Samyam Shrestha

Agricultural Economics, Labor Economics

Title: Trade Effects of Immigration Enforcement: Evidence from U.S. Labor-Intensive Agriculture

 

I am an applied microeconomist specializing in agricultural and labor economics with a focus on U.S. agricultural labor, trade, firm dynamics, and immigration policy. My interest in these topics stems from their direct implications for food security, economic resilience, and workforce stability. I work with administrative and survey data and employ causal inference, natural experiments, and quasi-experimental methods to explore policy-relevant issues in these areas.

 

My dissertation consists of three papers addressing policy-relevant questions related to labor market shocks and their effects on economic outcomes. My job market paper examines the impacts of immigration enforcement, a supply-side shock to farm labor availability, on domestic and international trade flows of labor-intensive fruits and vegetables. This project is motivated by several overlapping trends in recent decades: the intensification of immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior, the tightening of U.S. farm labor markets, declining U.S. fruit and vegetable production, increasing reliance on imports, and growing trade deficits. This research is the first to examine how the reduced availability of farm workers, driven by immigration policy, affects U.S. food supply systems and competitive advantage in fruit and vegetable trade.

 

The second paper of my dissertation investigates the impacts of Secure Communities, a police-driven immigration enforcement program in the U.S. interior, on business dynamics indicators such as firm entry, exit, job creation, and job destruction, particularly in labor-intensive sectors like agriculture and construction. The third paper, co-authored with a UGA Ph.D. student, analyzes the labor market effects of the Venezuelan refugee crisis in Brazil. This paper has received a revise-and-resubmit request from the Journal of Economic Geography.

 

In the near term, I plan to focus my research on the determinants of U.S. domestic food production and the factors affecting firm dynamics, both within and beyond agriculture, while maintaining an emphasis on labor and policy issues.