Legal Status Meets Automation: Do Amnesty and Credentialing Shift Migrants Out of Routine, Automatable Roles?

Loschmann et al. (2024) show that amnesty for Venezuelans in the Dominican Republic improved formalization (contracts, formality) but did not raise wages or reduce overqualification—suggesting a “formalization without task upgrading” puzzle. We hypothesize that without credential recognition or targeted upskilling, legalized migrants remain locked in routine tasks most exposed to automation (Acemoglu & Restrepo 2021). We propose a multi-country, multi-policy design: a triple-difference exploiting timing of (i) legal status reforms and (ii) title/credential validation policies across sectors with different automation exposure. We integrate an occupational mobility model with heterogenous risk (Faia et al. 2021) to test whether legalization reduces risk and liquidity constraints enough to enable task reallocation—and whether credentialing is the missing complement. We then examine whether education quality in origin or host settings (Kattan & Patrinos 2018) moderates transitions out of routine roles. The novelty is to couple migration regularization with automation exposure, moving beyond extensive-margin employment effects to the quality and automability of tasks. This has direct policy value: pairing amnesty with certification and non-cognitive skill programs could shift migrants toward less automatable niches, improving long-run wage trajectories and resilience to tech shocks.

References:

1. Labor Market Effect of Granting Amnesty to Venezuelan Refugees and Migrants in the Dominican Republic. C. Loschmann, Marta Luzes, Alejandra Rivera Rivera, Cynthia van der Werf (2024).
2. Tasks, Automation, and the Rise in US Wage Inequality. D. Acemoglu, P. Restrepo (2021). Social Science Research Network.
3. Dynamic Labor Reallocation with Heterogeneous Skills and Uninsured Idiosyncratic Risk. Ester Faia, Ekaterina Shabalina, Marianna Kudlyak (2021). Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Working Paper Series.
4. Automation and Labor Market Outcomes: The Pivotal Role of High-Quality Education. Raja Bentaouet Kattan, H. Patrinos (2018).