Do Interest Groups Affect U.S. Immigration Policy?

By Giovanni Facchini, Anna Maria Mayda, Prachi Mishra. Social Science Research Network, 2008

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work visas with data on lobbying activity associated with immigration. We find robust evidence that both pro- and anti-immigration interest groups play a statistically significant and economically relevant role in shaping migration policy across sectors. Barriers to migration are lower in sectors in which business interest groups incur larger lobbying expenditures and higher in sectors where labor unions are more important.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f53bfac53a8b7a9a312703b0b3f7b845ca502bdd

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Citations in the corpus

International Migration: Trends, Determinants, and Policy Effects (2019, background): “The overall liberalization of migration policies exemplifies the existence of a significant discursive gap between politicians’ tough rhetoric and the actual policies that are enforced, which are often responsive to powerful business lobbies favoring liberal immigration regimes (Freeman 1995; Facchi”
The Supply Side of Innovation: H‐1B Visa Reforms and U.S. Ethnic Invention (2010, background): “Alternatively, the interaction will not overcome the endogeneity problem if very dependent ﬁrms and cities inﬂuence the size of the program established by the federal government through lobbying or similar activities (e.g., Reksulak et al. 2006; Facchini et al. 2008).”
High-Skilled Migration and Agglomeration (2017, unknown): “Kerr et al. (2014) examine the lobbying efforts of U.S. public firms for high-skilled migration, building upon the interest group work of Facchini et al. (2011) for broader immigration policies.”
Skilled Immigration and the Employment Structures of US Firms (2014, unknown): “[23] Facchini, Giovanni, Anna Maria Mayda, and Prachi Mishra, "Do Interest Groups Affect U.”
Growing Restrictiveness or Changing Selection? The Nature and Evolution of Migration Policies1 (2014, unknown): “…and de Haas 2013) between the “tough talk” of politicians aiming to attenuate public fears about immigration and the actual policies on paper, which are often responsive to powerful business and trade lobbies who push for more flexibility in migration regimes (cf. Facchini, Mayda, and Mishra 2011).”
Policy Influence and Private Returns from Lobbying in the Energy Sector (2016, background): “Goldberg and Maggi (1999), Gawande and Bandyopadhyay (2000), and Gawande et al.”
Advancing the Empirical Research on Lobbying (2014, unknown): “These papers attempt to show that lobbying affects judicial confirmations (Caldeira & Wright 1998; Austen-Smith & Wright 1996), immigration policy (Facchini et al. 2011), trade association entry barriers (Morris & Neeley 2001), regulated prices in telecommunications (Duso 2005), technology…”
The Dynamics of Firm Lobbying (2014, methodology): “Annual Sales ($m) 14,680 11,561 32,073 (31,725) (25,555) (51,334) Annual Employment (k) 44 38 77 (67) (64) (76) Annual Assets ($m) 22,604 20,085 36,651”
A Fistful of Dollars: Lobbying and the Financial Crisis (2009, unknown): “…c policies (see, for instance, Grossman and Helpman 1994, Goldberg and Maggi 1999, and Ludema, Mayda, and Mishra 2010, for the case of trade policy; Facchini, Mayda, and Mishra 2011 for the case of immigration policy; Kroszner and Stratmann 1998 and Kroszner and Strahan 1999 for fi nancial…”