Mi casa es su casa
Maureen Craig & Jennifer Richeson
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The U.S. Census Bureau projects that racial minority groups will make up a majority of the U.S. national population in 2042, effectively creating a so-called majority-minority nation. In four experiments, we explored how salience of such racial demographic shifts affects White Americans’ political-party leanings and expressed political ideology. Study 1 revealed that making California’s majority-minority shift salient led politically unaffiliated White Americans to lean more toward the Republican Party and express greater political conservatism. Studies 2, 3a, and 3b revealed that making the changing national racial demographics salient led White Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly. Moreover, the results implicate group-status threat as the mechanism underlying these effects. Taken together, this work suggests that the increasing diversity of the nation may engender a widening partisan divide.
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Distributive Justice for Others, Collective Angst, and Support for Exclusion of Immigrants
Todd Lucas et al.
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Harsh treatment of others can reflect an underlying motivation to view the world as fair and just and also a dispositional tendency to believe in justice. However, there is a critical need to refine and expand existing knowledge, not only to identify underlying psychological processes but also to better understand how justice may be implicated in support for exclusionary policies. Across two studies, we show that support for policies that restrict immigrants is exclusively associated with thoughts about fair outcomes for other people (distributive justice for others). In Study 1, Americans' dispositional tendency to believe in distributive justice for others was associated with greater support for a policy proposing to further restrict immigrant job seekers' capacity to gain employment in the United States. In Study 2, we experimentally primed thoughts about justice in a sample of U.S. police officers. Support for a policy that mandated stricter policing of illegal immigration was strongest among officers who first thought about fair outcomes for other people, relative to other unique justice primes. Across both studies, distributive justice for others was associated with greater collective angst — perceived threat towards the future existence of Americans. Moreover, collective angst mediated the link between distributive justice for others and support for restrictive policies. Overall, this research suggests that thoughts about distributive justice for others can especially diminish compassion towards immigrants and other underprivileged groups via support for exclusionary policies. In addition, merely thinking about distributive justice for others may be sufficient to amplify social callousness.
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Timothy Diette & Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere
American Economic Review, May 2014, Pages 412-417
Abstract:
Recent evidence suggests that exposure to a larger share of Limited English (LE) students is associated with a slight decline in performance for students at the top of the achievement distribution. In this paper we explore whether LE peer effects differ by gender and race. Utilizing school-by-year fixed effect methods that allow us to address possible endogeneity with respect to the schools students attend, we find evidence of heterogeneous peer effects of LE students on natives. Specifically, we find no LE student peer effects on females' achievement in math and reading but significant negative effects on males and black students.
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Latino Immigrant Acculturation and Crime
Lorna Alvarez-Rivera, Matt Nobles & Kim Lersch
American Journal of Criminal Justice, June 2014, Pages 315-330
Abstract:
Recent debate on the future of immigration policy in the United States has spawned much discussion on social costs and consequences for immigrants, such as employment, education, health care, and most notably, crime. Although recent Latino immigrants are often portrayed as outsiders in popular media, their successful acculturation into the American way of life may present more crime-related risk rather than less. This study examines arrest records for Latinos in two southwestern American cities to determine the extent to which Latino acculturation is related to arrests and convictions for both misdemeanors and felonies after controlling for certain legal and extra-legal factors. Results indicate that acculturation is consistently and positively associated with all four crime-related outcomes in this sample. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.
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Foreign STEM Workers and Native Wages and Employment in U.S. Cities
Giovanni Peri, Kevin Shih & Chad Sparber
NBER Working Paper, May 2014
Abstract:
Scientists, Technology professionals, Engineers, and Mathematicians (STEM workers) are fundamental inputs in scientific innovation and technological adoption, the main drivers of productivity growth in the U.S. In this paper we identify the effect of STEM worker growth on the wages and employment of college and non-college educated native workers in 219 U.S. cities from 1990 to 2010. In order to identify a supply-driven and heterogeneous increase in STEM workers across U.S. cities, we use the distribution of foreign-born STEM workers in 1980 and exploit the introduction and variation of the H-1B visa program granting entry to foreign-born college educated (mainly STEM) workers. We find that H-1B-driven increases in STEM workers in a city were associated with significant increases in wages paid to college educated natives. Wage increases for non-college educated natives are smaller but still significant. We do not find significant effects on employment. We also find that STEM workers increased housing rents for college graduates, which eroded part of their wage gains. Together, these results imply a significant effect of foreign STEM on total factor productivity growth in the average US city between 1990 and 2010.
