STUDYING THE EFFECTS OF STRICT IMMIGRATION LAWS ON THE US AGRICULTURAL SECTOR AND BEYOND

Since the mid-2000's many US states (e.g. Georgia, Alabama, Arizona, North Carolina,Florida, Utah etc.) have adopted strict immigration laws which have resulted in a lower local immigrant population and lower immigrant labor supply (Bohn, Lofstrom and Rafael 2014; Kostandini, Mykerezi and Escalante 2014). The adoption of strict immigration enforcement, such as the Employment Verification (E-verify) usually imposes a large and instant labor supply shock to labor-intensive production sectors including agriculture that has a labor force composed by more than 50 percent of undocumented workers. E-Verify is a federal system that checks the employment eligibility of new employees and was launched by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996 as a voluntary participation program. Since the mid-2000s, as a response to the ineffective debates on immigration reform at the national level, some states have adopted E-verify mandates to tackle the issue of illegal immigration by themselves.This project will use existing and new empirical methods on individual, county and state level data to seek insights on three different aspects of the impact of immigration laws in the US agricultural sector and other sectors that may be affected by these laws. First, it will examine the effect of E-verify laws on the labor supply of the states that adopted them such as Georgia, Alabama, Utah, Arizona, etc. Second, it will examine the effect of the well documented immigrant shortage in Arizona (e.g. Bohn, Lofstrom and Raphael, 2014) due to the Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) and its effects on the farm family labor and investments in agricultural technology. Third, it will examine the effects of E-Verify laws on the wages of citizens and immigrants across different sectors in the US (agriculture, construction, service, etc.).