International
The unintended consequences of US immigration enforcement policies
Emily Ryo
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 May 2021
Abstract:
US immigration enforcement policy seeks to change the behaviors and views of not only individuals in the United States but also those of prospective migrants outside the United States. Yet we still know relatively little about the behavioral and attitudinal effects of US enforcement policy on the population abroad. This study uses a randomized experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey that was administered in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico to analyze the effects of US deterrence policies on individuals’ migration intentions and their attitudes toward the US immigration system. The two policies that the current study examines are immigration detention and nonjudicial removals. The survey results provide no evidence that a heightened awareness of these US immigration enforcement policies affects individuals’ intentions to migrate to the United States. But heightened awareness about the widespread use of immigration detention in the United States does negatively impact individuals’ assessments about the procedural and outcome fairness of the US immigration system. These findings suggest that immigration detention may foster delegitimating beliefs about the US legal system without producing the intended deterrent effect.
Welcome to Be Like Us: Expectations of Outgroup Assimilation Shape Dominant Group Resistance to Diversity
Felix Danbold & Yuen Huo
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose a theoretical framework for when and why members of dominant groups experience threat and express intolerant attitudes in response to social change. Scholarship on symbolic threat suggests that the detection of intergroup differences in values and norms is sufficient to elicit negative intergroup attitudes. Building on this theory, we argue that the experience of threat is actually shaped by prospective beliefs about difference (i.e., expectations of whether outgroups will assimilate to ingroup norms over time or not). Across two studies and two accompanying pilots, we show how outgroup assimilation expectation shapes dominant groups’ experiences of threat, specifically as it relates to their ability to define the norms of their superordinate category (prototypicality threat). We observe that members of dominant groups are surprisingly tolerant of both social change and intergroup difference in the present, so long as they expect outgroup assimilation in the future.
Use of Exact Matching to Examine Media’s Effect on Intended Behavior the Case of the Addition of the 2020 Census Citizenship Question
Gina Walejko et al.
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Researchers have argued that events and surrounding media coverage shape attitudes and intended behaviors on topics related to the events (Langer et al. 1992; Hoekstra 2003). Such research relies on analyzing attitudinal trends using rolling cross-section designs or across data collections, but little published research measures whether an event covered by the media could shape a behavioral intention salient to that event within one data collection period. In 2018 the Census Bureau conducted the Census Barriers, Attitudes, and Motivators Study (CBAMS) survey. Five weeks into the survey’s field period, the Secretary of Commerce directed the Census Bureau to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, resulting in media coverage. The CBAMS survey asked likelihood to respond to the decennial census, which may have been affected by the external news environment. Treating this as a “natural experiment,” we match pre- and post-citizenship question-announcement respondents and report the results of a multivariate model predicting intent to respond to the census. We also examine differences between subgroups and their complements pre- and post-announcement. Although the citizenship question was not included on the 2020 Census, the odds that those responding after the citizenship question announcement were “extremely” or “very likely” to respond to the census were 20 percent lower than the odds of those responding before. Future research should examine the permanency of changes on intended behaviors, especially in cases where news coverage focused on an outcome - such as the addition of the citizenship question - that did not occur.
Children Seeking Asylum: Determinants of Asylum Claims by Unaccompanied Minors in the US from 2013-2017
Daniel Braaten & Claire Nolasco Braaten
Law & Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the treatment and processing of immigration court decisions for unaccompanied alien children (UAC) in the United States from 2013-2017. We focus on two primary questions in our research: 1) whether asylum cases involving UAC are substantially different in outcome than non-UAC cases; and 2) whether there have been significant differences in the immigration courts’ asylum decisions involving unaccompanied minors before and after the Trump administration came to power. We utilize various multilevel models to test individual applicant level, immigration judge level, county level, and state‐level variables on the likelihood of UAC receiving a positive outcome in immigration court. We find strong support for the second hypothesis and mixed support for the first. Overall, our findings suggest multiple political, economic, social, and geographical factors influence immigration hearings for UAC above just the individual strength of any one child's case.
Learning to Detain Asylum Seekers and the Growth of Mass Immigration Detention in the United States
Smita Ghosh & Mary Hoopes
Law & Social Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing upon an analysis of congressional records and media coverage from 1981 to 1996, this article examines the growth of mass immigration detention. It traces an important shift during this period: while detention began as an ad hoc executive initiative that was received with skepticism by the legislature, Congress was ultimately responsible for entrenching the system over objections from the agency. As we reveal, a critical component of this evolution was a transformation in Congress’s perception of asylum seekers. While lawmakers initially decried their detention, they later branded them as dangerous. Lawmakers began describing asylum seekers as criminals or agents of infectious diseases in order to justify their detention, which then cleared the way for the mass detention of arriving migrants more broadly. Our analysis suggests that they may have emphasized the dangerousness of asylum seekers to resolve the dissonance between their theoretical commitments to asylum and their hesitance to welcome newcomers. In addition to this distinctive form of cognitive dissonance, we discuss a number of other implications of our research, including the ways in which the new penology framework figured into the changing discourse about detaining asylum seekers.
Is It Dangerous to Live in Neighborhoods with More Immigrants? Assessing the Effects of Immigrant Concentration on Crime Patterns
Sungil Han & Alex Piquero
Crime & Delinquency, forthcoming
Abstract:
The immigration-crime nexus has been the subject of much empirical attention and research findings consistently indicate that neighborhoods with large immigrant populations exhibit comparatively lower crime rates. However, it is still imperative to explain how these effects take place in different contexts of structural circumstances of communities. This study aims to examine the effects of immigrant concentration as well as its conditioning effects for racial/ethnic segregation and concentrated disadvantage in Dallas, Texas. Results show that immigrant concentration is negatively associated with crime counts and, most importantly, that immigrant concentration moderates the effect of structural conditions on crime. Generally, immigration has crime-reducing effects and helps ameliorate the negative effects of structural conditions on crime.