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The Persistent Connection Between Language-of-Interview and Latino Political Opinion
Taeku Lee & Efrén Pérez
Political Behavior, June 2014, Pages 401-425
Abstract:
Since the advent of public opinion polling, scholars have extensively documented the relationship between survey response and interviewer characteristics, including race, ethnicity, and gender. This paper extends this literature to the domain of language-of-interview, with a focus on Latino political opinion. We ascertain whether, and to what degree, Latinos’ reported political attitudes vary by the language they interview in. Using several political surveys, including the 1989–1990 Latino National Political Survey and the 2006 Latino National Survey, we unearth two key patterns. First, language-of-interview produces substantively important differences of opinion between English and Spanish interviewees. This pattern is not isolated to attitudes that directly or indirectly involve Latinos (e.g., immigration policy, language policy). Indeed, it emerges even in the reporting of political facts. Second, the association between Latino opinion and language-of-interview persists even after statistically controlling for, among other things, individual differences in education, national origin, citizenship status, and generational status. Together, these results suggest that a fuller understanding of the contours of Latino public opinion can benefit by acknowledging the influence of language-of-interview.
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Framing Unauthorized Immigrants: The Effects of Labels on Evaluations
Reidar Ommundsen et al.
Psychological Reports, April 2014, Pages 461-478
Abstract:
In the U.S. media, unauthorized immigrants are often interchangeably referred to as “illegal aliens,” “illegal immigrants,” and undocumented immigrants.” In spite of formal equivalence, these terms carry different connotations, but the effects of these labels on people's attitudes toward immigrants are not well documented. In this replication study, 274 undergraduate students in psychology responded to one of three randomly distributed versions of a 20-item scale measuring attitudes toward unauthorized immigration. The items in the three scale versions varyingly referred to immigrants using the three terms. Results showed differences in attitudes toward unauthorized immigration between all experimental conditions. The label “illegal immigrants” yielded significantly less positive attitudes compared to the label “undocumented immigrants,” and respondents exposed to the label “illegal aliens” showed the most positive attitudes. Furthermore, the effects of the experimental conditions were not moderated by the respondents' patriotism, sex, or own immigrant background.
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Jesús Fernández-Huertas Moraga & Hillel Rapoport
Journal of Public Economics, July 2014, Pages 94–108
Abstract:
International migration is maybe the single most effective way to alleviate global poverty. When a given host country allows more immigrants in, this creates costs and benefits for that particular country as well as a positive externality for individuals and governments who care about world poverty. Host countries quite often restrict immigration due to its important social and political costs, however these costs are never measured and made comparable across countries. In this paper we first show theoretically that tradable immigration quotas (TIQs) can reveal countries’ comparative advantages in hosting immigrants and – once coupled with a matching mechanism taking migrants’ preferences over destinations and countries preferences over migrants’ types into account – allow for exploiting them efficiently. We then discuss three potential applications: a market for the resettlement of international refugees, a market for the resettlement of migrants displaced by climate change, and the creation of an OECD poverty-reduction visa program adapted from the US green card lottery.
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Matthew Mendez & Christian Grose
University of Southern California Working Paper, April 2014
Abstract:
Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference-induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences. Elected officials who favor laws harming minority groups are also less likely to engage in non-policy responsiveness to minority groups. To test this proposition, we conducted a field experiment in 28 U.S. legislative chambers. Legislators were randomly assigned to receive messages from Latino, Anglo, English-speaking, and Spanish-speaking constituents asking if a driver’s license is required for voting. If legislators supported voter identification, Latino constituents were less likely than Anglo constituents to receive communications from legislators. The implication is that discriminatory intent underlies legislative support for voter identification laws.
