United States Immigration Policy: The 1965 Act and its Consequences

The United States Immigration Act of 1965 was followed by a steep upward trend in total immigration, and by a dramatic shift in the source‐country composition away from Europe and towards Asia and Latin America. In this paper I ask if and how the 1965 Act generated these unanticipated consequences. The result was partly because of the pre‐existing legislation and partly because of the admission of immigrants outside the terms of the Act. However, much of it was a result of the Act itself, and specifically because of family reunification effects that were larger, the poorer the source country.     

The drowning-refugee effect: media salience and xenophobic attitudes

We study whether salient media coverage of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean affects individual xenophobic attitudes. We combine a randomized survey experiment – a variant of the classic ‘trolley dilemma’ – that implicitly elicits individual attitudes towards foreigners, with variation in interview timing, and find that such issue salience significantly decreases xenophobic attitudes by 2.2 percentage points. Our results thus support the idea that exposure to news describing immigrants as victims (instead of a threat) can significantly affect public opinion and mitigate bias against immigrants.     

Education reform and education gaps

We estimate the causal effect of the Italian 2009 “Gelmini” education reform on four academic performance gaps relating to immigration status, gender, parental social status, and parental education. The reform led to a reduction in the number of teachers and an increase in class size. Lags in implementing the reform for different grades is used to specify a difference-in-difference identification strategy. We find that the reform had a statistically and economically significant effect on the immigrant-native gap and on the gender gap, but not on the gap between students with more and less favourable family background. Particularly, our findings show that students with an immigration background were the main losers from the Gelmini reform.     

经济增长与认同危机——欧盟一体化进程的移民学解读(一)

欧盟所追求的稳定与增长之所以未如所愿,问题的症结在于没有制定与经济发展相适应的合理的社会政策,尤其是在经济全球化、社会福利化和政治民主化三大背景下,欧盟在移民问题上倒因为果,没有意识到移民对欧盟稳定与增长发挥的无以替代的作用,没有对以公民权为核心的移民政治权利、以迁徙权为核心的移民人权和以国民待遇为核心的移民福利权给予妥善考虑,因而无法建构国家认同基础上的超国家认同、文化认同基础上的政治认同和经济认同基础上的社会认同,最终因社会团结的拆解导致稳定与增长的危机。     

Refugee Immigration and Total Factor Productivity

This paper uses panel cointegration and causality techniques to examine the long-run relationship between refuge immigration and total factor productivity (TFP), a relationship that has not yet been examined in the literature. It is found that refugee immigration has, on average, a positive long-run effect on TFP, suggesting that refuge immigration increases the diversity of skills and ideas available to society as a whole, which in turn promotes specialization and innovation. It is also found that causality is unidirectional from refugee immigration to TFP, suggesting that refugees are primarily motivated by the push factor of persecution in the source country rather than by productivity (and hence welfare) gains as a potential pull factor in the destination country.     

欧洲各国移民融入政策之比较

欧洲各国在战后都受到了移民潮的影响和冲击。出于各自的历史传统、政治文化、建国过程以及对国家的理解差异,欧洲各国对于如何促进移民融入采取了不同的理念、政策手段和具体措施。笔者通过对德、法、英、荷等若干欧洲国家移民融入政策的比较研究,深入分析了几种典型的融入政策模式的特点、异同之处及发展趋势。     

Dualistic Discourse and Immigration Policy

Abstract:

The central question in immigration policy is whether to support less immigration through more “restrictive” laws and procedures or whether to support more immigration through a “relaxation” of existing laws. Recently, however, a second debate has arisen on one side of this debate regarding the appropriate types of arguments that may be used to support “restrictive” immigration. Ross Douthat refers to this dispute as the “race versus economics” question: using “race-based” arguments is not legitimate; while an “economic” or a “fact-based” argument is regarded as legitimate. We argue that this distinction in anti-immigration rhetoric is more apparent than real. Using the two most common historical “tropes” in immigration policy, “criminal” and “worker,” we find that racist, anti-ethnic, and classist assumptions pervade U.S. immigration law and policy and have been far more influential in formulating actual policy than either economic or “fact-based” analysis. The central problem with restrictive immigration policy is that its primary purpose is to determine who is eligible to be an American, and who is not; in other words, immigration policy is, by its fundamental intent, invidious. The question is whether it is possible to exclude individuals on these “legitimate” grounds without relying on “illegitimate” invidious distinctions?     

后靠式移民对收入影响的研究:基于断点回归的估计

基于断点回归对后靠式移民政策的收入效应进行实证研究。研究结果显示移民政策对于涉及群体存在显著的负收入效应,移民使得涉及家庭收入减少超过3000元;相对于从事农业生计家庭超过4000元的收入损失,从事非农业生计策略的家庭具有更高的抗政策波动能力,损失1800元左右远小于农业生计策略;移民对于不同收入水平家庭影响不尽相同,整体上呈现为倒U型。     

The 2015 refugee inflow and concerns over immigration

How did the large asylum-seeker inflow to Germany in 2015 affect concerns about immigration? Using individual-level panel data for the years 2012–2018 and a policy that allocates asylum-seekers to districts, I identify the effect of exposure to asylum-seekers. In line with the contact hypothesis, living in a high refugee migration district reduced concerns about immigration by 3 pp. Alternatively, a 1 pp. increase in the share of asylum-seekers in the population reduced these concerns by 3.4 pp. The effect appears larger for right-leaning respondents and is driven by districts that do not host a large reception centre. However, the overall trend indicates that after 2015 concerns about immigration increased by about 21 pp. and support for extreme right-wing parties by about 1.7 pp. These trends show considerable heterogeneity for different demographic groups.     

Immigration and economic freedom of the US states: Does the institutional quality of immigrants' origin countries matter?

When people immigrate to the United States from countries with less economic freedom, they do not dampen economic freedom in their destination states. We use the Economic Freedom of North America report to rate the economic freedom of US states, and we group immigrants by how far below the United States their origin countries score in the Economic Freedom of the World report. Our major findings hold true even when states receive immigrants from countries with far less economic freedom. Most relationships between immigration and the US states' economic freedom scores are neither statistically nor economically significant.