Does immigration impact institutions?

Abstract

The economics literature generally finds a positive, but small, gain in income to native-born populations from immigrants and potentially large gains in world incomes. But immigrants can also impact a recipient nation's institutions. A growing empirical literature supports the importance of strong private property rights, a rule of law, and an environment of economic freedom for promoting long-run prosperity. But little is known about how immigration impacts these institutions. This paper empirically examines how immigration impacts a nation's policies and institutions. We find no evidence of negative and some evidence of positive impacts in institutional quality as a result of immigration.

Cultural Baggage: Do Immigrants Import Corruption?

“…Some caution in interpreting the relevance of our result for a world of unrestricted migration is warranted. Our cross-country findings, such as the other studies attempting to empirically assess the "new economic case for immigration restrictions" (Ortega and Peri 2014;Clark et al 2015;Padilla and Cachanosky 2018) come from a sample of regions with managed migration. Perhaps, results from much greater quantities of migration in a world of open borders would be different, though our synthetic studies on mass migration to Israel and Jordan cast doubt on it.…”

“…Padilla and Cachanosky (2018) examine how immigrants have impacted U.S. state level economic freedom and find no economically significant relationship between either the share of immigrants or naturalized citizens in the population and overall state level economic freedom. Methodologically, our article is most closely related to Clark et al (2015). They study how the initial stock of immigrants in 1990, and the subsequent 20-year flow of immigrants, impacted the change in countries' economic freedom in a cross section of 110 countries from 1990 to 2011.…”

“…2 Interestingly, while Dimant, Krieger, and Redlin (2015) find no robust effects when immigration is lagged beyond three years, we find evidence that relatively more corrupt migrants may reduce corruption in the destination country over a five-year period. However, because our focus is on the long run, we additionally follow the empirical methodology of Clark et al (2015) and examine the effects of immigrant stocks and flows on corruption over a 20-year period. As with Dimant, Krieger, and Redlin (2015), we do not find that the short-run effects persist.…”

Migration and institutional quality across Italian provinces: The role of human capital

“…However, this idea has been discarded by a recent empirical study focused on the relationship between foreignborn immigrants and institutional quality, which indicates a gain in institutions due to immigration. Clark et al (2015), for instance, empirically examining the impact of immigrants on different dimensions of institutions in the recipient country, found that immigration is able to improve a country's institutions. In other words, a larger share of immigrants over the total population could yield positive effects on government quality.…”

“…On the one hand, a strand of research has focused the attention on the impact on the origin country, highlighting a beneficial effect related to the ability of migrants to transfer norms, values and institutions from the receiving country to the origin place (the so called 'diaspora' effect) (Beine & Sekkat, 2013;Chauvet & Mercier, 2014;Docquier et al, 2016;Spilimbergo, 2009). On the other hand, other studies have provided evidence of a positive effect on the receiving country, suggesting that the changes in institutions descend from the migrant participation in the political process of the destination country (Clark, Lawson, Nowrasteh, Powell, & Murphy, 2015;Powell, Clark, & Nowrasteh, 2017).…”