Adult Beliefs About the Migration Motives of Unaccompanied Honduran Youth

A number of researchers have examined undocumented migration from Central America. This literature lacks information about adult beliefs regarding the motivations of minors who journey from Central America unaccompanied and undocumented. Using data from a recent survey conducted in Honduras, we examine adult Hondurans’ beliefs about why unaccompanied minors leave the country unaccompanied. The dependent variable is a dummy variable that measures “why children leave the country.” Predictor variables are attitudes toward smuggling, willingness to leave without documentation, deportation experience, age, income, and residence in the northern part of Honduras. Using multinomial logistic regression, we find support for four of the eight hypotheses. Findings indicate that adults from the northern region are most likely to believe minors would leave for reasons associated with undocumented immigration. Those who are younger, with lower incomes, and with less access to sanitation are more likely to believe minors would leave without documentation.

Trump’s Immigration Legacy

From the moment that he first announced his presidential candidacy until his final days in office, Donald Trump’s signature personal political cause was the restriction of immigration. Media coverage and public debate often focused on Trump’s rhetorical invocation of this issue and emphasized his opposition to undocumented immigration in particular, as symbolized by his famous proposal to build a wall across the southern border of the United States. But while the wall itself was not completed, the Trump administration worked aggressively through the federal bureaucracy to reduce all forms of immigration. The Trump administration’s record on immigration should therefore be understood as extending far beyond charged presidential rhetoric and sporadic wall-building efforts, leaving a much more consequential substantive legacy in American immigration policy that will not be quickly or easily reversed by future presidents.

The Labor Market Impact of Immigration: Job Creation versus Job Competition

This paper studies the labor market effects of both documented and undocumented immigration in a search model featuring nonrandom hiring. As immigrants accept lower wages, they are preferably chosen by firms and therefore have higher job finding rates than natives, consistent with evidence found in US data. Immigration leads to the creation of additional jobs but also raises competition for natives. The dominant effect depends on the fall in wage costs, which is larger for undocumented immigration than it is for legal immigration. The model predicts a dominating job creation effect for the former, reducing natives’ unemployment rate, but not for the latter. (JEL E24, J15, J23, J31, J61, M51)