Labor Market Outcomes for Legal Mexican Immigrants Under the New Regime of Immigration Enforcement

Circular migration between Mexico and the United States historically has been very common. For most Mexicans, migration north of the border was not a once-in-a-lifetime event, but a mobility strategy repeated multiple times over the course of a migratory career, with trips for wage labor abroad being interspersed with stays at home. As a result, Mexican migrants accumulate U.S. experience across a number of different trips and, potentially, in a variety of different legal statuses. Although some migrants may hold the same legal status on each trip, others shift documentation over time. For example, a migrant might initially cross the border without documents to work without authorization, return home, and then reenter later with a temporary work visa, only to return home again to marry someone who can sponsor them for permanent resident status, and then come back again as a legal permanent resident. Indeed, given the proximity of Mexico to the United States and the long history of migration between the two countries, the typical Mexican immigrant is likely to have made multiple trips and accumulated different amounts of U.S. experience in several legal statuses. We began this work seeking to determine whether U.S. labor market experience accumulated in undocumented versus temporary or permanent legal status had long-term implications for the jobs attained and wages earned by legal Mexican migrants. We hypothesized that time accumulated in undocumented or temporary status might not carry the same benefits and returns as time accumulated in permanent resident status. Compared with documented migrants, those without documents and those holding temporary work visas are constrained in the sorts of jobs they can obtain and are in a poor position to bargain for wages. Undocumented migrants are generally confined to the lowest rungs of the secondary labor market and have no effective labor rights. Likewise, temporary work visas are issued to employers rather than workers, thus constraining job mobility, skill formation, and wages and giving them very limited labor rights. In order to consider whether experience accumulated under legal auspices had long term consequences for immigrant earnings, we turned to data from the Mexican Migration Project, which contains complete migratory histories for all household heads with U.S. migratory experience. Using these data, we selected all migrants who had achieved legal status by the time of their last U.S. trip and then identified the different pathways to legalization the migrants had followed (the sequences of statuses held prior to adjustment) and computed the cumulative time spent in different legal statuses. We then matched the pathways and accumulated times with information on wages earned on the most recent U.S. trip. Analyzing these data, we found that, other things equal, the specific pathway a migrant followed to legalization had no effect on wages earned or occupations held after legal status was achieved. When we examined differences by legal status in the economic returns to U.S. experience, however, we found complex interactions with period of migration and discovered a sharp break in how human capital of all kinds was rewarded before and after 1996. Before that date, migrants with more education, greater English language ability, and higher levels of U.S. experience were more likely to attain a skilled occupation, whether the experience was in undocumented or temporary status. Afterward, the positive effect of education declined, English language lost its effect on occupational attainment, undocumented experience declined to insignificance, and experience accumulated with a temporary visa came to have a negative effect on the odds of getting a skilled job. In terms of wages, we observed similar differences in the returns to education, English language ability, and U.S. experience before and after 1996. We argue here that major shifts in U.S. immigration and border policies during the mid-1990s undermined the labor market position of Mexican immigrants to the United States, even those with legal documents, the group we focus on here. We present data documenting the dramatic nature of American policy shifts and consider their likely influence on immigrant labor markets. We then estimate regression equations to predict occupational and wage attainments before and after 1996 to reveal a very clear deterioration in the labor market position of legal immigrants who, in theory, but apparently not in practice, enjoy full labor rights in the United States.