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The Movement Of Undocumented Immigrants

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The movement of undocumented immigrants has been a major concern in both the United States and in Europe over the past few years. Frequently, politicians talk about this issue in broad, general statements that appeal to emotion as much as logic, if not more. This style of discussion is often not based on facts, research, or theory, but instead makes use of seemingly ‘invented’ data points and ungrounded opinions. In this paper, a number of potential policies the United States government could enact are reviewed for their economic effects in an attempt to separate true information from political abstraction, and are also applied to the agricultural sector to provide an example of specific effects. As a whole, pro-legalization policies provide positive economic benefits to the labor market and the American population at large, while restrictive policies harm the labor market and population. This paper considers both migrant-positive ‘legalization’ policies and migrant-negative ‘restrictive’ policies. Positive policies include increasing the probability that a worker will be able to gain legal status, immediately legalizing workers who desire a path to legalization or citizenship, and redesigning guest worker programs, especially within the agricultural sector, which will be discussed later. Negative policies include increasing border enforcement to decrease the number of illegal immigrants, “increasing the costs that illegal immigrants face when looking for a job” such as

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