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Title: Unexpected Harvest: A Study of Californian Agricultural Wages after the IRCA

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2015

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Abstract: The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was supposed to encourage a smaller, legal agricultural workforce. However, it actually led to a larger labor force, increased by newimmigrant SAWs and unabated illegal immigration. Previous papers have failed to econometrically identify the drop in wages and increase in labor supply reported by farmers and workers, leading to a discrepancy between the economic literature and other fields literatures on the IRCA. Using a linear spline approach between two regions in California, I find that employment of agricultural workers in the SAW-heavy Los Angeles regions increased relative to that in the North Coast region due to a relative increase in farm labor contractor employment, suggesting an increase in labor supply caused by the IRCA. I also use difference-in-differencein-differences equations to show that wages decreased post-IRCA, particularly for laborintensive industries and for Mexican male immigrants.

Url: http://economics.stanford.edu/files/EmilyKohn_HonorsThesis_2015.pdf

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Authors: Kohn, Emily

Publisher: Stanford University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Migration and Immigration, Other

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