Undocumented immigration and host-country welfare: Competition across segmented labor markets

摘要

To analyze illegal immigration and the effects of immigration enforcement policies. The paper looks at how undocumented workers compete with others in host country markets. The paper analyzes immigration using a model that features a mix of segmentation and displacement. Segmentation is where the legal and migrant workers are segmented, at least partly, with migrants taking the lower wage jobs. Displacements are where the host country workers are displaced when submarkets switch from employing legals to employing migrants. Thus, there is competition between migrants and legal workers, except that competition is across segmented markets. (Or, even though migrants and natives are segmented into different submarkets, they still compete). There are two dimensions to migration. Immigration raises the number of migrants per job type and the number of job types. Migration grows both in depth and width. The paper models the immigration aspects and several conclusions are presented.