Mexico, but argues that this premium is the result of pre-migration differences in ability and not the result of human capital gains derived from migration. Reinhold and Thom (2013) also find a wage premium for Mexican returnees who worked in the United States. The return to a year of occupation-specific migration experience is estimated to be as high as 9% for some occupations. De Vreyer, Gubert, and Robilliard (2010) examine the labor market outcomes of returnees in seven capital cities in West Africa and find that experience abroad results in a substantial wage premium for migrants returning from an OECD country but not for other return migrants. Controlling for the emigration and return migration selections, Wahba (2015) finds that return migrants experience a wage premium of 16% relative to non-migrants. However, none of these studies has examined the differential effects of return migration on wages with respect to migrants’ legal status.

Our paper contributes to the literature in at least two ways. Firstly, while the literature on undocumented migration has focused on the impact of irregularity on destination countries, this paper is the first to investigate the impact of undocumented migration on migrants after they return to their origin country. This is particularly important since many unauthorized migrants return to their country of origin. Secondly, by disentangling the effects of migrants’ legal status, we contribute to the literature on the impacts of migration on origin countries, which has so far overlooked the question of undocumented migration.

We use data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS 2012), which has several major advantages. First, the Arab Republic of Egypt provides a particularly suitable case study since it is a country with substantial return migration. According to the ELMPS data, in 2012, 9% of individuals between the ages of 15 and 59 were return migrants.<sup>3</sup> This figure is in line with the World Bank report by Brodmann, Pouget, and Gatti (2010), who document that Egyptian migrants constitute 85% of temporary workers in Arab countries, representing as much as 10% of the Egyptian labor force in recent years. Based on the Development Economics Group data from the World Bank, Brodmann, Pouget, and Gatti (2010) show that, in 2005, Egypt was among the top 10 emigration countries in the world. Second, our data provides unique information on migrants’ legal status while abroad, which allows us to distinguish between return migrants according to their type of international migration—documented versus undocumented. Return migrants were asked whether they had a visa or legal document to enter the destination country, as well as the type of document they had.

In this paper, illegal status/undocumented migration refers to unauthorized entry, stay, or employment in a country.<sup>4</sup> Generally speaking, misreporting information regarding migrants’ legal status is problematic. This is especially the case for studies

> 3 Using the ELMPS 2018, we also find high rates of return migration. For example, in 2018, we find that 7.4% of households had a return migrant. We also find that 7.1% of individuals between the ages 15-59 and 9.2% of men between the ages 15-59 were return migrants in 2018.

> 4 We note the use of the terms undocumented and illegal interchangeably in the rest of the paper.

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