In their study of nearly 1,400 Mexican and Central American men who illegally entered the United States between 1975 and 1982 but were granted permanent resident status after IRCA, Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark found that increases in the men's wages after amnesty were due primarily to their newly legalized status, not because of an improved national economy. In this sense, at least, Congress' policy experiment does appear to have led to a beneficial change. Our analysis provides evidence that wage determinants are structurally different for legalized workers after amnesty. The amnestied men, the researchers say, now benefit from the same factors that determine wages for other legal workers, such as educational background, English proficiency and labor market mobility. No longer are the newly legalized immigrants at the mercy of exploitative employers or under the constant threat of discovery by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, they add.
Education now plays a more established role in wage determination.
This is not likely to result from a sudden change in the way in which employers value the human capital of their workers. Instead, the freedom to be mobile after legalization allows workers to maximize the return to their existing human capital. Although the newly legalized workers posted larger income gains than the comparison group during the post-amnesty period, the researchers say that they are still three times as likely to hold traditional migrant jobs as farm workers, groundskeepers, janitors, laborers, cooks and machine operators.