Migration, labor markets, and economic opportunity

Immigration detention removes workers from households and local labor markets, but its economic costs are largely unknown. I exploit a recent Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) ruling that sharply reduced eligibility for bond among detained migrants in the United States to estimate the economic effects of detention. Using the ruling's differential impact across individuals, I find that increased detention reduces household employment and income and generates spillovers to local industries with greater exposure to affected workers. Effects are concentrated among households with fewer alternative earners and industries more reliant on immigrant labor. The results show that immigration enforcement generates substantial economic costs beyond the individuals directly subject to detention, affecting household labor supply and local production.

This paper examines how Venezuelan migration affected the labor market outcomes of Peruvian women, with a focus on adjustment in the informal sector before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than treating the post-pandemic period as merely a longer time horizon, I use it to examine whether the labor market margins through which migration affects native workers change over time.

Using nationally representative household survey data and a gender-specific shift-share instrument, I estimate the causal effects of migration on labor force participation, informal employment, and labor income. I find that Venezuelan migration reduced labor force participation among Peruvian women while increasing labor income among those who remained employed in the informal sector. These results attenuate by 2022.

My findings suggest that migration altered the composition of women's participation in the informal labor market, highlighting the importance of considering multiple margins of labor market adjustment when evaluating the distributional consequences of migration for women in highly informal economies, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic.

We study how a highly salient national event shapes perceptions of a minority group. Our setting is the 2023 rescue of the four Indigenous children who survived for forty days in the Colombian Amazon following a plane crash. The rescue received extensive media coverage in Colombia and abroad, and media accounts emphasized the role of Indigenous people in locating and rescuing the children. Using variation in interview timing around the rescue in a nationally representative survey, we estimate the effect of the event on views toward Indigenous communities. Respondents interviewed after the rescue expressed significantly more favorable views, especially among those who identify as right-wing, whose pre-existing views left greater room for updating. We also find evidence of increased Indigenous self-identification, even though ethnic identities are generally regarded as relatively stable. More broadly, our findings highlight the role of salient collective experiences in shaping social beliefs and identities.