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Politics, unemployment, and the enforcement of immigration law
Michael Makowsky & Thomas Stratmann
Public Choice, July 2014, Pages 131-153
Abstract:
Immigration control-related audits and their resulting sanctions are not solely determined by impartial enforcement of laws and regulations. They are also determined by the incentives faced by vote-maximizing politicians, agents acting on their behalf, and workers likely to compete with immigrants in the local labor market. In this paper, we use a unique data set to test the extent to which congressional oversight determines the bureaucratic immigration enforcement process. We examine the decisions made at each stage of enforcement from over 40,000 audits from 1990 to 2000. This includes analysis of (1) whether a firm is found in violation, (2) whether a fine is issued, (3) the size of the fine issued, and (4) how much of a dollar reduction fined employers were able to negotiate. We find that the number of audits conducted increases with local unemployment. We also find that a congressman’s party affiliation and its interaction with committee membership and party majority status, as well as firm size and local union membership, correlate to decisions made at every stage of enforcement.
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Immigration, Search, and Redistribution: A Quantitative Assessment of Native Welfare
Michele Battisti et al.
NBER Working Paper, May 2014
Abstract:
We study the effects of immigration on native welfare in a general equilibrium model featuring two skill types, search frictions, wage bargaining, and a redistributive welfare state. Our quantitative analysis suggests that, in all 20 countries studied, immigration attenuates the effects of search frictions. These gains tend to outweigh the welfare costs of redistribution. Immigration has increased native welfare in almost all countries. Both high-skilled and low-skilled natives benefit in two thirds of countries, contrary to what models without search frictions predict. Median total gains from migration are 1.19% and 1.00% for high and low skilled natives, respectively.
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Blake Sisk & Carl Bankston
Population Research and Policy Review, June 2014, Pages 309-334
Abstract:
Disasters provide opportunities to study the social and economic dimensions of large-scale shifts. Drawn by the surge in demand for low-skill construction workers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Latino immigrants represented a substantial share of the New Orleans reconstruction workforce. Scholars, however, have yet to examine how the increased presence of immigrants affected U.S.-born workers in New Orleans. In this analysis, we investigate how the influx of Latino immigrant construction workers shaped the demographic composition and occupational-wage structure of the New Orleans construction sector. Using IPUMS-U.S.A. data from the 2000 and 2006–2010 periods for the New Orleans MSA, we employ logistic and multinomial logistic regression models to analyze a sample of 3,206 foreign-born Latinos, U.S.-born whites, U.S.-born blacks, and others employed in the construction industry. Our analysis indicates that the probability of U.S.-born workers being employed in construction remained stable from the pre- to post-storm period, even as we find evidence of an emerging immigrant employment niche in the post-Katrina construction industry. After the storm, however, Latino immigrants were much more heavily concentrated in occupations at the bottom end of the construction industry’s wage structure, while the relative position of U.S.-born workers improved across the two periods. Together, these findings show that disasters, like other structural shifts, can yield the conditions that produce immigrant employment niches. Moreover, our results indicate that while employment niches provide economic opportunities for the foreign-born, they can also intensify the disadvantage experienced by immigrant workers.
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Cathy Yang Liu & Jason Edwards
Social Science Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Immigrants continue to settle in metropolitan areas across the United States and bring significant changes to various urban labor markets. Using American Community Survey (ACS) data for 2007 and 2011, we trace the employment outcomes of immigrants compared to native-born workers before and after the recent Great Recession across the 100 largest metropolitan areas and examine individual-level and metropolitan-level factors that shape their employment outcomes. We find that low-skilled workers in general and immigrants without English proficiency and those who are new entrants or earliest arrivals are harder hit in the recession. Latino immigrants and black workers fare worse in areas with high immigrant concentration. Latino immigrants experience employment gains, however, in the South, large urban economies, as well as new immigrant gateways. Asian immigrants see declines in employment likelihood in areas with a large construction sector, while areas with a large trade sector hurt native-born white workers.
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Raymond Barranco
Sociological Spectrum, May/June 2014, Pages 185-202
Abstract:
Past research has shown that a lack of low-skill jobs increases both unemployment and homicide for blacks. Therefore, it is important for scholars to understand the potentially negative effects brought about by increased competition for these jobs. Given the recent dramatic rise in the number of low-skilled Latinos in the United States, this paper examines how increased Latino competition for low-skill jobs affects black homicide victimization. Using negative binomial regression, I examine black homicide victimization data obtained from coroner's reports. Results indicate that Latino competition for jobs only affects blacks in urban areas that have recently experienced a large increase in its Latino population; however, the effects vary by industry.
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Do Immigrants Bring Good Health?
