Temporary Protected Status and Immigration to the United States
Although immigration reform has proved elusive for more than forty years, presidents from both parties have issued crucial executive actions that regulate inflows of new immigrants and the status of those already in the US. "Temporary Protected Status and Immigration to the United States" focuses on a particular class of executive actions, those related to granting immigrants Temporary Protected Status (TPS), exploiting the fact that immigrants who hold TPS receive access to the formal US labor market regardless of their legal status.
Harnessing the New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM), the authors hypothesize that granting TPS to immigrants increases remittances to crisis-affected countries, decreasing the demand for both legal and illegal entry into the United States. The authors find robust statistical support for this hypothesis, and also use synthetic control methods to evaluate TPS as a policy lever in prominent TPS-eligible countries. This report's findings shed light on potentially unintended consequences that flow from providing labor market access to immigrants in the United States.
Leblang, D. A., et al. (2018). Temporary Protected Status and Immigration to the United States. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3206009