The Grecian horse: does immigration lead to the deterioration of American institutions?

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 ; Clark et al ; Padilla and Cachanosky ) 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.…”

“…Powell, Clark, and Nowrasteh () used a synthetic control methodology to examine how the mass migration from the Soviet Union impacted Israel's economic freedom in the 1990s and found that rather than importing social capital that undermined economic freedom, the mass migration significantly improved economic freedom. Padilla and Cachanosky () 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 ().…”

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

“…Furthermore, analogous positive consequences have been also found for the destination regions. In particular, Padilla and Cachanosky (), for instance, in an empirical attempt to analyse the relationship between immigration and economic freedom, indicated that the naturalized US immigrants who are eligible to vote do not lead to a deterioration of the American states' institutions as suggested by Borjas ().…”

“…Analogous consequences have also been found when investigating the effect of international immigration on institutions at regional level. In particular, Padilla and Cachanosky () found that the immigrants and foreign naturalized citizens positively contribute to improve the American states' institutions. However, to the best of our knowledge, the effects of internal flows between regions and sub‐regions within the same country have not been studied yet.…”

Immigration, diversity and institutions

“…3 Some prominent scholars, such as Collier (2013) and Borjas (2015), appear to be pessimistic, raising concerns that migrants might import "bad" institutions into the receiving countries. Yet, the few existing empirical studies have documented mixed results on some indicators related to the quality of governance, such as economic freedom, corruption, and political stability (see, Gebremedhin & Mavisakalyan, 2013;Clark et al, 2015;Dimant et al, 2015;Powell et al, 2017;Padilla & Cachanosky, 2018;Bologna Pavlik et al, 2019). The main message conveyed by these studies is that immigration is strongly associated with higher levels of economic freedom across countries, 4 whereas it induces political instability.…”