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on Economics of Human Migration |
| By: | De Weerdt, Joachim (University of Antwerp); Christiaensen, Luc (World Bank); Kanbur, Ravi (Cornell University) |
| Abstract: | While city migrants see their welfare increase much more than those moving to towns, many more rural-urban migrants end up in towns. This phenomenon, documented in detail in Kagera, Tanzania, begs the question why migrants move to seemingly suboptimal destinations. Using an 18-year panel of individuals from this region and information on the possible destinations from the census, this study documents, through dyadic regressions and controlling for individual heterogeneity, how the deterrence of further distance to cities (compared to towns) largely trumps the attraction from their promise of greater wealth, making towns more appealing destinations. Education mitigates these effects (lesser deterrence from distance; greater attraction from wealth), while poverty reduces the attraction of wealth, consistent with the notion of urban sorting. With about two thirds of the rural population in low-income countries living within two hours from a town, these findings underscore the importance of vibrant towns for inclusive development. |
| Keywords: | Africa, internal migration, urbanization, secondary towns |
| JEL: | J61 O15 O55 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14157&r=all |
| By: | Bert Provan |
| Abstract: | This report considers the impact of extending the "move-on" period (currently 28 days) which is allowed to refugees, once they are awarded Leave to Remain in the UK. This question arises for those refugees who were in receipt of Section 95 subsistence and accommodation grants from the Home Office at the point of being granted refugee status. The move-on period allows for the continuation of Section 95 support for 28 days, with the aim that work and/or mainstream benefits can be secured, and alternative accommodation arranged, by the time this support is stopped. Over the last five years, a range of agencies and groups have suggested increasing this period to 56 days, as they believe 28 days is not long enough to allow this transition to take place. They argue that the 28-day rule increases the risks of homelessness and destitution for some refugee households, and that the potential benefits of a supported integration into work and community life are undermined. The agencies and groups include the British Red Cross, Refugee Council, the No Accommodation Network, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees, the All-Party Parliamentary group on Homelessness, and CRISIS (a national homelessness campaigning and service provision charity). |
| Keywords: | migration, asylum, red cross |
| Date: | 2020–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:sticar:casereport126&r=all |
| By: | Daniele Archibugi (Birkbeck, University of London, UK); Marco Cellini (National Research Council (CNR), Rome, Italy); Mattia Vitiello (National Research Council (CNR), Rome, Italy) |
| Abstract: | The refugee’s flows have alighted the European political debate boosting nationalistic forces in almost all countries. The aim of this paper is to show that the actual number of asylum seekers does not really allow to talk about a “refugee crises†. It argues, however, that the current European Union institutions and procedures are highly insufficient to manage successfully refugee’s inflows and asylum requests. A European foreign policy could have helped to prevent refugees’ inflows from war-thorn areas such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, Libya and Syria. Once the problem is there, the procedures centred on the Dublin Convention are inadequate and the paper provides a few radical suggestions that are made for an EU- centred refugees and asylum seekers management and policy. |
| Date: | 2019–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:img:manwps:17&r=all |
| By: | Zimmermann, Severin (University of Basel); Stutzer, Alois (University of Basel) |
| Abstract: | Asylum migration is a major societal challenge in the Western world affecting residents' policy preferences. We analyze the effects of newly hosting asylum seekers in a given municipality on local citizens' preferences in terms of migratory and redistributive policies as well as of support or opposition to political change in general. Policy preferences are measured based on citizens' actual voting behavior in national referendums in Switzerland between 1987 and 2017. We exploit the administrative placement of asylum seekers across municipalities and find that citizens vote temporarily slightly more restrictively on immigration issues in national referendums and are less supportive of redistribution than before hosting asylum seekers. Citizens are not more likely to vote for the status quo and not more likely to participate per se. |
| Keywords: | asylum seekers, direct democracy, political preferences, pro-immigration attitudes, redistribution, status quo effect, voter participation |
| JEL: | F22 H53 I38 J15 Z13 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14159&r=all |
| By: | Barbora Šedová (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), University of Potsdam); Lucia Čizmaziová (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)); Athene Cook (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)) |
