Legalization and Long-Term Outcomes of Immigrant Workers

This article establishes a new fact about immigration policies: granting legal status to undocumented immigrants has long-term effects on their formal employment and assimilation. We exploit the broad amnesty enacted in Italy in 2002, together with rich survey data collected in 2011 on a representative sample of immigrant households, to estimate the long-run effects of receiving legal amnesty. Immigrants who were not eligible for the amnesty have a 14% lower probability of working in the formal sector a decade later, are subject to more severe ethnic segregation on the job, and display less linguistic assimilation than those who obtained legal status through the amnesty.