In the Shadows
The role of Mexican immigration to the United States in improved workplace safety for natives from 1980 to 2015
Marcus Dillender & Melissa McInerney
Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Between 1980 and 2015, Mexican immigration to the United States and the share of Mexican immigrants in the labor force quintupled. We provide the first evidence examining whether this impacted one element of the work environment for native workers: workplace safety. To account for endogeneity and ensure that the change in Mexican immigration arose from supply shifts, we use 2SLS and instrumental variables. We show Mexican immigration over this period led natives to work in safer jobs; resulted in fewer workplace injuries for natives; and reduced WC benefit claims overall, which had a meaningful impact on employer costs for WC.
Immigration and the Health of U.S. Natives
Christian Gunadi
Southern Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Immigration may put a strain on the health care system, adversely impacting the health of the native population. At the same time, recent studies have documented the role of immigration in nudging native workers from risk‐intensive, physically demanding jobs toward occupations that require more communication and interactive ability, potentially improving their health. In this article, I examine the relationship between immigration and the health of the native population in the United States. The results of the analysis fail to show that immigration adversely affects the health of U.S. natives. Instead, the findings suggest that the presence of low‐skilled immigrants may improve the health of low‐skilled U.S.‐born individuals.
Trump, Trade, and Immigration
Margaret Peters
The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, March 2020
Abstract:
President Trump campaigned on “making America great again” through trade and immigration restrictions. I argue that it is difficult for policymakers to restrict both trade and immigration because of trade’s effects on business support for immigration. When trade is restricted, more low-skill intensive goods are made in the US, leading to more demand for low-skill immigration from businesses. As businesses are relatively powerful, we should expect immigration to open. Conversely, when trade opens, fewer low-skill intensive goods are made in the US, leading to the closure of the firms that produce these goods. This reduces demand for low-skill labor and, with it, the demand for low-skill immigration. As business demand for immigration recedes, policymakers restrict immigration to appease anti-immigrant groups. Using data on immigration and trade in the US, I show that this relationship has held over US history. At the end of the article I hypothesize several reasons why Trump’s tariffs are not leading to more demand for immigration due to their limited effects on trade and the job market.
How do U.S. Visa Policies Affect Unauthorized Immigration?
Brian Kovak & Rebecca Lessem
NBER Working Paper, February 2020
Abstract:
We examine how increasing the number of visas available to potential migrants would affect unauthorized immigration from Mexico to the U.S. Current U.S. policy bans people who are deported from receiving legal status for a period of time. This policy aims to serve as an additional deterrent to unauthorized immigration, but may be ineffective given that most potential Mexican migrants have an extremely low probability of ever being able to legally move to the U.S. We develop a dynamic discrete location choice model, which we estimate using data from the Mexican Migration Project, and consider various counterfactual policies that vary the intensity of enforcement and access to work visas. We find that legal entry bans for deported individuals are ineffective at current rates of legal immigration, but that increased legalization rates would amplify the deterrent effects of deportation. We also show that a temporary work visa program would yield similar deterrent effects as an increase in permanent legalization without resulting in very large increases in the total stock of migrants residing in the U.S. These findings have important implications for structuring future immigration reforms.
Revisiting Economic Assimilation of Mexican and Central American Immigrants in the United States
Giovanni Peri & Zachariah Rutledge
University of California Working Paper, February 2020
Abstract:
Using data from the United States spanning the period between 1970 and 2017, we analyze the economic assimilation of subsequent arrival cohorts of Mexican and Central American immigrants, the more economically disadvantaged group of immigrants. We compare their wage and employment probability to that of similarly aged and educated natives across various cohorts of entry. We find that all cohorts started with a disadvantage of 40-45 percent relative to the average US native, and eliminated about half of it in the 20 years after entry. They also started with no employment probability disadvantage at arrival and they overtook natives in employment rates so that they were 5-10 percent more likely to be employed 20 years after arrival. We also find that recent cohorts, arriving after 1995, did better than earlier cohorts both in initial gap and convergence. We show that Mexicans and Central Americans working in the construction sector and in urban areas did better in terms of gap and convergence than others. Finally, also for other immigrant groups, such as Chinese and Indians, recent cohorts did better than previous ones.
Integrating Refugees: Language Training or Work-First Incentives?
Jacob Nielsen Arendt et al.
NBER Working Paper, March 2020
Abstract:
Social and economic integration of refugees are key to their personal fulfillment and to producing positive effects in the host country. We evaluate the impact of a reform that expanded and improved early language classes to refugees in Denmark while also temporarily lowering welfare benefits for a subgroup of them. The policy change applied to those who obtained refugee status in Denmark on or after January 1, 1999. Using a regression discontinuity design around the cutoff date we find that employment and earnings gradually diverged for the treated group after completion of the language program. The effect was significant and resulted in four percentage points permanently higher employment and almost USD 2,510 in extra yearly earnings over eighteen years. We do not find temporary or permanent labor market effects of cutting welfare benefits, but we find evidence of temporarily higher property crime when refugees received lower benefits. We also find that children of refugees who received enhanced language classes were more likely to complete lower secondary school and less likely to commit crime.
Birthplace diversity and economic growth: Evidence from the US states in the Post-World War II period
Frédéric Docquier et al.
