Costs and Benefits of Immigration and Multicultural Interaction

Bonn Moritz ()
Additional contact information
Bonn Moritz: University of Siegen

No 201240, MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung)

Abstract: This paper studies how the existence of a minority culture influences the well-being of the native population and its attitude towards immigrants. In this context, I assume that multicultural interaction can be advantageous for immigrants and natives if intercultural obstacles and communication problems are abolished. It is found that certain shares of the immigrant as well as of the native population have incentives to acquire knowledge of the respective other culture since it enables them to interact with each other. I find that immigrants are more likely to acquire knowledge of the domestic culture than vice versa what I attribute to di?erences in the respective population size, assortative matching behavior and potentially asymmetric learning costs. The model further predicts that natives who have suffciently low costs of learning the foreign culture are willing to vote for free migration whereas those who have higher learning costs will be in favor of immigration restrictions.

Keywords: Immigration; Cultural Interaction; Political Economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Forthcoming in

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/fb02/research-groups ... ers/40-2012_bonn.pdf First version, 2011 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mar:magkse:201240

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bernd Hayo ().