Description:

Eduardo Campillo and Jose Flor Toro (Northwestern University): "Immigration, deportation, and resettlement: A research agenda in Haiti and the Dominican Republic"

Abstract:
In 2013, a ruling of the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic (DR) effectively threatened citizenship for around 668,000 Dominican-born, most of them Haitian-Dominicans—about 7% of the population. Three years later, close to 100,000 people had been deported to neighboring Haiti, a country ten times poorer. In this setting, we ask three questions. First, we ask how can developing economies most efficiently accommodate large inflows of what are effectively refugees. In particular, we plan to run a field experiment to see if the positive impacts of migrants in the receiving economies’ export industry documented in the literature can be leveraged to facilitate accommodation. Second, we are interested in the labor market effects of sudden changes in the composition of labor supply due to an unexpected loss of citizenship and deportations. Finally, we take a step back and ask why a State would implement such measures. We model the political economy of such decisions focusing on public-finance and electoral motives. We provide some supporting evidence for both rationales using cross-country data on immigration policies and public finance, and sub-national Dominican data on electoral outcomes as they relate to the localized enforcement of deportations.