| Abstract: | The large literature that aims to find evidence of climate migration delivers mixed findings. This meta-regression analysis i) summarizes direct links between adverse climatic events and migration, ii) maps patterns of climate migration, and iii) explains the variation in outcomes. Using a set of limited dependent variable models, we meta-analyze thus-far the most comprehensive sample of 3,625 estimates from 116 original studies and produce novel insights on climate migration. We find that extremely high temperatures and drying conditions increase migration. We do not find a significant effect of sudden-onset events. Climate migration is most likely to emerge due to contemporaneous events, to originate in rural areas and to take place in middle-income countries, internally, to cities. The likelihood to become trapped in affected areas is higher for women and in low-income countries, particularly in Africa. We uniquely quantify how pitfalls typical for the broader empirical climate impact literature affect climate migration findings. We also find evidence of different publication biases. |
| Keywords: | migration, climate change, meta-analysis |
| JEL: | F22 O15 Q54 Q56 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pot:cepadp:29&r=all |
| By: | Duleep, Harriet (College of William and Mary); Jaeger, David A. (University of St. Andrews); McHenry, Peter (College of William and Mary) |
| Abstract: | We present a novel theory that immigrants facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship by being willing and able to invest in new skills. Immigrants whose human capital is not immediately transferable to the host country face lower opportunity costs of investing in new skills or methods and will be more exible in their human capital investments than observationally equivalent natives. Areas with large numbers of immigrants may therefore lead to more entrepreneurship and innovation, even among natives. We provide empirical evidence from the United States that is consistent with the theory's predictions. |
| Keywords: | immigration, innovation, entrepreneurship, human capital |
| JEL: | J15 J24 J39 J61 L26 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14188&r=all |
| By: | Kaufmann, Marc (Central European University); Machado, Joël (LISER); Verheyden, Bertrand (LISER (CEPS/INSTEAD)) |
| Abstract: | Empirical evidence suggests that a large proportion of immigrants who initially intended to stay temporarily in the destination country end up staying permanently, which may lead to suboptimal integration. We study systematic causes of unexpected staying that originate in migrant misperceptions. Our framework contains uncertainty about long-term wages, endogenous integration and savings in the short term, and return migration in the long term. We identify necessary and sufficient conditions on misperceptions that lead migrants to overestimate their probability of return migration, independently of their characteristics. We show that these conditions involve pessimism about the destination country, either in terms of short-term utility, of long-term utility, or of wage prospects. We then highlight specific behavioural biases that give rise to such forms of pessimism. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel, we find that relatively higher pessimism at arrival about future utility and wages is associated with migrants staying unexpectedly ex post. |
| Keywords: | migrant integration, return intentions, unexpected staying, misperceptions, pessimism, GSOEP |
| JEL: | F22 D91 J61 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14155&r=all |
| By: | Furtado, Delia (University of Connecticut); Kong, Haiyang (Beijing Normal University) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the link between trade-induced changes in local labor market opportunities and English language fluency rates among low-skilled immigrants in the United States. Many of the production-based manufacturing jobs lost in recent years due to Chinese import competition did not require strong English-speaking skills while many of the jobs in expanding industries, mostly in the service sector, did. Consistent with responses to these changing labor market opportunities, we find that a $1,000 increase in import exposure per worker in a local area led to an increase in the share of low-skilled immigrants speaking English very well in that area by about half a percentage point. As evidence that at least part of this is a result of actual improvements in English language speaking abilities, we show that low-skilled immigrants in trade-impacted areas became especially likely to be enrolled in school compared to similarly low-skilled natives. However, while we find little support for selective domestic migration in response to trade shocks, we present evidence suggesting that new immigrants arriving from abroad choose where to settle based either on their English fluency or their ability to learn English. Regardless of whether low-skilled immigrants respond to trade shocks via actual improvements in English fluency or migration choices, our results suggest that immigrants help to equilibrate labor markets, an implication we find evidence for in the data. |
