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How does facilitating the economic integration of migrants change migrant’s fertility decisions? We leverage a panel survey representative of Venezuelan irregular migrants in Colombia to compare the fertility decisions of eligible and ineligible households before and after a large migratory amnesty was launched in Colombia in 2018. The amnesty granted irregular migrants a labor permit and access to full social services. Our results suggest that the amnesty lowered the likelihood of having a child among program beneficiaries, possibly driven by better labor market opportunities for women and better access to family planning through health services.

In response to the intensification of immigration enforcement in the interior of the USA, some school districts have implemented safe-zone policies to protect students academic progression and well-being. Using primary data from a sample of US-born children of unauthorized migrants, we document the detrimental effect of stricter immigration enforcement on childrens educational outcomes and the benefits of safe-zone policies. Our analyses show that restricting immigration authorities access to schools and providing counseling on immigration-related issues are crucial policy components in strengthening childrens focus, effort, expectations, parental involvement, and relationships. These findings highlight the damaging impact of immigration enforcement on US-citizen children in mixed-status households and advance our understanding of the role of local policies in mitigating these effects.

This article examines changes in parental labor supply in response to the unanticipated closure of schools following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The authors collect detailed daily information on school closures at the school-district level, which they merge to individual-level data on labor supply and sociodemographic characteristics from the monthly Current Population Survey spanning from January 2019 through May 2020. Using a difference-in-differences estimation approach, the authors find evidence of non-negligible labor supply reductions. Having a partner at home helped offset the negative effect of school closures, particularly for maternal employment, although respondents' job traits played a more significant role in shaping labor supply responses to school closures. Overall, the labor supply impacts of school closures prove robust to identification checks and to controlling for other coexistent social distancing measures. In addition, these early school closures seem to have had a long-lasting negative impact on parental labor supply.

BackgroundMexican migrants traveling across the Mexico-United States (U.S.) border region represent a large, highly mobile, and socially vulnerable subset of Mexican nationals. Population-level health data for this group is hard to obtain given their geographic dispersion, mobility, and largely unauthorized status in the U.S. Over the last 14 years, the Migrante Project has implemented a unique migration framework and novel methodological approach to generate population-level estimates of disease burden and healthcare access for migrants traversing the Mexico-U.S. border. This paper describes the rationale and history of the Migrante Project and the protocol for the next phases of the project.Methods/designIn the next phases, two probability, face-to-face surveys of Mexican migrant flows will be conducted at key crossing points in Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, and Matamoros (N = 1,200 each). Both survey waves will obtain data on demographics, migration history, health status, health care access, COVID-19 history, and from biometric tests. In addition, the first survey will focus on non-communicable disease (NCD), while the second will dive deeper into mental health and substance use. The project will also pilot test the feasibility of a longitudinal dimension with 90 survey respondents that will be re-interviewed by phone 6 months after completing the face-to-face baseline survey.DiscussionInterview and biometric data from the Migrante project will help to characterize health care access and health status and identify variations in NCD-related outcomes, mental health, and substance use across migration phases. The results will also set the basis for a future longitudinal extension of this migrant health observatory. Analyses of previous Migrante data, paired with data from these upcoming phases, can shed light on the impact of health care and immigration policies on migrants' health and inform policy and programmatic responses to improve migrant health in sending, transit, and receiving communities.

Using county-level data on COVID-19 mortality and infections, along with county-level information on the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), we examine how the speed of NPI adoption affected COVID-19 mortality in the United States. Our estimates suggest that adopting safer-at-home orders or non-essential business closures 1 day before infections double can curtail the COVID-19 death rate by 1.9%. This finding proves robust to alternative measures of NPI adoption speed, model specifications that control for testing, other NPIs, and mobility and across various samples (national, the Northeast, excluding New York, and excluding the Northeast). We also find that the adoption speed of NPIs is associated with lower infections and is unrelated to non-COVID deaths, suggesting these measures slowed contagion. Finally, NPI adoption speed appears to have been less effective in Republican counties, suggesting that political ideology might have compromised their efficacy.

To contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries around the globe have adopted social distancing measures. Yet, establishing the causal effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) is difficult because they do not occur arbitrarily. We exploit a quasi-random source of variation for identification purposes -namely, regional differences in the placement on the pandemic curve following an unexpected and nationwide lockdown. Our results reveal that regions where the outbreak had just started when the lockdown was implemented had 1.62 fewer daily deaths per 100,000 inhabitants when compared to regions for which the lockdown arrived 10+ days after the pandemic's outbreak. As a result, a total of 4,642 total deaths (232 deaths/daily) could have been avoided by the end of our period of study -a figure representing 23% of registered deaths in Spain at the time. We rule out differential pre-COVID mortality trends and self-distancing behaviors across the compared regions prior to the swift lockdown, which was also uniformly observed nationwide. In addition, we provide supporting evidence for contagion deceleration as the main mechanism behind the effectiveness of the early adoption of NPIs in lowering the death rate, rather than an increased healthcare capacity.

BackgroundThe health of Latino migrants is most often studied with samples of immigrants settled in the United States or returned migrants in Mexico. We examine health outcomes and health care access of Mexican migrants traversing the Mexican border region to gain a better understanding of migrant health needs as they transition between migration phases.MethodsWe used data from a 2013 probability survey of migrants from Northbound and Southbound migration flows in Tijuana, Mexico (N=2412). Respondents included Northbound migrants with and without US migration experience, Southbound migrants returning home from the United States or the Mexican border region, and migrants returning to Mexico via deportation. Descriptive statistics and regression models were estimated to characterize and compare their health status, behavioral health, and health care access across migration phases.ResultsNorthbound migrants with US migration experience, Southbound migrants from the United States, and deported migrants had worse levels of health insurance, health care utilization, and diabetes than Northbound migrants without US migration experience. Southbound migrants returning from the border reported worse self-rated health and deportees had higher odds of reported substance use compared with Northbound migrants without US migration experience.ConclusionsMexican migrants' health profile and health care access vary significantly across migration flows and generally are worse for migrants with US migration experience. The results add to our understanding of Mexican migrant health along the migration continuum and can inform services in sending, receiving, and intermediate communities.

Climate change, political turmoil, and economic instability worldwide suggest that managing migration surges will be a permanent challenge for many economies. In response to the record arrival of unaccompanied migrant children at the southern border, the Biden administration used surge facilities to expedite the processing of children. We assess the effectiveness of this strategy and document reductions in the time children spent under government custody. A counterfactual analysis reveals that, in their absence, the average time to reunification would have risen from 37 to 50 days. Migration surges involving unaccompanied children underscore the urgency of identifying efficient and humanitarian strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent dramatic growth in self-employment among Mexican immigrants in the United States in the past two decades is a puzzling trend, in stark contrast to the stagnant growth or even decline among other demographic groups. The authors propose that the expansion of interior immigration enforcement, a characteristic of the US immigration policy during that time span, contributed to this unique trend by pushing Mexican immigrants into self-employment as an alternative livelihood. Exploiting temporal and geographic variation in immigration enforcement measures from 2005 to 2017, the authors show that tougher enforcement has been responsible for approximately 15% of the rise in Mexican self-employment in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of noncontributory pension programs at the federal and state levels on Mexican households' saving patterns using micro data from the Mexican Income and Expenditure Survey. We find that the federal program curtails saving among households whose oldest member is either 18-54 or 65-69-years old, possibly through anticipation effects, a decrease in the longevity risk faced by households, and a redistribution of income between households of different generations. Specifically, these households appear to be reallocating income away from saving into human capital investments, like education and health. Generally, state programs have neither significant effects on household saving, nor does the combination of federal and state programs. Finally, with a few exceptions, noncontributory pensions have no significant impact on the saving of households with members 70 years of age or older--individuals eligible for those pensions, plausibly because of their dissaving stage in the lifecycle. (JEL D14, J26, 012, H55), I. INTRODUCTION In the last 15 years, many Latin American countries have implemented noncontributory (NC) pension programs for the elderly, spending an average of 0.56% of their gross domestic product [...]