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Title: Heterogeneous firms and immigration policy

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2013

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Abstract: The conventional wisdom in the immigration literature is that firms are uniformly pro-immigration and have a relatively out-sized influence over immigration policy. If this is true, why do we see increasing immigration restrictions throughout the world? In this paper, I argue that firms are not uniformly pro-immigration. Instead, their preferences depend on their need for unskilled labor, their exposure to trade and their ability to move production overseas. Using a formal model, I show that increasing the capital/ skill intensity or productivity of production leads to a decreased need for migrant labor; that trade exposure leads firms that use immigrant labor to exit the market, decreasing the demand for immigrant labor in the economy, and that increasing the ability to move overseas reduces firms incentives to lobby for open immigration. Using a case study of an agricultural trade group and a textile trade group, I show that firm behave as the model predicts.

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Authors: Peters, Margaret E.

Publisher: University of Wisconsin - Madison

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration

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