Working Papers

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Chiara Galli, University of Chicago  

Tatiana Padilla, Cornell University

Worldwide, more children than ever before are crossing international borders alone to seek asylum in rich receiving countries in the Global North (UNHCR 2014). In the past ten years, the US has seen nearly a half-million unaccompanied minors -children under age 18 who migrate without their parents or legal guardians- arrive at its border with Mexico (CBP 2020). This project aims to understand the access to legal council among this particularly vulnerable population. In other words, what is the association between individual-level characteristics and access to counsel among unaccompanied minors, accounting for adjudicator and contextual characteristics?

• Oral presentation at the American Population Association annual meeting 2022 

Tatiana Padilla, Cornell University 

Adriana Reyes, Cornell University

State policy and the climates they create have become increasingly important for health outcomes and the proliferation of inclusionary and exclusionary immigration related state policies has led to varying state climates for immigrants. We use this divergence in state policy climates to test the relationship between state-level immigration policies and three health outcomes. We include 22 state policies related to immigration enforcement, integration and health to capture the state climate for immigrants. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a nationally-representative study of households in the U.S., we estimate multilevel regression models to assess the role of state policy climate for the healthcare access of immigrants. We also examine differential effects of the policy climate among immigrants, by examining differences by citizenship status and race. We find that more exclusionary immigration policies may be detrimental to healthcare access for all residents regardless of legal status– but ultimately noncitizens see the greatest benefits from inclusive policy climates. 

• Oral presentation at the American Population Association annual meeting 2021 

Through increased border enforcement, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act changed US-Mexico migration flows. Motivated by the rise in utilization of coyotes and soaring coyote fees, I hypothesize that the burden of migration costs due to border enforcement is unequally distributed among migrants. 

I leverage the Mexican Migration Project data to operationalize migration cost through payments for human smuggling services. Implementing a Heckman  Model to correct for selection on coyote usage, this paper investigates: (1) how has coyote pricing changed in a post-IRCA era; (2) what role does demographic composition of migration flows and social networks play in explaining fees paid to coyotes; (3) what role does immigration enforcement play in explaining coyote payments; (4) how have the relationships between migration costs and human capital, social capital and enforcement changed post-1986? 

This paper quantitatively analyzes which type of migrants is most vulnerable to “indebted crossings”, a phenomenon recently exposed by qualitative research. This paper offers a first step towards addressing concerns of debt, wealth transfers and intergenerational inequality in Mexican sending communities. 

• Accepted for oral presentation at the American Population Association annual meeting 2020 
• Accepted for oral presentation Pew Research Center Conference on Global Unauthorized Immigration 2020
• Accepted for oral presentation at Understanding Inequalities Conference 2020 (ui2020)