.
Political Impact of Curtailing Low-skilled Immigrants: Evidence from the Bracero Program
Rui Zhong (GWU)
A central question in U.S. immigration policy is how a reduction in low-skilled immigrant labor shapes the economy and politics. This paper examines the political impact of restricting the supply of immigrant workers under the Bracero Program, a U.S.–Mexico agreement that provided Mexican farm labor to address postwar shortages. This restriction occurred in two phases: first, a 1962 minimum wage increase for Mexican workers and second, the program’s official termination. Using cross-county variation in exposure to Mexican farm workers, I employ a difference-in-differences model to compare electoral outcomes in high- and low-exposure counties after 1962. In the short run, these policies led to a 2.8 percentage point increase in the vote share for the Republican party, which had opposed the program’s termination. This effect is likely driven by voter reaction to higher agricultural prices and by the mobilization of voters through Republican-affiliated media.
Undocumented Migration In The US
Uncertain futures: How did the threat of rescinding DACA affect eligible immigrants’ outcomes?
Mate Szurop (CU Boulder)
Since its introduction in 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has been one of the most contested U.S. immigration policies. This article examines how the uncertainty arising from the 2017 attempted rescission of the policy impacted the labor market outcomes of eligible immigrants. Using American Community Survey data, I implement a difference-in-differences research design that exploits the sharp eligibility cutoffs of the policy to define treatment and comparison groups. I find that the threat to end the program had statistically significant negative effects on eligible immigrants’ employment, labor force participation, and total income. I further investigate how state-level support for DACA recipients mitigated these effects and explore heterogeneity by sex, age, and education. My results are robust across a range of different specifications, samples, and undocumented proxies, and pass placebo tests. My paper demonstrates that the outcomes of DACA-eligible workers respond to legislative uncertainty, strengthening the argument for a more permanent legal structure.
Immigration Policies and Human Capital: The Impact on Undocumented College Attendance
David Titus (Cornell)
I estimate the impact of Universal E-Verify laws on the college attendance of undocumented Hispanics in the United States. To do so, I implement a series of event studies that account for staggered adoption over time, and I use a random forest algorithm as my primary approach for predicting undocumented status. My results indicate that Universal E-Verify laws lower the college attendance of undocumented Hispanics ages 18–24 by about 3.7 percentage points. This is a substantial effect: only 15.7 percent of undocumented Hispanics ages 18–24 in treated states were enrolled in college following the passage of the laws. This effect is robust to using logical imputation on non-citizen Hispanics to proxy for undocumented immigrants, using a logit model instead of random forest, testing for migration spillover effects on bordering states, and considering potentially confounding impacts of other state-level policies. I develop a theoretical model that explains the mechanisms through which Universal E-Verify affects college education, and I test this model’s implications. I find suggestive evidence that the effect is driven by a negative labor market shock on undocumented adults ages 25–54, which likely leads to worse schooling for their children and renders college less attainable. These findings indicate that employment restrictions targeting working-age undocumented adults hinder the human capital development of undocumented youth.
Provided they had a job market candidate website.
There weren’t any migration papers in the first 10 departments, so then I gave up.