Doctoral Dissertation Research: Natural Resources and Immigration Policy in the Era of Trade Liberalization

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary The project investigates the determinants of immigration policies in wealthy advanced democracies around the world, an issue highly relevant to current debates on immigration and refugee flows. In general, the PI views the politics of immigration as the tug of war between voters who oppose low-skilled workers on various grounds and firms who favor foreign labor. In contrast to much of the existing literature on immigration that tends to focus on native voters' preferences for immigration, the PI focuses on the role of labor-intensive firms in immigration policymaking. He classifies firms into two broad categories, firms that face competition in the international goods market (tradable sector) and firms that offer domestic services that cannot be traded (non-tradable sector). The PI argues that firms in the tradable sector are much more likely to support more open immigration policy and identify two factors that explain the decline of pro-immigration firms: a sudden windfall from capital-intensive natural resources, such as oil and natural gas, and increasing competition in the global goods market. Using new data on immigration policy and field research in the Netherlands and Scandinavia, the PI demonstrates that his theoretical framework is not limited to the U.S. and Canada but is generalizable across a variety of cases. He also finds that a country's immigration policy does not generally respond to short-term labor needs or unorganized native opposition, but merely reflects the relative political power of pro- or anti-immigration groups. Technical Summary The project takes advantage of newly assembled data on immigration policies of wealthy economies around the world. Following the existing literature, the PI classifies immigration policy into more than a dozen policy dimensions, including citizenship regime, restrictions on inflows, and immigrant rights. The PI uses a principal component analysis to extract two factors scores, one that measures the policy restrictive of immigration entry and the other that measures the scope of immigrant rights. Using the time-series cross-sectional data on immigration policy, he runs a set of ordinary least squares analyses to test the effects of trade liberalization and natural resource booms on immigration policy development. To complement the statistical analyses in the project, he uses in-depth interviews and archival research for the culturally and politically similar welfare states in the Netherlands and Scandinavia while incorporating country-specific political institutions into the qualitative research. This study sheds light on what preferences firms hold toward immigration and how they seek to influence immigration policy making in the absence of institutionalized lobbying.