American Economic Review Vol. 108 No. 6 2018

Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion

Michael A. Clemens¹; Ethan Lewis²; Hannah Postel³

¹ Center for Global Development, 2055 L Street NW, 5th Floor, Washington, DC 20036, and IZA (email: ) · ² Department of Economics, Dartmouth College, 304  Rockefeller Hall, Hanover, NH 03755, and NBER (email: ) · ³ Office of Population Research, Princeton University, Wallace Hall 2nd Floor, Princeton, NJ 08540 (email: )

Abstract

An important class of active labor market policy has received little impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to raise wages and employment by shrinking labor supply. Theories of endogenous technical advance raise the possibility of limited or even perverse impact. We study a natural policy experiment: the exclusion of almost half a million Mexican bracero farm workers from the United States to improve farm labor market conditions. With novel labor market data we measure state-level exposure to exclusion, and model the absent changes in technology or crop mix. We fail to reject zero labor market impact, inconsistent with this model.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20170765

Volume

108

Issue

6

Pages

1468-1487

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

APA 7 MLA 9 Chicago (author–date) Harvard Elsevier Harvard (JFE, JBF…) The Accounting Review Academy of Management American Marketing Association INFORMS (Management Science) Copy citation Copied ✓