Journal of Economic Geography, March 2020, Pages 321–354
Abstract:
This paper empirically investigates the impact of birthplace diversity on economic growth. We use panel data on US states over the 1960–2010 period. This rich data set allows us to better deal with endogeneity issues and to conduct a large set of robustness checks. Our results suggest that diversity among college-educated immigrants positively affects economic growth. We provide converging evidence pointing at the existence of skill complementarities between workers trained in different countries. These synergies result in better labor market outcomes for native workers and in higher productivity in the R&D sector. The gains from diversity are maximized when immigrants originate from economically or culturally distant countries (but not both), and when they acquired part of their secondary education abroad and their college education in the USA. Overall, a 10% increase in high-skilled diversity raises GDP per capita by about 6%. On the contrary, low-skilled diversity has insignificant effects.
Immigration enforcement awareness and community engagement with police: Evidence from domestic violence calls in Los Angeles
Ashley Muchow & Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes
Journal of Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The unwillingness of Latino and immigrant communities to interact with the police or report crime is a recognized concern of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Using data on calls for service dispatched to LAPD patrols from 2014 through 2017, we assess if heightened awareness of immigration enforcement, as captured by a novel Google Trends index on related searches, is associated with reduced calls to report domestic violence in predominately Latino noncitizen neighborhoods. We find that domestic violence calls per capita dropped in LAPD reporting districts with a higher concentration of Latino noncitizens as awareness about immigration enforcement increased. The decline provides empirical evidence of the “chilling effect” of immigration enforcement on Latino immigrant engagement with the police, underscoring the need to engage communities increasingly alienated by federal immigration policy.
Seeing Spanish: The Effects of Language-Based Media Choices on Resentment and Belonging
Joshua Darr et al.
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does seeing Spanish-language news in the media change the racial and political attitudes of Whites and Spanish-speaking Latinos? We examine the effects of Spanish-language media on White and Spanish-speaking Latino attitudes using online survey experiments in English and Spanish, respectively. We expect White Americans to react to Spanish-language media options by developing more hostile attitudes toward Hispanics, and Spanish-speaking Latino audiences to feel a greater sense of belonging in America when they see Spanish represented in the media. We find that seeing articles about non-immigration politics in Spanish, as an option next to English articles, significantly raises racial resentment toward Hispanics among Whites. Among Spanish-speaking Latinos, seeing a political news article option in Spanish increases feelings of inclusion and belonging, even when it is not about a racialized issue like immigration. Such evidence suggests that language alone may prime identity and shape political attitudes for White and Spanish-speaking Latino voters.
Political Trust and Support for Immigration in the American Mass Public
David Macdonald
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Immigration is one of the most salient and important issues in contemporary American politics. While a great deal is known about how cultural attitudes and economics influence public opinion toward immigration, little is known about how attitudes toward government influence support for immigration. Using cross-sectional data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), panel data from the ANES and General Social Survey, as well a Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey experiment, I show that political trust exerts a positive and substantively meaningful influence on Americans' support for immigration. Politically trustful individuals, both Democrats and Republicans, are more supportive of pro-immigration policies. These findings underscore the political relevance of trust in government and show that public attitudes toward immigration are not driven solely by feelings about immigrant groups, partisanship, core political values, nor personality traits, but are also affected by trust in government, the actor most responsible for managing immigration policy.
Situational insecurity versus entrenched ideologies as the source of right‐wing voters’ anti‐migrant sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic
Violet Cheung‐Blunden
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
A popular explanation for the emergence of right‐wing populism is that perceived threats toward migrants triggered a wave of anti‐migrant sentiment. This kind of insecurity narrative paints ethnocentrism as a reaction to ongoing events rather than an entrenched belief that coexists with related right‐wing ideologies. A mediation model was constructed with an anti‐migrant sentiment as the outcome, a sense of insecurity as the mediator and a composite of right‐wing ideologies as predictors. Study 1 was conducted with 220 Americans and 231 Germans a few months after the Paris terrorist attack. Study 2, a preregistered replication, was conducted two years later on 151 British as well as 183 Spanish participants where both countries saw a recent terrorist attack on their own soil. A replicated finding across the four samples rejected insecurity as a mediator. In all samples, the indirect pathways showed the same weakness — while conservatives were risk averse, their sense of insecurity was not a linchpin to anti‐migrant sentiment. The significant direct pathways confirmed the integrity of the conservative belief system where anti‐migrant sentiment was best explained by related componential beliefs, such as right‐wing authoritarianism, nationalism, and neoliberalism. Concerns about terror threats and migrant crises seem to have been hijacked to sugarcoat the ideological nature of ethnocentrism, at least under the present threat scenarios. Suggestions are made to further examine the insecurity narrative in the future.
Perceiving acculturation from neutral and emotional faces
Thora Bjornsdottir & Nicholas Rule
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Facial expressions of emotion convey more than just emotional experience. Indeed, they can signal a person’s social group memberships. For instance, extant research shows that nonverbal accents in emotion expression can reveal one’s cultural affiliation (Marsh, Elfenbein, & Ambady, 2003). That work tested distinctions only between people belonging to one of two cultural categories, however (Japanese vs. Japanese Americans). What of people who identify with more than one culture? Here we tested whether nonverbal accents might signal not only cultural identification but also the degree of cultural identification (i.e., acculturation). Using neutral, happy, and angry photos of East Asian individuals varying in acculturation to Canada, we found that both Canadian and East Asian perceivers could accurately detect the targets’ level of acculturation. Although perceivers used hairstyle cues when available, once we removed hair, accuracy was greatest for happy expressions — supporting the idea that nonverbal accents convey cultural identification. Finally, the intensity of targets’ happiness related to both their self-reported and perceived acculturation, helping to explain perceivers’ accuracy and aligning with research on cultural display rules and ideal affect. Thus, nonverbal accents appear to communicate cultural identification not only categorically, as previous work has shown, but also continuously.