It has been more than a decade since California voters passed a ballot initiative entitled “Proposition 187.” Though it was later declared unconstitutional, the measure would have denied unauthorized immigrants access to all public benefits. Slightly less than two years later, passage of the federal-level welfare and illegal immigration acts in 1996 effectively barred not only unauthorized immigrants, but also almost all non-citizens from receiving food stamps and supplemental social security. States, meanwhile, were permitted to exclude most non-citizens from three other important federal anti-poverty programs. Taken collectively the three policy initiatives reflect a lingering ambiguity felt by many U.S. residents concerning the impact of unauthorized immigration.
Although it may be true that some unauthorized immigrants are motivated to migrate to the United States to tap into publicly available resources, it is generally recognized that most enter to build a better life for themselves and their families by securing a higher paying job.
Targeting immigrants’ behavior in the form of labor market competition in the United States certainly is not new. But the legislative developments during the 1990s represented the first time in U.S. history that immigrant use of welfare caused a major immigration policy change. But perhaps more striking is the almost complete lack of credible, systematic research on the economic impact of unauthorized immigrants. Amid this dearth of credible studies, restrictionist immigration policy galloped apace.
Consider the claim that unauthorized immigrants take jobs away from, or depress the wages of, lower-skilled, U.S.-born, minority workers. Before 1994, only two quantitative studies employing random data had been published on this subject. The first was undertaken in the late 1980s by a team of University of Texas researchers using 1980 U.S. Census data. They reported that although legal immigrants had a small negative effect on the wages of U.S.-born white workers in the U.S. Southwest, undocumented Mexican immigrants actually had a small positive effect.
University of Toledo researchers in the early 1990s used the same data. This time, however, they investigated the impact of undocumented immigrants on the unemployment of U.S.-born youth and minority workers, and found an inverse relationship. Unauthorized immigrants tended to cluster in states where unemployment among these two vulnerable groups was lower. The authors interpreted this finding as suggestive of labor market complementarity rather than substitution. More recent research suggests that unauthorized immigrants fill relatively undesirable jobs only after more socially integrated groups of workers migrate into more desirable occupations. My work with 1994 and 2001 Mexican survey data collected in Los Angeles County and more recent census data for California confirm the positive earnings and employment impact results of the two quantitative studies noted above.
What is perhaps even more surprising about the measurement-sentiment gap and passage of the 1996 acts, is that not one empirical article on unauthorized immigrants’ use of welfare using random data was published until the late 1990s. Furthermore, when it appeared, the findings produced by a team of researchers from the University of Southern California contradicted the fundamental premise underlying Proposition 187 and the 1996 acts. Rather than being more likely to have accessed any of several means-tested entitlement programs, unauthorized Mexican immigrants in 1995-1996 were no more likely to have done so than other residents of Los Angeles County. And they were significantly less likely to have used Medicaid, general public assistance or school lunch subsidies than U.S.-born residents. Despite their lower relative income status, when unauthorized Mexican immigrants did use a public assistance program, the value of services received was substantially lower compared to other welfare recipients.
Taken together these sparse yet important findings recommend that caution should be embraced when contemplating the economic effects of unauthorized immigration. They suggest that while it is tempting to think that unauthorized Latino immigrants harm the United States fiscally and threaten the employment and earnings opportunities of certain vulnerable groups of workers, in general, available measurements do not support this conclusion. As Mexico and the United States once again begin to discuss the possibility of a new amnesty or guest worker program, policymakers and the public should first recognize that very little evidence exists on how this might impact the United States. Second, they should demand that studies employing more recent data on unauthorized immigrants be undertaken. n
About the Author
Enrico Marcelli is assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the 2003-2005 Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at Harvard University.
