Can immigrant workers help to solve the child labour problem?

Abstract

Bans on child labour as mitigating measures to avoid the abuse of child labour have now been widely recognized to be ineffective and may be costly for low‐ and middle‐income countries. Evaluations of different social programmes and efforts by international organizations to reduce child labour provide the same conclusion. This paper explores how the existence of immigrant workers, a common economic condition for many of these countries, can be effectively used as a novel and cheap mechanism to mitigate the employment of child labour. I show that when immigrant workers are available at discounted wages, profit‐maximizing firms will switch from child labour to immigrant workers. From a policy standpoint, this suggests that conditions can be generated to move the economy to a no‐child‐labour equilibrium. Although the solution may be a second‐best for immigrant workers, it may help avoid the undesirable social consequences of child labour and at the same time ease the economic and non‐economic concerns about immigration.