Illegal Aliens, Unemployment and Immigration Policy

This paper develops a simple two-country model of illegal immigration in an attempt to examine the interaction among variables such as the stock of migrant labor, the unemployment rates of the two economies, and the rate of spending by the host country on the enforcement of its immigration restrictions. The focus of the analysis is on the dynamics of immigration policy and on its role in determining the nature of the mechanism by which disturbances to the labor market of one economy are transmitted to that of the other in the short run and in the long run