DOCUMENTATION STATUS AND LABOUR MARKET OUTCOMES OF LOW-SKILLED MIGRANTS: EVIDENCE ACROSS DESTINATION REGIMES

Abstract

Low-skilled migrants do not move through a single regulatory world. Alongside the permanent-residence and enforcement-based systems of North America and Western
Europe, employer-tied visa regimes, where a worker's legal status is conditional on remaining with a specific sponsoring employer now govern the majority of lowskilled labour migration across the Gulf states, Malaysia, and Singapore. The role of documentation status in shaping migrants' working lives depends, on which of
these two institutional environments they inhabit. This study synthesises 33 peer-reviewed studies on the effects of documentation status across four labour-market
outcomes, such as wages, working hours, occupational mobility, and employment duration, drawing on a structured search of Scopus and Web of Science. The wage
evidence is robust, a residual penalty of four to seventeen percent for undocumented workers and post-regularisation earnings gains of five to ten percent are documented
consistently across the United States and European literature. Roughly half of those earnings gains operate through occupational upgrading rather than wage growth
within jobs, meaning a wage-only analysis recovers at most part of the full regularisation effect. Working hours and employment stability respond in directions consistent
with a bargaining-friction mechanism, but the evidence base for these outcomes remains thin. Evidence from employer-tied regimes remains limited because legal
status is tied to a specific employer rather than determined by entry and enforcement decisions, the channels through which documentation shapes labour-market
outcomes likely differ from those documented in amnesty-type settings. Extending the evidence base to sponsorship-based destinations represents a clear direction for future research.