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Immigration Reform and Farm Labor Markets
Author(s) -
Richards Timothy J
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
american journal of agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.949
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1467-8276
pISSN - 0002-9092
DOI - 10.1093/ajae/aay027
Subject(s) - immigration reform , economic shortage , immigration , enforcement , agriculture , labour economics , economics , state (computer science) , immigration policy , business , political science , law , geography , linguistics , philosophy , archaeology , algorithm , government (linguistics) , computer science
Farmers throughout the United States report a shortage of workers. At the same time, there are proposals to strengthen the enforcement of existing immigration laws. In this paper, we develop an equilibrium approach to examine the impact of removing undocumented workers from the California agricultural labor market, and to infer whether there is evidence of shortages using individual‐worker data. We find evidence that is consistent with a persistent shortage in some sub‐sectors of the California farm labor market. Further, we conduct counter‐factual policy simulations over a range of possible policy alternatives, and find that removing 50% all undocumented farm workers from the state would lead to an increase in wages of over 22%.