Osea Giuntella & Fabrizio Mazzonna
University of Oxford Working Paper, March 2014
Abstract:
This paper studies the effects of immigration on health. We merge information on individual characteristics from the German Socio-Economic Panel with detailed local labor market characteristics for the period 1984 to 2009. We exploit the longitudinal component of the data to analyze how immigration affects the health of both immigrants and natives over time. Immigrants are shown to be healthier than natives upon their arrival ("healthy immigrant effect"), but their health deteriorates over time spent in Germany. We show that the convergence in health is heterogeneous across immigrants and faster among those working in more physically demanding jobs. Immigrants are significantly more likely to work in strenuous occupations. In light of these facts, we investigate whether changes in the spatial concentration of immigrants affect natives' health. Our results suggest that immigration reduces residents' likelihood to report negative health outcomes by improving their working conditions and reducing the average workload. We show that these effects are concentrated in blue-collar occupations and are larger among low educated natives and previous cohorts of immigrants.
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The Impact of Immigration on the Well-Being of Natives
Alpaslan Akay, Amelie Constant & Corrado Giulietti
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, July 2014, Pages 72–92
Abstract:
Combining data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1998-2009 with local labor market information, this is the first paper to investigate how the spatial concentration of immigrants affects the life satisfaction of the native Germans. Our results show a positive and robust effect of immigration on natives’ well-being, which is not driven by local labor market characteristics. Immigration has only a weak impact on the subjective well-being of immigrant groups, meanwhile. We also examine potential threats to causality and conclude that our findings are not driven by selectivity and reverse causality. Specifically, natives are not crowded out by immigrants and the sorting of immigrants to regions with higher native happiness is negligible. We further find that the positive effect of immigration on natives’ life satisfaction is a function of the assimilation of immigrants in the region. Immigration's well-being effect is higher in regions with intermediate assimilation levels and is essentially zero in regions with no or complete assimilation.
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Thomas de Vroome, Borja Martinovic & Maykel Verkuyten
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, April 2014, Pages 166-175
Abstract:
The so-called integration paradox refers to the phenomenon of the economically more integrated and highly educated immigrants turning away from the host society, instead of becoming more oriented toward it. The present study examined this paradox in the Netherlands among a large sample (N = 3,981) of immigrants, including 2 generations and 4 ethnic groups. The assumed negative relationship between level of education and attitudes toward the host society and the native population was expected to be mediated by two indicators of perceived acceptance by the native majority: discrimination and subgroup respect. Results show that higher educated immigrants perceive more discrimination and less respect for minorities, and these perceptions, in turn, relate to less positive evaluations of the native majority and the host society. This pattern of associations is quite similar for the 2 generations and for the 4 migrant groups.
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Jacob Hibel & Matthew Hall
Population Research and Policy Review, June 2014, Pages 365-391
Abstract:
We use data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999 as well as neighborhood data from the 2000 U.S. Census to examine relationships between neighborhood Mexican immigrant concentration and reading (n = 820) and mathematics (n = 1,540) achievement among children of Mexican descent. Mixed-effects growth curves show that children living in immigrant-rich communities enter school at an achievement disadvantage relative to children in neighborhoods with fewer coethnic immigrant families. However, these disparities are driven by lower-SES families’ concentration in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods as well as these neighborhoods’ structural disadvantages. Controlling for children’s generation status and socioeconomic status, as well as neighborhood-level measures of structural disadvantage, safety, and social support, neighborhood immigrant concentration demonstrates a modest positive association with mathematics achievement among children of Mexican immigrant parents at the time of school entry. However, we do not find strong positive associations between Mexican American children’s rate of achievement growth over the elementary and middle school years and their neighborhoods’ concentration of Mexican immigrants.
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On Consumer Credit Outcomes in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region
Chintal Desai & Andre Mollick
Journal of Financial Services Research, February 2014, Pages 91-115
Abstract:
The ease in mobility of people across the U.S.-Mexico border region provides a natural setting for analyzing the role of economic interdependency on consumer credit outcomes. Since the U.S. and Mexican economies are not entirely synchronized and have different growth rates, the growing Mexican border economy is likely to increase the consumption of U.S. goods and services in the region, and provide additional job opportunities to the U.S. border residents. Thus, the effect of being located at the border (‘border effect’) might reduce default and bankruptcy in the U.S. However, if both economies are nearly perfectly correlated, then the ‘border effect’ is likely to be insignificant. Our results are consistent with the border effect lowering the rate of bankruptcies and mortgage defaults in the U.S. counties that share a border with Mexico. An increase in the level of economic interdependency, as measured by the differential economic growth between Mexican municipalities and their sister U.S. county, decreases the bankruptcy rates in the U.S. border region. Overall, this research helps understand credit risk issues in the U.S.-Mexico border region.
