Research Brief
Faster work permits unlock thousands of jobs and big-city savings
We built a continuous time search model grounded in Swiss employment elasticities, Swedish earnings scarring, and today's U.S. wage and shelter data. It shows how trimming the 180 day wait for employment authorization unlocks earlier wages, steadier tax flows, and measurable relief for municipal shelter systems.
The problem we set out to solve
Every asylum seeker in the United States waits six months before they can hold lawful work. During that wait, job searches stall, savings disappear, and cities shoulder shelter budgets that were never designed for today's caseload. On the research side, we know from Switzerland that each year of forced idleness scars long run employment; Sweden shows a similar depressive effect on early earnings. Yet policymakers in the United States rarely see those elasticities translated into local numbers. We wanted to change that.
The paper inside this release uses those international estimates as calibration targets, then layers in current U.S. separation hazards, weekly wages, and per diem shelter costs. The question at the heart of the work is simple: what happens to households and municipal ledgers if work authorization arrives at day 0, day 30, or day 90 instead of day 180.
How we approached the solution
We built a two state, continuous time search model that treats pre authorization job finding as effectively zero and post authorization job finding as a Poisson process. The hazard rate is tuned so that delaying work access by one year recreates the five percentage point employment hit observed in Switzerland. A Swedish elasticity compresses early earnings when the first job happens later. 20,000 Monte Carlo draws propagate the uncertainty in those elasticities, in U.S. separation hazards, in the wage distribution, and in the per diem ranges that cities currently pay to house new arrivals.
That modeling stack lets us simulate counterfactual waits of 0, 30, and 90 days against the status quo. For each scenario we translate the employment paths into job months, wage mass, payroll contributions, and shelter days saved. The upshot is a narrative that ties individual trajectories to municipal budgets without taking any shortcuts on the underlying labor dynamics.
What faster authorization delivers
Eliminating the wait lifts month twelve employment by 16.7 percentage points relative to today. Even a 30 day wait sustains a 14.3 point gain, and a 90 day rule still preserves 9.1 points. The zero day reform adds about 2,129 job months in the first year for every 1,000 entrants and pulls forward roughly 5.4 million dollars in wages. That much income generates about 414 thousand dollars in payroll contributions on the employee side and the same amount for employers.
Employment gains from shorter EAD waits. We show that reducing work permit wait times leads to significant employment gains. For example, at the 6-month mark, asylum seekers who receive permits earlier show 15-20 percentage point higher employment rates compared to the current 180-day waiting period. These gains persist and even grow over time, with the employment advantage reaching 25-30 percentage points after two years - representing thousands more employed workers contributing to the U.S. economy and achieving self-sufficiency sooner.
Per 1,000 entrants
2,129
additional job months when work authorization starts on day zero instead of day one hundred eighty.
First year wages
$5.4M
in additional income for the same 1,000 person cohort, plus $414k in employee payroll taxes right when budgets need it.
How cities feel the impact
New York City currently shelters roughly 42,700 recent arrivals. Scaling our per person results to that stock shows what local governments stand to regain. A zero day wait would put about 7,138 more people in work by month twelve, generate 18.1 million dollars in monthly wage mass, and deliver roughly 1.39 million dollars in employee payroll taxes at that same horizon. The shelter side matters just as much: the median person would shorten their stay enough to save the city about 17 thousand dollars, and the total savings add up to 0.73 billion dollars for the current census.
Even the incremental reforms matter. The 30 day scenario still reaches 6,122 additional workers and 0.60 billion dollars in shelter savings. A 90 day wait clears nearly 3,900 additional jobs plus 0.36 billion dollars in avoided per diems. These are the numbers that turn a policy sketch into something a budget director can react to.
Why the national math matters
Applying the same logic to incoming flows instead of the existing stock keeps things grounded in what a new policy could change right away. For every 100,000 people who will file for an initial EAD next year, a zero day wait produces 16,716 additional employed workers by month twelve, 42.5 million dollars in extra wage mass, and 3.2 million dollars in payroll contributions. The shelter framing travels too. Per 10,000 people currently in shelter, the median savings come in near 170 million dollars under zero day access, 141 million dollars with a 30 day rule, and 85 million dollars even if the wait only drops to 90 days.
These findings were built to inform mayors, budget committees, and federal partners at the same time. They also give community based organizations and legal service providers a clearer way to explain why the work permit clock is not a small paperwork fight but a lever that shapes integration for years.
Where we go next
This project started as a question from partners inside city hall and in mutual aid networks: can you show us the labor market story behind all of these cots and case managers. We now can. The model is intentionally transparent, the assumptions are traceable, and the ranges are honest about what we do not know yet. Most importantly, the story is hopeful. Earlier work authorization is not just administratively possible. It is one of the fastest ways to let asylum seekers support their families while giving cities breathing room to rebuild services.
We are already prototyping policy tools that let practitioners plug in their own caseloads, per diem rates, and wage profiles. In the meantime, explore the full paper for the methodological details and replication code.