Measuring the Impact of Diverse Legal Status Designation Policies (TPS 2021, TPS 2023, and CHNV) on Venezuelan Migrants’ Economic Integration to the United States

Abstract

This thesis seeks to examine the impact of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) 2021, TPS 2023, and the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) humanitarian parole programs as instruments of changing legal status markers in their effects on the economic and labor market integration of Venezuelan migrants to the United States. To accomplish this goal, this paper proposes a research design that applies difference in differences estimators with both GLM logistic regressions and OLS linear regressions to 5-year pooled cross-sectional ACS data. The advantages of this design are that it is both highly replicable and provides an innovative solution to imputing legal status among Venezuelan migrants across the last five years, as the three key policies have had direct, temporally defined impacts on that status. These multiple, rapid-fire policies / changes in legal status offer a unique opportunity to address a gap in the existing literature whereby heterogeneities in legal status are underexamined as a complex and textured mechanism impacting migrant integration. The design continues advancing a literature that seeks novel quantitative solutions to the study of economic integration while still offering nuanced implications that are often elusive in the more statistically robust datasets available to quantitative researchers. I find that at least the TPS 2021 policy had a positive impact on the earnings of those non-citizen migrants with income before and after the policy took effect.