Labor Migrants

Abstract:
Many households in developing countries rely on renewable natural resources as their main source of energy. Collecting and burning firewood requires a considerable amount of time, has negative health consequences, and can cause deforestation and depletion of local resources if forests are not properly managed. A transition from traditional to modern fuels can benefit households by reducing these negative effects. Migration, a quintessential feature of development, may facilitate this transition, but its impacts on fuel choice are theoretically ambiguous. It can reduce the household labor available for firewood collection and provide cash to purchase substitutes; however, it has an income effect that changes the demand for home-cooked food and energy to cook it. Firewood or gas could be used to meet the increase in energy demand. To resolve this theoretical ambiguity, we use an instrumental-variables method with household panel data from rural Mexico and investigate the impact of Mexico-to-US migration and remittances on gas expenditures and household labor allocated to firewood collection. Sending a migrant to the United States causes a significant decrease in reliance on firewood collection and an increase in both stove and gas purchases. These findings have potentially far-reaching environmental implications as labor moves off the farm.

Abstract:
US farms employ 2.4 million hired workers sometime during a typical year, over half of whom are unauthorized. Hired farm labor is concentrated by commodity, geography, and size of farm. While all producers face risks due to immigration enforcement, large producers of labor-intensive crops in California, Florida, Texas, and Washington are most vulnerable to increased labor costs. The four major immigration policy options would increase enforcement against illegal migration. The status quo of more I-9 audits and state and local laws encourages risk avoidance, including farmers turning to labor contractors and other intermediaries to obtain workers so that liability for violations rests with these middlemen. An enforcement-only approach that requires all employers to use EVerify to check new hires may result in the circulation of unauthorized workers between employers. Stepped-up enforcement combined with easier access to guest workers should increase the share of farm jobs filled by legal foreign workers from less than 10 percent today. Finally, comprehensive immigration reforms that include more enforcement and legalization could accelerate the exodus of current workers from the farm work force and may increase the employment of guest worker.

Abstract:
An analysis of nationally representative panel data from rural Mexico, with observations in years 2002, 2007, and 2010, suggests that the same shift out of farm work that characterized U.S. labor history is well underway in Mexico. Meanwhile, the demand for agricultural labor in Mexico is rising. In the future, U.S. agriculture will compete with Mexican farms for a dwindling supply of farm labor. Since U.S. domestic workers are unwilling to do farm work and the United States can feasibly import farm workers from only a few countries in close geographic proximity, the agricultural industry will eventually need to adjust production to use less labor. The decline in foreign labor supply to farms in the United States ultimately will need to be accompanied by farm labor conservation, switching to less labor intensive crops and technologies, and labor management practices that match fewer workers with more farm jobs.

Abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between openness to trade, immigration, and income per person across countries. To address endogeneity concerns we extend the instrumental-variables strategy introduced by Frankel and Romer (1999). We build predictors of openness to immigration and to trade for each country by using information on bilateral geographical and cultural distance (while controlling for country size). Since geography may affect income through other channels, we also control for climate, disease environment, natural resources, and colonial origins. Most importantly, we also account for the roles of institutions and early development. Our instrumental-variables estimates provide evidence of a robust, positive effect of openness to immigration on long-run income per capita. In contrast, we are unable to establish an effect of trade openness on income. We also show that the effect of migration operates through an increase in total factor productivity, which appears to reflect increased diversity in productive skills and, to some extent, a higher rate of innovation.

Abstract:
Using longitudinal data on the universe of workers in Denmark during the period 1991-2008 we track the labor market outcomes of low skilled natives in response to an exogenous inflow of low skilled immigrants. We innovate on previous identification strategies by considering immigrants distributed across municipalities by a refugee dispersal policy in place between 1986 and 1998. We find that an increase in the supply of refugee-country immigrants pushed less educated native workers (especially the young and low-tenured ones) to pursue less manual-intensive occupations. As a result immigration had positive effects on native unskilled wages, employment and occupational mobility.

Abstract:
In this paper we analyze the impact of immigrants on the type and quantity of native jobs. We use data on fifteen Western European countries during the 1996-2010 period. We find that immigrants, by taking manual-routine type of occupations pushed natives towards more "complex" (abstract and communication) jobs. Such positive reallocation occurred while the total number of jobs held by natives was unaffected. This job upgrade was associated in the short run to a 0.6% increase in native wages for a doubling of the immigrants' share. These results are robust to the use of two alternative IV strategies based on past settlement of immigrants across European countries measured alternatively with Census or Labor Force data. The job upgrade slowed, but did not come to a halt, during the Great Recession. We also document the labor market flows behind it: the complexity of jobs offered to new native hires was higher relative to the complexity of lost jobs. Finally, we find evidence that such reallocation was significantly larger in countries with more flexible labor laws and that his tendency was particularly strong for less educated workers.

Introduction:
Nearly a century before it became known as Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley was world-renowned for something else: the succulent fruits and vegetables grown in its fertile soil. In Garden of the World, Cecilia Tsu tells the overlooked, intertwined histories of the Santa Clara Valley's agricultural past and the Asian immigrants who cultivated the land during the region's peak decades of horticultural production. Weaving together the story of three overlapping waves of Asian migration from China, Japan, and the Philippines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Tsu offers a comparative history that sheds light on the ways in which Asian farmers and laborers fundamentally altered the agricultural economy and landscape of the Santa Clara Valley, as well as white residents' ideas about race, gender, and what it meant to be an American family farmer.

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Abstract:
The Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis posits that pre historic population expansions, precipitated by the innovation or early adoption of agriculture, played an important role in the uneven distribution of language families recorded across the world. In this case, the most widely spread language families today came to be distributed at the expense of those that have more restricted distributions. In the Americas, Uto-Aztecan is one such language family that may have been spread across Mesoamerica and the American Southwest by ancient farmers. We evaluated this hypothesis with a large-scale study of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosomal DNA variation in indigenous populations from these regions. Partial correlation coefficients, determined with Mantel tests, show that Y-chromosome variation in indigenous populations from the American Southwest and Mesoamerica correlates significantly with linguistic distances (r = 0.33-0.384; P < 0.02), whereas mtDNA diversity correlates significantly with only geographic distance (r = 0.619; P = 0.002). The lack of correlation between mtDNA and Y-chromosome diversity is consistent with differing population histories of males and females in these regions. Although unlikely, if groups of Uto-Aztecan speakers were responsible for the northward spread of agriculture and their languages from Mesoamerica to the Southwest, this migration was possibly biased to males. However, a recent in situ population expansion within the American Southwest (2,105 years before present; 99.5% confidence interval = 1,273-3,773 YBP), one that probably followed the introduction and intensification of maize agriculture in the region, may have blurred ancient mtDNA patterns, which might otherwise have revealed a closer genetic relationship between females in the Southwest and Mesoamerica.

Abstract:
This study of boosterism and everyday agricultural labor practices in the Santa Clara Valley during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries reveals how the presence of Chinese immigrants in rural California forced white growers to reconceptualize the cherished family farm ideal in a new racial framework.

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Abstract:
Puerto Ricans are concentrated in low-wage jobs and experience higher rates of unemployment and poverty than other Hispanic subgroups. Through a cross-sectional data analysis from the American Community Survey, 2006– 2008, we examine the experience of Puerto Rican workers. Though educational attainment and language disparities play a role, structural factors such as concentration in low-wage service industries also explain the disadvantaged standing of Puerto Ricans in the labor market. This analysis highlights the importance of ethnic-specific studies and the need for research on factors that may influence Puerto Rican workers’ mobility in and out of low-wage jobs.