Faculty Affiliate Joaquín Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba, Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has co-authored a new article titled “The effects of ongoing internal immigration enforcement on the U.S. agricultural labor supply” in the Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
Using a novel empirical approach that leverages month-to-month fluctuations in immigration-related arrests as a proxy for enforcement shocks, the study finds that unexpected increases in internal immigration enforcement lead to a decline in labor force participation by up to 3.4 percentage points among non-citizen farmworkers and a reduction in weekly work hours by as much as 23.1% in the affected month. These reductions in turn translate into an estimated 1.38 percentage-point decline in labor force participation and a 9.08% reduction in weekly hours worked across the broader farmworker population.
By documenting these short-term but meaningful disruptions, Rubalcaba and his colleague demonstrate how enforcement actions exert downward pressure on agricultural labor supply, with implications for farm operations, labor markets, and immigrant communities alike.
Read the full article here: The effects of ongoing internal immigration enforcement on the US agricultural labor supply