Getting Off on the Wrong Foot: The Long-Term Effects of Missing a Large-Scale Amnesty for Immigrant Workers

Event Date: 10 November 2021

Speaker: Roberto Nistico, Associate Professor Department of Economics and Statistics (DiSES), University of Naples Federico II

Time: 4pm

Please contact Rachel Hill (r.hill@strath.ac.uk) for Zoom details.

Abstract:

We estimate the long-run effects of ineligibility for legalization on immigrants' formal employment and assimilation at work. Our empirical approach exploits the exogenous change in probability of obtaining legal status induced by a 2002 Italian amnesty program targeting irregular foreign workers. We show that immigrants unexposed to the amnesty have a 15% lower probability of being regularly employed a decade later than their counterparts. They also experience a deterioration in their working conditions in the long run, with increases in job immobility and segregation, and a decline in linguistic assimilation.

If you would like to read the full paper, please click here.

Published: 6 October 2021