Staying Power
The Effect of Firm Lobbying on High-Skilled Visa Adjudication
Steven Liao
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Skilled foreign-born workers are critical to firms. Yet political or cultural factors can lead governments to restrict skilled immigration. To what extent, and how, does lobbying help firms overcome immigration barriers? This study explores these questions by focusing on the case of U.S. firms and an exogenous increase in H-1B high-skilled visa denial rates following the election of Trump in 2016. I construct an original firm-level dataset that combines the universe of U.S. temporary high-skilled visa petitions through 2017 with firms’ immigration lobbying reports and financial information. Leveraging the data and text analysis, I document key stylized facts about U.S. immigration lobbying behavior: who, how, and what firms lobby. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that firms’ bureaucratic lobbying under the Trump administration reduced denial rates on their visa petitions by at least 4.5 percentage points. These findings bridge existing research on immigration policymaking and lobbying effectiveness.
Living in the Shadow of Deportation: How Immigration Enforcement Forestalls Political Assimilation
Marcel Roman
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research demonstrates that acculturated co-ethnics of immigrant groups adopt restrictive immigration policy preferences akin to that of host country dominant groups. However, acculturated U.S. Latinxs still maintain relatively open immigration policy preferences despite their distance from the canonical immigrant archetype (e.g., Spanish-speaking, immigrant). To answer the puzzle, I draw on sociological perspectives and theorize that the increased societal integration of undocumented immigrants in tandem with an expanding interior immigration enforcement apparatus generates rebuff against Anglo political norms among acculturated Latinxs. Using 6 national Latinx surveys, I corroborate my theory and find perceptibly threatening immigration enforcement contexts forestall the adoption of restrictive immigration policy preferences via acculturation. Absent deportation threat, acculturated Latinxs adopt immigration preferences similar to white Anglos. I also replicate these findings for attitudinal dimensions outside immigration policy preferences. This paper suggests political assimilation is not preordained among acculturated immigrant co-ethnics in light of an unreceptive host society.
The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States
Shai Bernstein et al.
NBER Working Paper, December 2022
Abstract:
We characterize the contribution of immigrants to US innovation, both through their direct productivity as well as through their indirect spillover effects on their native collaborators. To do so, we link patent records to a database containing the first five digits of more than 230 million of Social Security Numbers (SSN). By combining this part of the SSN together with year of birth, we identify whether individuals are immigrants based on the age at which their Social Security Number is assigned. We find immigrants represent 16 percent of all US inventors, but produced 23 percent of total innovation output, as measured by number of patents, patent citations, and the economic value of these patents. Immigrant inventors are more likely to rely on foreign technologies, to collaborate with foreign inventors, and to be cited in foreign markets, thus contributing to the importation and diffusion of ideas across borders. Using an identification strategy that exploits premature inventor deaths, we find that immigrant inventors create especially strong positive externalities on the innovation production of their collaborators, while natives have a much weaker impact. A simple decomposition illustrates that immigrants are responsible for 36% of aggregate innovation, two-thirds of which is due to their innovation externalities on their native-born collaborators.
Loss of Peers and Individual Worker Performance: Evidence from H-1B Visa Denials
Prithwiraj Choudhury et al.
Harvard Working Paper, December 2022
Abstract:
We study how restrictive immigration policies and the unexpected loss of peers affect the performance of skilled migrants, exploiting the unexpected increased denials of H-1B visa extensions in the United States beginning in 2017. We find that employees who lost peers of the same ethnic background experience a substantial decrease in individual performance. To resolve the endogeneity surrounding visa denial decisions, we build an instrumental variable that exploits the fixed duration of the visas. Our mechanism tests suggest that ethnic ties boost individual performance through preferential channels of knowledge and information spillovers.
How Do Low-Education Immigrants Adjust to Chinese Import Shocks? Evidence Using English Language Proficiency
Delia Furtado & Haiyang Kong
University of Connecticut Working Paper, January 2023
Abstract:
This paper examines the link between trade-induced changes in local labor market opportunities and English language fluency rates among low-education immigrants in the United States. The production-based manufacturing jobs lost due to Chinese import competition around the turn of the century mostly did not require strong English-speaking skills while many of the jobs in expanding industries, mostly in the service sector, did. Consistent with responses to these changing labor market opportunities, we find that a $1,000 increase in import exposure per worker in a local area led to an increase in the share of low-education immigrants speaking English very well in that area by about half a percentage point. As evidence that at least part of this is a result of actual improvements in English language speaking abilities, we show that low-education immigrants in trade-impacted areas became especially likely to be enrolled in school compared to similarly low-education natives. However, while we find little support for selective domestic migration in response to trade shocks, we present evidence suggesting that new immigrants arriving from abroad choose where to settle based either on their English fluency or their ability to learn English.
Sanctuary city policies and Latinx immigrant mental health in California
Tanya Nieri et al.
