Defying The Bully Pulpit: Government Mandates and Employer Passive Resistance

• In Event: 50614 - Organizations as Legal Actors

Abstract

Government mandates are considered administratively weak, yet some organizations promptly comply with a new mandate even when its legality and practical specifics are as-of-yet unclear. Less is known about the factors shaping employers’ passive resistance efforts—effectively “staying the course” and persisting through a period of regulatory ambiguity in lieu of complying. Addressing this, we study then-President Trump’s 2017 “Muslim ban” Executive Order (EO), which sought to ban U.S. entry for immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries. Leveraging government administrative records, we analyze all labor certification applications (the first work authorization stage for employers seeking to hire immigrants on a permanent basis). Specifically, we examine employers’ voluntary withdrawal of these immigrant applications in the year before and after the ban. We find an estimated treatment effect of 3.2 percent, representing the increase in withdrawals among applications for immigrants from targeted majority Muslim countries after the ban, relative to immigrants from non-targeted majority Muslim countries. No withdrawal increase is observed among immigrants from non-targeted countries. Assessing sources of persistence, we find that working in an ideologically-supportive worksite and greater U.S. labor market prospects moderate the negative effects of the ban for immigrants from targeted majority Muslim countries. Findings from this work emphasize the role of government leaders in shaping labor market inequality, the possible presence of a partisan filter in regulatory enforcement expectation, and the process by which employers engage with government leaders’ rhetoric.

Authors

• Ben A. Rissing, Cornell University

• Katie Apker, Cornell University

• Laura Carver, Cornell University