Can Authorization Reduce Poverty among Undocumented Immigrants? Evidence from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program

Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Francisca Antman

No 10145, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We explore the impact of authorization on the poverty exposure of households headed by undocumented immigrants. The identification strategy makes use of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provided a temporary work authorization and reprieve from deportation to eligible immigrants. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we compare DACA-eligible to DACA-ineligible likely unauthorized immigrants, before and after the program implementation. We find that DACA reduced the likelihood of life in poverty of households headed by eligible individuals by 38 percent, hinting at the gains from even temporary authorization programs.

Keywords: immigration; poverty; DACA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I32 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2016-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Forthcoming - published in: Economics Letters, 2016, 147:1-4

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp10145.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Can authorization reduce poverty among undocumented immigrants? Evidence from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10145

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().