Poster #76 - Occupational Heterogeneity and Disruptions to Domestic Outsourcing: Immigration Enforcement and Skilled Women’s Labor Decision

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

U.S. households rely on outsourced domestic services—housekeeping, childcare, and eldercare—to balance work and family demands. Undocumented immigrants supply a large share of this workforce, often working nonstandard shifts and extended hours. This paper examines whether disruptions in outsourced domestic services affected the labor‐market decisions of college‐educated women in skilled occupations, particularly those in time‐greedy or schedule‐inflexible occupations.

Leveraging the staggered county‐level rollout of Secure Communities as an exogenous shock, a difference‐in‐differences analysis shows that policy adoption sharply contracted the local availability of outsourced domestic services. Consequently, college‐educated women—who depend on these services to balance professional and household responsibilities—reduced their working hours in counties where the program was implemented. Reductions were most pronounced in occupations that demand long working hours (time‐greedy occupations) and those with limited schedule flexibility. Moreover, in households where spouses held flexible‐schedule jobs, the negative impact on women’s labor supply was largely mitigated, highlighting that changes in household responsibilities due to constrained access to domestic services are the primary channel through which the policy influenced women’s labor decisions, and that supportive family dynamics can offset these effects.

These findings uncover a novel, indirect channel through which immigration enforcement policies can reshape domestic‐service markets and exacerbate gender disparities in labor‐market participation among skilled professionals by constraining women’s ability to juggle intensive career demands with household duties.

Author

• Sanghee Mun, University of Illinois
  Presenting Author