The Birth of Mass Unauthorized Immigration in the United States

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 imposed, for the first time in US history, annual numerical restrictions on lawful immigration from the Western Hemisphere. This paper introduces and implements a method for estimating highly granular local unauthorized rates in the wake of the surge in Latin American immigration that ensued. Using within-state, cross-county variation in these estimated unauthorized rates for foreign-born Mexican women and multiple comparison groups, we then estimate how maternal legal status affects the health of US-born—and thus US-citizen—children. We find that maternal authorization increases birth weight in the second generation.