Kiel Working Papers, Kiel Institute for World Economics
No 1835:
Empirical Characteristics of Legal and Illegal Immigrants in the U.S.
Vincenzo Caponi
Abstract: We combine the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), which contains
information on US legal immigrants, with the American Community Survey
(ACS), which contains information on all immigrants to the U.S., legal and
illegal ones. Using econometric methodology proposed by Lancaster and
Imbens (1996) we compute the probability for each observation in the ACS
data to refer to an illegal immigrant, conditional on observed
characteristics. The results for illegal versus legal immigrants are novel,
since no other work has quanti ed the characteristics of illegal immigrants
from a random sample. We nd that, compared to legal immigrants, illegal
immigrants are more likely to be less educated, males, and married with
spouse not present. These results are heterogeneous across education
categories, country of origin (Mexico) and whether professional occupations
are included or not in the analysis. Forecasts for the distribution of
certain legal and illegal characteristics match those available from other
sources, such as aggregate imputations by the Department of Homeland
Security for illegal immigrants
Keywords: legal immigrants; illegal immigrants; contaminated controls; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: J15,; F22; (follow links to similar papers)
29 pages, April 2013
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