IMMIGRATION POLICY AND THE AGRICULTURAL LABOR MARKET: THE EFFECT ON JOB DURATION

isolates the effect of legal status of the worker from differing characteristics of workers by holding
the characteristics constant across different legal status. We fix each continuous variable at the
mean of unauthorized worker observations, and fix each discrete variable at the category with the
maximum number of observations of unauthorized workers, except for the “After 2001” dummy
variable. Although observations after 2001 are approximately 24 percent of all unauthorized
worker observations, the post-2001 period is more relevant for current policy purposes. The
profile of the “typical” unauthorized worker is illustrated in Table 5.

The expected duration for this “typical” unauthorized worker is shown in Table 6 using the
equation estimates for each legal status, conditionally upon being an unauthorized worker. The
first row of Table 6 shows the typical unauthorized worker’s expected duration under each legal
status; the second row shows the percentage change from the unauthorized status. The result
indicates that the duration of the “typical” unauthorized worker would be 4.4 percent longer if he
were working as an authorized worker, and 3.9 percent larger if working as a permanent resident.
Expected duration would decline by 4.7 percent were he to be working as a citizen, although this
result is based on a statistically insignificant parameter estimate. In contrast to the results in Table
4, the Table 6 results hold worker characteristics constant across status whereas they vary across
status in Table 4.

Setting aside the result for citizens that is based on a statistically insignificant estimate for
the coefficient on the Mills ratio (λ), our estimated effect of a change in legal status from
unauthorized to a legal status (either temporary authorization or permanent resident) is largely
consistent with Tran and Perloff’s result. In our case, expected duration is somewhat longer when
working under a legal status; they report that “... IRCA increased the long-run probability that
people granted amnesty stayed in agriculture.” (p. 437) Hashida and Perloff’s result is in the

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