The Wage Penalty to Undocumented Immigration

The Wage Penalty to Undocumented Immigration. George Borjas, May 2019, Paper, "This paper examines the determinants of the wage penalty experienced by undocumented workers, defined as the wage gap between observationally equivalent legal and undocumented immigrants. Using recently developed methods that impute undocumented status for foreign-born persons sampled in microdata surveys, the study documents a number of empirical findings. Although the unadjusted gap in the log hourly wage between the average undocumented and legal immigrant is very large (over 35 percent), almost all of this gap disappears once the calculation adjusts for differences in observable socioeconomic characteristics. The wage penalty to undocumented immigration for men was only about 4 percent in 2016."