The economic effect of citizenship on unauthorized immigrants: Income gains from legalization and citizenship.

           If we made the assumption that the income effect of legalization and citizenship combined for the unauthorized is the same as the income effect of citizenship that we estimated for the entire noncitizen immigrant population, then we would conclude that the unauthorized would experience an average increase in income of 16 percent from legalization and citizenship. This estimate, however, understates the true income effect for the unauthorized population because it aggregates the relatively smaller income gains that legal non citizens get from citizenship alone with the relatively larger income gains that the unauthorized get from legalization and citizenship. In addition, our regression estimate further understates the income effect of citizenship for the unauthorized because the unauthorized are undercounted in the dataset.