Immigration, Employment, and Public Policies
Paper Session
Friday, Jan. 3, 2025 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (PST)
- Chair: Francisca Antman, University of Colorado-Boulder
Unaccompanied Migrant Children and Violations of Federal Child Labor Legislation
Abstract
Child labor violations in the United States have quadrupled since 2015. Labor shortages caused by the pandemic, baby boomer retirements, and inflationary pressures have prompted state-level efforts to relax child labor laws, emphasizing teenage labor as cost-effective and respectful of parental rights. However, reports on unaccompanied migrant children (UMCs) being hired post-release from government custody challenge some of those arguments and raise concerns about the potential abuse of at-risk children. In this paper, we explore whether UMC placements, amid changes in state child labor laws, have contributed to county-level child labor violations between 2019 and 2022. We pay attention to the incidence, but also the frequency and seriousness of the infractions—as captured by the number of affected children and whether it involved hazardous occupations. Our findings highlight the need for regulatory controls to ensure the government’s ability to track vulnerable UMCs and ensure children’s well-being.The Self-Employment Decisions of Immigrants in America
Abstract
In this paper, I analyze the relationship between immigrants’ employment engagement in their home countries and their self-employment decisions in the United States. Using a unique dataset with pre and post-migration labor market data from permanent residents, I assess whether individuals who did not work before migrating were more likely to be self-employed in America controlling for demographic characteristics, human capital, and region of origin and destination in the United States, among other factors. This paper belongs to a burgeoning literature studying the relationship between pre and post-migration labor market outcomes of immigrants. Previous work on this area has looked at the persistence of self-employment across borders but has focused on the U.S. outcomes of the subset individuals with home country work experience. However, many immigrants come to America without work experience, whose trajectories I analyze in this paper in addition to studying the experiences of those who worked in their origin countries.Food Insecurity and SNAP Access among Immigrant Households
Abstract
Over 40 million people in the U.S. are foreign-born, and one in four children have at least one immigrant parent, making immigrant households crucial for the future of the U.S. population. We document that there have been significant disparities in food insecurity exposure and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits received between immigrant and native households, which become more prominent when focusing on Hispanic households or those with children. While SNAP partially mitigates the food insecurity disparity and vulnerability, the unmet gap in food resources remains substantial. We also use a decomposition framework that breaks down differences in SNAP benefits across groups into three policy components: eligibility, participation, and generosity, and links them to differences in food insecurity outcomes. Through this decomposition, we study how the relative importance of these three policy components differs across immigrant and native households. Among other insights, we find that immigrant-led low-income Hispanic households receive significantly lower mean SNAP benefits compared to their native counterparts, which is primarily attributed to the generosity component. However, both the eligibility and participation components exacerbate the relative benefits gap. Among low-income households with children, SNAP slightly mitigates the relative food resource gap between immigrant-led and native-led households through both eligibility and generosity, but participation significantly intensifies their relative gap. Counterfactual policy experiments indicate that policies aimed at increasing participation among immigrants would be the most effective policy approach for alleviating the relative food resource gap between immigrant and native disadvantaged populations.Discussant(s)
Christopher Campos
,
University of Chicago
Rene Crespin
,
Michigan State University
Chunbei Wang
,
Virginia Tech
Joaquin Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba
,
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
JEL Classifications
- J1 - Demographic Economics
- F2 - International Factor Movements and International Business