Did the 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act Reduce the State's Unauthorized Immigrant Population?

Sarah Bohn; Magnus Lofstrom; Steven Raphael

doi:10.1162/rest_a_00429

Did the 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act Reduce the State's Unauthorized Immigrant Population?

Sarah Bohn¹; Magnus Lofstrom²; Steven Raphael³

¹ Public Policy Institute of California · ² Public Policy Institute of California and IZA · ³ Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley and IZA

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2014

Abstract We test for an effect of Arizona's 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) on the proportion of the state's population characterized as noncitizen Hispanic. We use the synthetic control method to select a group of states against which Arizona's population trends can be compared. We document a notable and statistically significant reduction in the proportion of the Hispanic noncitizen population in Arizona. The decline observed matches the timing of LAWA's implementation, deviates from the time series for the synthetic control group, and stands out relative to the distribution of placebo estimates for other states in the nation.

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00429
Volume: 96 (2)
Pages: 258-269
Language: en
Export: BibTeX
Sources: crossref openalex