Does The Legalization of Undocumented Immigrants in the US Encourage Unauthorized Immigration from Mexico? An Empirical Analysis of the Moral Hazard of Legalization.

Does the prospect of a legalization programme in the US increase unauthorized immigration from Mexico? The logic of the moral hazard of legalization suggests that providing lawful status to undocumented immigrants has the unintended effect of incentivizing further unauthorized immigration. However, we argue and show that concerns about the moral hazard of legalization may be overstated. We conceptualize our argument using two distinct temporal dimensions: a concurrent dimension and a prospective one. Our analysis of the 2007 Mexican Migration Field Research Program ( MMFRP) survey provides evidence supporting our arguments. The data show that knowledge regarding a prospective legalization programme in the US does not increase the intent to migrate among prospective migrants. Our results hold when accounting for a range of potential confounding factors, across several multivariate model specifications, and also when analysing comparable respondents who are matched using propensity score matching ( PSM) techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]