PRELIMINARY How Much Does Amnesty Stretch the Safety Net? Evidence from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper estimates the effect of immigrant legal status on Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and food stamp transfers using variation from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which authorized the largest U.S. amnesty to date. Our empirical approach exploits both the timing of IRCA and the geographic unevenness of applications for legal status under the law. We find that areas with higher applicant shares experienced relatively large increases in EITC transfers after IRCA, both at the state level and at the metropolitan area level within three heavilyaffected states – California, Florida, and Texas. Income tax filing rates among low earners increased alongside EITC transfers, and effects arise in years when the EITC schedule remained unchanged. The estimates imply that achieving legal status raised the annual EITC transfer to the average applicant by about $800 by 1996 – roughly 5% of pre-amnesty average annual earnings, and marginally more than would be expected based on mechanical eligibility effects alone. Estimated effects of legal status on food stamp transfers are small by comparison. The findings suggest that legal reprieves for unauthorized parents today could have large effects on their U.S. citizen children by making them eligible for the EITC. * Corresponding author: [email protected]. We thank participants at the 2016 SOLE Annual Meeting for their comments. We also thank William Paja and Chris Brown for outstanding research assistance and gratefully acknowledge funding from Dartmouth College. All errors are our own.
منابع مشابه
How Much Does Amnesty Strengthen the Safety Net? Evidence from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986
We explore how immigrant legal status affects safety net transfers using variation from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which authorized the largest U.S. amnesty to date. Exploiting the timing and geographic unevenness in intensity of IRCA’s legalization programs, we estimate a sizable effect of permanent residency on Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) transfers. By contrast...
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