Do Interest Groups Affect U.S. Immigration Policy?

Prachi Mishra, Anna Maria Mayda () and Giovanni Facchini ()

No 08/244, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work visas with data on lobbying activity associated with immigration. We find robust evidence that both pro- and anti-immigration interest groups play a statistically significant and economically relevant role in shaping migration across sectors. Barriers to migration are lower in sectors in which business interest groups incur larger lobby expenditures and higher in sectors where labor unions are more important.

Keywords: Immigration; United States; Industrial sector; Political economy; Migration; Labor unions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig and nep-pol
Date: Written
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2008/wp08244.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Interest Groups Affects US Immigration Policy? (2008)
Working Paper: Do Interest Groups Affect US Immigration Policy? (2008)
Working Paper: Do Interest Groups affect US Immigration Policy? (2009)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:08/244

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund
Address: International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().