Governments do not always enforce their laws, even when they have the means of doing so, and lax enforcement is common in domain immigration policy. To explain this paradox we develop a political agency model where gains from migration are unevenly distributed, an elected government chooses both quotas enforcement. We show that distributional concerns can perverse effects on policy since utilit...

We analyze the consequences of illegally residing in a country on the likelihood of reporting a crime to the police and, as a consequence, on the likelihood to become victims of a crime. We use an immigration amnesty to address two issues when dealing with the legal status of immigrants: it is both endogenous as well as mostly unobserved in surveys. Right after the 1986 US Immigration Reform an...

Bianca is a 35-year-old, divorced Brazilian woman with a history of depression, anxiety, trauma, and substance abuse who has made several serious suicide attempts. Before three years ago, Bianca had no history of mood or anxiety symptoms. In fact, most of her recent psychiatric symptoms have occurred in the context of heavy substance use. Bianca was previously stable and gainfully employed as a...

This study tests international migration theory, especially cumulative causation theory, by looking into the causal mechanisms of international migration behavior among African immigrants in China by using the respondent-driven sampling method since African immigrants in China belong to a small hidden population. This method collected a representative sample (N = 648) from two locations in 2011...

There is little consensus on the effects of immigration on crime. One potential explanation for the conflicting evidence is heterogeneity across space and time in policies toward immigrants that affect their status in the community and their incentives to engage in illegal activity. In this paper, we take advantage of provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which gr...