Description/Abstract
This paper studies how increased immigration enforcement in the destination country impacts labor markets in the origin country. Using variation in Mexican migrant networks and Secure Communities (SC), a policy which expanded local immigration enforcement, I show that the deportation of Mexican migrants from the U.S. increases return migration to Mexico and decreases monthly earnings for workers in Mexico. The negative earnings effects are largest for workers most similar to return migrants in terms of their demographics, occupations, and employment types, and are consistent with increased labor market competition.
Document Type
Working Paper
Date
3-4-2026
Keywords
Return migration, deportations, labor markets
Language
English
Series
Working Papers Series
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my advisors Sam Bazzi, Daniele Paserman, and David Lagakos for their support and guidance throughout this project. I would like to thank Dilip Mookherjee, Kevin Lang, Hanna Schwank, Cem Özgüzel, Brian Cadena, David McKenzie, Steven Stillman, Eduardo Medina-Cortina, and Daniel Osuna-Gomez for their helpful comments and suggestions. I benefited from discussions with seminar participants at California State University, Fullerton, Cornell University, Syracuse University, and the University of California Davis Global Migration Center and conference participants at the Western Economic Association International Virtual (WEAI) Conference, the IZA Annual Migration Meeting, the Development and Political Economics SF Bay Area PhD Student Conference (DEVPEC), the Young Economists Symposium (YES), the RIDGE Virtual Workshop on Labor, the 15th Migration and Development Conference hosted by NOVAFRICA, and the Southern Economic Association (SEA) Conference. I am grateful to Eduardo Medina-Cortina for sharing bilateral migration data and to Sue Long at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) for assistance with immigration enforcement data, which I obtained from Syracuse University as a TRAC Fellow. Any errors are my own.
Disciplines
Economic Policy | Economics | Labor Economics | Migration Studies | Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration | Public Policy
ISSN
1525-3066
Recommended Citation
Pearson, Thomas, "Immigration Enforcement and Origin Country Labor Markets" (2026). Center for Policy Research. 524.
https://surface.syr.edu/cpr/524
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Included in
Economic Policy Commons, Labor Economics Commons, Migration Studies Commons, Public Policy Commons
Additional Information
CPR Working Paper No. 286