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Immigration Quotas, World War I, and Emigrant Flows from the United States in the Early 20th Century
Michael Greenwood & Zachary Ward
Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
Little is known about international return migration because governments rarely track out-migrants. However, one exception occurred early in the 20th century when the United States kept records of emigrants. Using within-country changes in quota allocations in 1921, 1924, and 1929 in combination with 1908-1932 data on specific countries of intended destination of the emigrants, we estimate the effect of quotas on (1) out-migration rates, (2) emigration across skill groups, and (3) the duration of temporary migrants’ stays in the U.S. Higher quota restrictions reduced emigration rates, mostly for unskilled laborers and farmers. Higher quota restrictions also increased duration of stay, as the share of migrants staying less than 5 years fell and the share staying 5 to 10 years rose. Return migration behavior was also associated with changes in previous immigrant cohort’s networks and savings. Return migration rates were also low during World War I, and more significant population losses from the War in home countries discouraged return migration. Finally, out-migration of German migrants increased substantially during the 1920s.
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Foreign-Born Voting Behavior in Local Elections: Evidence From New Immigrant Destinations
Melissa Goldsmith & Claudio Holzner
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Approximately half of immigrants to the United States are now settling directly in cities and towns with little prior history of immigration. Because this dispersed settlement pattern is so recent, we know little about the political behavior of naturalized citizens in these new immigrant destinations. This article begins to fill this gap by exploring the determinants of foreign-born voting in municipal elections using a new dataset that combines official voting information from the state of Utah with demographic information about Utah residents from the Utah Population Database (UPDB). We hypothesize that in addition to individual-level predictors of prior experience with democratic politics and community attachment, the size of cities and their form of government will also affect the likelihood that foreign-born citizens will turn out to vote in local elections. We use multilevel modeling techniques to test these hypotheses and find that prior experience with democratic politics, whether in the United States or in their home country, along with the city-level characteristics of city size and form of government, are powerful predictors of foreign-born voting in local elections. Moreover, we find that while large cities experience lower levels of turnout for all citizens, the negative effect on participation is strongest for foreign-born citizens.
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Immigration and House Prices in the UK
Filipa Sá
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article studies the effect of immigration on house prices in the UK. It .finds that immigration has a negative effect on house prices and presents evidence that this negative effect is due to the mobility response of the native population. Natives respond to immigration by moving to different areas and those who leave are at the top of the wage distribution. This generates a negative income effect on housing demand and pushes down house prices. The negative effect of immigration on house prices is driven by local areas where immigrants have lower education.
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Immigration and Structural Change: Evidence from Post-War Germany
Sebastian Braun & Michael Kvasnicka
Journal of International Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does immigration accelerate sectoral change from low- to high-productivity sectors? This paper analyzes the effect of one of the largest population movements in history, the influx of millions of German expellees to West Germany after World War II, on Germany’s speed of transition away from low-productivity agriculture. A simple two-sector specific factors model, in which moving costs prevent the marginal product of labor to be equalized across sectors, predicts that expellee inflows boost output per worker by expanding the high-productivity non-agricultural sector but decrease output per worker within sectors. Using German district-level data from before and after the war, we find empirical support for these predictions.
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Nadia Campaniello
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the attempt to reduce migration pressure, since 1995, the European Union has been planning to establish a free trade area with developing countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. The process is still ongoing. Our paper tests whether it is likely to be an effective policy. We estimate a gravitational model of bilateral migrations on bilateral exports from the Mediterranean Third Countries (South) to the European Union (North) over the period 1970-2000, using different specifications. We find, in line with most of the literature, a significantly positive correlation (called “complementarity”) between exports and migrations from the South to the North. Then we go one step further, trying to solve the potential endogeneity problem using average trade tariffs and bilateral exchange rate volatility as instruments for trade. Based on the OLS as well as the 2SLS results, liberalizing trade in the area of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership does not seem to be an effective policy to mitigate the migration flows, at least in the short run.