The Politics of Place: Evidence from Refugees to the U.S.

• In Event: Immigrant Incorporation in the EU and US

Abstract

We show that refugee children who spend more of their childhood in the U.S. are less likely to be politically engaged and more likely to be registered as Democrats in adulthood. We digitize administrative records held by HIAS, a U.S.-based refugee resettlement non-profit, to obtain a sample of refugee families who fled countries like the Soviet Union, Egypt, and Cuba for the U.S. after 1950. Merging these data with a national voter files allows us to study differences in political preferences and engagement within these families. Using family fixed effects specifications to measure differences between siblings, we find that each additional year of childhood spent in the U.S. decreases the probability of voting in the 2014 midterm election by 2.3% and of voting in the 2016 general election by 0.8%. Put another way, more years of childhood spent in the origin country, an environment of repression and persecution, appears to result in a heightened interest in exercising one’s political rights in the U.S. The effect is especially pronounced for the less socially salient, midterm elections. Each additional year of childhood spent in the U.S. also increases the probability of registering as a Democrat in adulthood by 2.2%. Using quasi-random resettlement of refugee families in different cities across the U.S., we document how the characteristics of one’s assigned city can mitigate or amplify these childhood exposure effects. Our findings contribute to literatures on the formative nature of the childhood environment, on how refugees integrate into new societies, and on how political preferences and levels of engagement are formed.

Authors

• Mayya Komisarchik, University of Rochester

• Brian Daniel Libgober, University of California, San Diego

• Valentin Bolotnyy, Hoover Institution