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Migration, Culture and Politics

Paper Session

Friday, Jan. 6, 2023 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (CST)

New Orleans Marriott, Preservation Hall Studio 2
Hosted By: Association for Comparative Economic Studies
  • Chair: Guido Friebel, Goethe University

Faith and Assimilation: Italian Immigrants in the U.S.

Stefano Gagliarducci
,
University of Rome
Marco Tabellini
,
Harvard Business School

Abstract

How do ethnic religious organizations influence immigrants’ assimilation? This paper offers the first systematic answer to this question by focusing on Italian Catholic churches in the US between 1890 and 1920, when four million Italians moved to America, and anti-Catholic sentiments were widespread. We digitize and assemble novel data from the Catholic directories, and exploit variation in the timing of arrival of Italian Catholic churches across US counties. We obtain three main results. First, Italian churches reduced the social assimilation of Italian immigrants, lowering intermarriage, residential integration, and naturalization rates. Second, the ethnic content of names chosen by Italian parents for their US born children suggests that churches reduced the vertical transmission of culture across generations, likely due to higher horizontal socialization within the Italian enclave. Third, despite the reduction in Italians' social assimilation, Italian churches had ambiguous effects on immigrants' economic outcomes, and raised children's literacy and ability to speak English. We provide evidence that increased coordination within the Italian community and natives’ backlash are plausible pathways for our results. We also identify patterns of selective migration of Italians following church entries, which, however, are quantitatively small and cannot explain our findings.

The impact of immigration on local tax revenues and public expenditures in the United States

Anna Maria Mayda
,
Georgetown University
Mine Senses
,
Johns Hopkins University
Walter Steingress
,
Bank of Canada

Abstract

This paper studies the causal impact of immigration on local government finances using U.S.
county-level data from 1990 to 2010. We are the first to quantify the local fiscal effect of
immigrants to the United States by estimating a reduced-form model. We uncover substantial
heterogeneity in terms of the effects, across skill levels, locations within the U.S. and
generations of immigrants. Inflows of high-skilled foreign born increase county-level per
capita revenues and expenditures, leading to greater provision of public goods and services;
the arrival of low-skilled immigrants has the opposite impact. One important channel of
impact on county-level receipts is property tax revenues, which we show move in the same
direction as property values in response to immigration. Differences in the location of low-
and high-skilled immigrants lead to asymmetric fiscal effects across US counties and
transfers from the federal and state government partially offset these local effects. The
impact of second-generation immigrants is more positive than that of first-generation ones.

Migration and Cultural Change

Hillel Rappoport
,
Paris School of Economics
Arthur Silve
,
Laval University
Sulin Sardoschau
,
Humboldt University

Abstract

We propose a novel perspective on migration and cultural change by asking both
theoretically and empirically – and from a global viewpoint – whether migration is a source of
cultural convergence or divergence between home and host countries. Our theoretical model
derives distinctive testable predictions as to the sign and direction of convergence for various
compositional and cultural diffusion mechanisms. We use the World Value Survey for 1981-
2014 to build time-varying measures of cultural similarity for a large number of country pairs
and exploit within country-pair variation over time. Our results support migration-based
cultural convergence, with cultural remittances as its main driver. In other words and in
contrast to the populist narrative, we find that while immigrants do act as vectors of cultural
diffusion, this is mostly to export the host country culture back home.

Terrorism and Voting: The Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Germany

Navid Sabet
,
Goethe University
Marius Liebald
,
Goethe University
Guido Friebel
,
Goethe University

Abstract

Can right-wing terrorism increase support for far-right populist parties and if so, why? Exploiting quasi-random variation between successful and failed attacks across German municipalities, we find that successful attacks lead to significant increases in the vote share for the right-wing, populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in state elections. Investigating channels, we find that successful attacks lead to differential increases in turnout which are mainly captured by the AfD. Using the German SOEP, a longitudinal panel of individuals, we investigate terror's impact on individual political attitudes. We first document that people residing in municipalities that experience successful or failed attacks are indistinguishable. We then show that successful terror leads individuals to prefer the AfD, adopt more populist attitudes and report significantly greater political participation at the local level. These results display important heterogeneities: individuals without prior partisan commitments, without prior history of political participation and with less education prefer the AfD differentially more in response to successful terror. Terror also leads voters to migrate away from (some) mainstream parties to the AfD. Successful attacks also receive more media coverage among local and regional publishers and that coverage makes significantly more use of words related to Islam and terror. These results hold despite the fact that most attacks are motivated by right-wing causes and targeted against migrants. The AfD responds to attacks by speaking more about crime and integration in its election manifestos at the state level. Other parties do not shift their language or shift in the opposite direction.
JEL Classifications
  • J0 - General