Anna Maria Mayda (Georgetown University)

"The Political Impact of Immigration: Evidence from the United States” joint with Giovanni Peri and Walter Steingress

Abstract:
This paper studies the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote for the Republican Party by analyzing county-level data between 1990 and 2010. Our main contribution is to show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants de-creases the share of Republican votes, while an inflow of low-skilled immigrants increases it. These effects are mainly due to the indirect impact on existing citizens’ votes and seem independent of the country of origin of immigrants. We find that the political effect of immigration is heterogeneous across counties and depends on their labor-market, fiscal and non-economic characteristics, consistent with voters’ perceptions.