Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration

By M. Tabellini. The Review of Economic Studies, 2019

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this article, I jointly investigate the political and the economic effects of immigration, and study the causes of anti-immigrant sentiments. I exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to U.S. cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the Immigration Acts of the 1920s, and instrument immigrants’ location decision relying on pre-existing settlement patterns. I find that immigration triggered hostile political reactions, such as the election of more conservative legislators, higher support for anti-immigration legislation, and lower redistribution. Exploring the causes of natives’ backlash, I document that immigration increased natives’ employment, spurred industrial production, and did not generate losses even among natives working in highly exposed sectors. These findings suggest that opposition to immigration was unlikely to have economic roots. Instead, I provide evidence that natives’ political discontent was increasing in the cultural differences between immigrants and natives. Results in this article indicate that, even when diversity is economically beneficial, it may nonetheless be socially hard to manage.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/106a1e4edef053d6ec8dfe7bfdb1eb23f2533ef5

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Citations in the corpus

Immigrants and the Making of America (2019, background): “It is informative to compare these long-run effects with the estimated short-run effects from Tabellini (2018), who studies the effects of immigration from 1910 to 1930 across 180 U.S. cities.”
Immigration and preferences for redistribution in Europe1 (2019, unknown): “While population diversity may have important economic benefits in the long run (Ortega and Peri, 2014; Alesina et al., 2016; Sequeira et al., 2019; Tabellini, 2018), in the short-run immigration and diversity are perceived by many as a threat to social cohesion and as putting welfare systems at ris”
Immigration and Redistribution (2018, unknown): “…period in which the federal welfare state was minimal and cities were mostly independent fiscal units responsible for the provision of public goods, Tabellini (2018) finds that cities which received more European immigrants – specifically Catholic and Jewish immigrants – between 1910 and 1930…”