Immigration, diversity and institutions
Stelios Roupakias & Spiridoula Dimou
Kyklos, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the relationship between immigration and host countries' institutional quality, using international migration data for a sample of 130 countries over the 1990-2015 period. We employ two composite metrics of political institutions, encompassing multiple dimensions of governance. To reduce endogeneity concerns, related to immigrant settlement patterns, we employ pseudo-gravity-based instruments in a 2SLS setting. Overall, our findings withstand several robustness checks and suggest that immigration has a negative and statistically significant impact on the level of institutional development of the countries analyzed in this study. However, there is substantial heterogeneity, since the impact of migrants appears to be somewhat stronger in less developed host countries. Interestingly, these findings are entirely driven by migrants stemming from countries displaying low institutional development.
How Social Desirability Bias Affects Immigration Attitudes in a Hyperpolarized Political Environment
Edward Carmines & Rita Nassar
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Method: Using a list experiment, we examine whether Democrat (and liberal) opposition to the building of a wall at the Mexican border and to the deportation of undocumented immigrants are due to societal pressures to adopt inclusive positions and whether Republicans (and conservatives) hide their negative immigrant attitudes.
Results: We find that Democrats and liberals' views on these two issues do indeed reflect their true preferences. Conversely, we find that Republicans and conservatives do feel the need to conceal their anti‐immigrant stances.
Alphabetical Author Order, Intellectual Collaboration and High-Skilled Migration
Wenchao Li & Junjian Yi
Economic Journal, April 2021, Pages 1250-1268
Abstract:
We study the consequences of alphabetical author order in economics for job placements of economists, based on a context that enables a clean identification. Results using two different data sets both show that, relative to Chinese physicists and statisticians, Chinese economists with surname initials located later in the alphabet tend not to stay in the US and are more likely to work in China. Such effects of surname initials on job placements are clearly identified and represent a result of alphabetical author order, because in Chinese culture, names are seldom listed alphabetically in contexts other than joint publications in international economics journals.
Hiring High-Skilled Labor through Mergers and Acquisitions
Jun Chen, Shenje Hshieh & Feng Zhang
University of Utah Working Paper, April 2021
Abstract:
In two natural experiments based on H-1B visa lotteries and a drastic cut in the annual H-1B visa quota, we document that firms respond to shortages in high-skilled workers by acquiring target firms that have these workers. Additional tests show that desire for the target's skilled workers is an important driver of these acquisitions. Acquirers that successfully obtain skilled workers from their targets outperform acquirers that withdraw their acquisition bids for exogenous reasons. Our findings suggest that skilled labor is a driver of acquisition decisions and a source of synergy gains.
Getting Schooled: The Role of Universities in Attracting Immigrant Entrepreneurs
Natee Amornsiripanitch et al.
NBER Working Paper, May 2021
Abstract:
Immigrant founders of venture capital-backed companies have been critical to the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We document the channels through which immigrant founders find their way to the United States and how those channels have changed over time. Immigrants have been an important source of founders for venture capital-backed startups accounting for roughly 20% of all founders over the past 30 years. Immigrants coming to the United States for their education have been the primary source of founders with those coming after being educated abroad and then arriving for work decreasing in importance over time. The importance of undergraduate education as a channel for immigrant founders has increased over time. Immigrant founders coming for education are likely to start their companies in the state in which they were educated, especially states where they received their graduate education, leading to potentially large local economic benefits. The results of this paper have important policy implications for the supply of entrepreneurial talent and efforts to promote entrepreneurial ecosystems.
The determinants of immigrant health insurance in the United States: Understanding the role of health care in origin societies
Catalina Amuedo‐Dorantes & Crystal Zhan
Health Economics, June 2021, Pages 1498-1516
Abstract:
We examine how immigrants' health insurance in the United States is shaped by institutional traits of the health care systems in their origin societies. Conditional on a wide range of individual, country‐of‐origin, state‐level, and temporal controls, we find the affordability of health care back home helps explain immigrants' US health coverage. Specifically, low‐ and middle‐income migrants from countries with less affordable health care are more likely to get private insurance once in the United States and, correspondingly, less likely to have public coverage, relative to migrants from countries with more affordable care. The relationship conforms to multiple hypotheses. As predicted by the institutional beliefs hypothesis, migrants from countries with less affordable care might anticipate equally expensive health services in the United States and, in turn, insure themselves against high medical bills. Likewise, as predicted by the endogenous preferences hypothesis, migrants from countries with less affordable care might be accustomed to paying more for health care and, in turn, be less reluctant to pay for private health insurance. Overall, the findings underscore the relevance of migrants' past health care experiences in their origin societies in informing their health insurance in the United States even years after migration.
Immigration and Gender Differences in the Labor Market
Joan Llull
Journal of Human Capital, Spring 2021, Pages 174-203
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the effect of immigration on gender gaps. Using an equilibrium structural model for the US economy, I simulate the importance of two mechanisms: the differential increase in labor market competition from immigration on male and female workers and the availability of cheaper childcare services. Aggregate effects on gender and participation gaps are negligible. Females are more negatively affected by labor market competition, but the availability of cheaper childcare compensates for these effects. This generates heterogeneity in the effects along skill distribution: gender gaps are increased at the bottom and reduced at the top. Human capital adjustments are also heterogeneous.