Ex Ante Xenophobia: How Local Politics Anticipates Immigration in the U.S.

• In Event: Experimental Methods in Migration and Citizenship research

Abstract

Existing work on the domestic politics of immigration in the United States has
documented important relationships between political outcomes and the growth in
foreign-born populations, focusing on an ex post response to changing local demographics. Less understood are the ways in which individuals, communities, and local governments anticipate future changes in immigrant population, strategically adjusting policies to constrain the movement of immigrants within the country. In this paper, we estimate ex ante changes in individual beliefs, community development, and municipal policies by predicting variation in these measures as a function of proximity to nearby immigrant populations, exploiting quasi-experimental evidence from the United States. Applying generalized difference-in-differences methods to county-level demographic data, we estimate the causal effect of proximity to growing immigrant populations on housing prices. We untangle the possible mechanisms by which these prices change by exploiting variation in municipal decision-making, specifically comparing direct democracies to representative democracies. We supplement our analysis with township-level information on as-good-as-random placement of refugees to predict individual beliefs and local media content as a function of proximity to these towns. Our research provides an important but understudied perspective on the strategic responses to immigration that occur before migrants arrive.

Authors

• Diana Da In Lee, Columbia University

• James Hodgdon Bisbee, NYU