| Keywords: | immigrants, language fluency, import competition, immigrant assimilation |
| JEL: | J15 J61 J24 F16 |
| Date: | 2021–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14152&r=all |
| By: | Figlio, David N. (Northwestern University); Giuliano, Paola (University of California, Los Angeles); Marchingiglio, Riccardo (Northwestern University); Ozek, Umut (American Institutes for Research); Sapienza, Paola (Northwestern University) |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among White and comparatively affluent students, in response to the presence of immigrant students in the school. We propose a new identification strategy to partial out the unobserved non-random selection into schools, and find that the presence of immigrant students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of US-born students, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Moreover, the presence of immigrants does not affect negatively the performance of affluent US-born students, who typically show a higher academic achievement compared to immigrant students. We provide suggestive evidence on potential channels. |
| Keywords: | immigrant students, educational attainment |
| JEL: | I21 I24 J15 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14196&r=all |
| By: | Sequeira, Sandra; Nunn, Nathan; Qian, Nancy |
| Abstract: | We study the effects of European immigration to the U.S. during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1920) on economic prosperity. Exploiting cross-county variation in immigration that arises from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant flows and of the gradual expansion of the railway network, we find that counties with more historical immigration have higher income, less poverty, less unemployment, higher rates of urbanization, and greater educational attainment today. The long-run effects seem to capture the persistence of short-run benefits, including greater industrialization, increased agricultural productivity, and more innovation. |
| Keywords: | Economic development; Historical persistence; Immigration |
| JEL: | B52 F22 O10 O40 |
| Date: | 2020–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:100819&r=all |
| By: | Grumstrup, Ethan (University of Nevada, Reno); Sorensen, Todd A. (University of Nevada, Reno); Misiuna, Jan (Warsaw School of Economics); Pachocka, Marta (Warsaw School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | Tempers flared in Europe in response to the 2015 European Refugee Crisis prompting some countries to totally close their borders to asylum seekers. This was seen to have fueled anti-immigrant sentiment, which grew in Europe along with the support for far-right political parties that had previously languished. This sparked a flurry of research into the relationship between immigration and far-right voting, which has found mixed and nuanced evidence of immigration increasing far-right support in some cases, while decreasing support in others. Studies by Mendez and Cutillas (2014); Mayda, Peri, and Steingress (2016); Vertier and Viskanic (2018); and Georgiadou, Lamprini, and Costas (2018) found that the presence of immigrants decreased votes for right parties, while others by Otto and Steinhardt (2014); Dustmann, Vasiljeva, and Damm (2016); Halla, Wagner, and Zweimuller (2017); Brunner and Kuhn (2018); and Edo et. al. (2019) found that immigration increased votes for right parties. To provide more evidence to this unsettled debate in the empirical literature, we use data from over 400 European parties to systematically select cases of individual countries. We augment this with a cross-country quantitative study. Our analysis finds little evidence that immigrant populations are related to changes in voting for the right. Our finding gives evidence that factors other than immigration are the true cause of rises in right voting. |
| Keywords: | European Union, immigration, voting |
| JEL: | J15 F22 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14164&r=all |
| By: | Sekou Keita (IAB); Thomas Renault (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne); Jérôme Valette (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne) |
| Abstract: | Immigration and crime are two first-order issues that are often considered jointly in people's minds. This paper analyzes how media reporting policies on crime impact natives' attitudes towards immigration. We depart from most studies by investigating the content of crime-related articles instead of their coverage. Specifically, we use a radical change in local media reporting on crime in Germany as a naturel experiment. This unique framework allows us to estimate whether systematically disclosing the places of origin of criminals affects natives' attitudes towards immigration. We combine individual survey data collected between January 2014 and December 2018 from the Germain socio-Economic Panel with data from more than 545,000 crime-related articles in German newspapers and data on their diffusion across the country. Our results indicate that systematically mentioning the origins of criminals, especially when offenders are natives, significantly reduces natives' concerns about immigration |
| Keywords: | Immigration; Crime; Media Bias |
| JEL: | F22 K42 L82 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mse:cesdoc:21004&r=all |