SSM - Population Health, forthcoming
Abstract:
This quasi-experimental study examined whether “sanctuary city” policies are an effective mechanism for reducing mental health inequalities by immigrant origin status in Latinx populations in California. Ample evidence indicates that people experience mental health problems when restrictive immigration policies are imposed. It remains unclear whether sanctuary city policies can improve population mental health in the groups targeted by restrictive immigration policies: undocumented immigrant Latinxs, documented immigrant Latinxs, and native-born Latinxs. We combined data on California's 482 cities concerning whether and when they implemented a sanctuary policy with health data on approximately 142,000 adults, 6400 adolescents and 13,000 children from the multi-year California Health Interview Survey. After using propensity score matching to identify non-sanctuary cities comparable to sanctuary cities, we estimated respondent-level difference-in-differences models to determine whether sanctuary city policies had beneficial mental health effects on three age groups: adults, adolescents, and children during the period 2007–2018. There was a trend toward improved mental health in sanctuary cities after policy enactment, but the patterns of mental health in the three Latinx immigration sub-groups of each age group did not conform to our hypotheses. Buffering the adverse effects of harsh federal immigration policies may need to involve other approaches, such as expanded local mental health care access. We discuss these results in terms of alternative treatment interference, residents' policy awareness, the policy's capacity to address past health impacts, methodological issues, and potential policy momentum.
Migrant-Family Separation and Higher-Order Laws’ Diverging Normative Force
Kevin Cope & Charles Crabtree
Journal of Legal Studies, June 2022, Pages 403–426
Abstract:
A growing experimental literature suggests that international law has a larger impact on public opinion than constitutional law. Because the former US policy of separating migrant families at the border arguably runs afoul of both the Constitution and international law, it provides an unusual opportunity to simultaneously explore the normative pull of these norms experimentally. We fielded national surveys in 2018 and 2020, asking respondents how much they supported the policy. We find that telling people that the policy is unconstitutional increases support for the policy, but only when the issue is receiving heavy media coverage, and that international law has no comparable effect on public opinion. We attempt to explain these seemingly counterintuitive results in two ways. First, in studies that explore the impact of constitutional law, respondents may be unsuccessfully treated. Second, constitutional law treatments can trigger a backlash effect through defensive processing of information about constitutionality.
“The Best Country in the World”: The Surprising Social Mobility of New York’s Irish-Famine Immigrants
Tyler Anbinder, Cormac Ó Gráda & Simone Wegge
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Winter 2023, Pages 407-438
Abstract:
Historians generally portray the Irish immigrants who came to the United States, fleeing the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century, as hopelessly mired in poverty and hardship due to discrimination, a lack of occupational training, and oversaturated job markets in the East Coast cities where most of them settled. Although the digitization of census data and other records now enables the tracking of nineteenth-century Americans far more accurately than in the past, scholars have not utilized such data to determine whether the Famine Irish were, in fact, trapped on the bottom rungs of the American socioeconomic ladder. The use of a longitudinal database of Famine immigrants who initially settled in New York and Brooklyn indicates that the Famine Irish had far more occupational mobility than previously recognized. Only 25 percent of men ended their working careers in low-wage, unskilled labor; 44 percent ended up in white-collar occupations of one kind or another -- primarily running saloons, groceries, and other small businesses.
From National Memory to Self-Referential Symbol: The Rebirth of the Phoenix Metaphors among Chinese Immigrant Women
Wei Miao & Hua Shi
SAGE Open, January 2023
Abstract:
This article focuses on the psychocultural perceptions and social interactions among a sample of 58 Chinese immigrant women in the Maricopa County, the metro area of the city of Phoenix, Arizona, and the manner in which they are able to negotiate multiple identity markers that in part influence and define their capacity to achieve and maintain self-referential growth. The sample of Chinese women living in the Phoenix area not only apply the metaphor of the phoenix to themselves, but also reference this mythical bird in their social media ID, clubs names, and themed events, and include it in oral traditions passed on to children. In comparison, they reject, negotiate, or resist the stigma and stereotypes attached to the “dragon” symbol which often convey qualities of overpowering and irrational oppression. Instead, they associate themselves with the heuristic of the phoenix as a tool for self-empowerment, virtue, well-being, and ethnic- self-representation. These spontaneous reconstructions of ethnic symbols and metaphors based on traditional cultural consensus allowed immigrants to develop cultural self-confidence because they believed that they had eliminated the possibility of discrimination, and eventually contribute to feasible solutions of silent symbolic violence.
What divides the first and second generations? Family time of arrival and educational outcomes for immigrant youth
Marie Hull
Southern Economic Journal, January 2023, Pages 754-787
Abstract:
In this article, I develop a measure of host country experience, which I call “relative time of arrival,” to explore differences between first- and second-generation immigrants. This measure is finer than immigrant generation and expands on the widely used measures of years since migration and age at migration. It is scaled so that zero indicates that a child was born in the same year that the family migrated, and the negative side of the scale measures parents' host country experience before the child's birth. I then use relative time of arrival to assess whether parents' host country experience before birth matters and generally find that it does not. I also study the dividing line between the first and second generations, specifically, whether there are differences in educational outcomes between early arriving first-generation immigrants and second-generation immigrants whose parents arrived shortly before birth. For most outcomes considered, I find that the transition between the first and second generations is relatively smooth, indicating that these groups are not as distinct as often thought. Thus, observed differences between the first and second generations are driven by the lower performance of late-arriving first-generation children.