US study about the political impact of immigration on elections should raise concerns in Germany

Here is a study from the US about the political impact of immigration on elections and what political parties people tend to vote for when "confronted" with low-skilled versus high-skilled immigrants.

With integration of immigrants in the US certainly better than in Germany, those findings should raise grave concerns in Germany and in particular its impact on the political landscape. Secondly, unemployment, in particular youth unemployment, in the Eurozone is markedly higher than in America. Further increases will lead to a shift to right-wing parties.


THE POLITICAL IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION: EVIDENCE FROM THE UNITED STATES

Anna Maria Mayda Giovanni Peri Walter Steingress

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138

ABSTRACT

In this paper we study the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote for the Republican Party by analyzing county-level data on election outcomes between 1990 and 2010. Our main contribution is to separate the effect of high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants, by exploiting the different geography and timing of the inflows of these two groups of immigrants. We find that an increase in the first type of immigrants decreases the share of the Republican vote, while an inflow of the second type increases it. These effects are mainly due to the local impact of immigrants on votes of U.S. citizens and they seem independent of the country of origin of immigrants. We also find that the pro-Republican impact of low-skilled immigrants is stronger in low-skilled and non-urban counties. This is consistent with citizens' political preferences shifting towards the Republican Party in places where low-skilled immigrants are more likely to be perceived as competition in the labor market and for public resources.

Conclusion

In this paper we have analyzed the connection between the change in the immigrant population and the vote to the Republican Party, exploiting the variation across U.S. counties between 1990 and 2010. We hypothesize that such a connection can be different in response to high- or low-skilled immigrants.

The first group certainly brings fiscal benefits to natives, possibly increases job creation and growth, and is believed to be easily integrated. The second may have a fiscal cost, may compete in the labor market with less-educated voters, and may have a harder time to integrate. We take no stand on whether these assessments of facts are correct, and in general economists agree that the labor market effects of less-educated immigrants are small (e.g. Ottaviano and Peri (2012)), but we think that they may correspond to the perceptions of U.S. voters.

We also account for the fact that the perception and response of voters (and hence of counties, in that their median voter differs) may be different depending on their characteristics. Less-skilled citizens may perceive the labor market and fiscal competition of less-skilled immigrants, while high-skilled citizens may value their skills and their contributions to the local economy.

We find that an increase in low-skilled immigrants affects the vote of U.S. counties in different ways, but in general tends to push voters towards the Republican Party. Non-urban, low-skill counties with high local public spending strongly increased their Republican vote share in response to low-skilled immigration. To the contrary, voting patterns in urban, high-skilled counties with low local public spending did not respond much to low-skilled immigration, but did respond to high-skilled immigration by moving towards the Democratic Party.

The differential response to the inflow of more- and less-educated immigrants is consistent with an explanation in which natives prefer high-skilled immigrants, and their response to less-educated immigrants is negative and stronger the less educated the local population. Interestingly, this differential response to immigration is another contributor to the polarization and political divide in the United States. While the most highly educated immigrants (as well as less-educated, though not as many) moved into urban, skill-intensive areas and contributed to moving those already left-leaning areas further towards the Democratic Party, low-skilled immigration (and not much highskilled immigration) in non-urban and low-skilled areas has contributed to push those areas towards the Republican Party. Our model can explain 22% of the growth in the Republican Party vote share over the 1990-2010 period across U.S. counties, and it shows how the opinion response to immigration is consistent with the local perception of economic costs and benefits from it.