Cultural avoidance and internal migration in the USA: Do the Source Countries Matter?

Alessandra Faggian, Mark Partridge and Dan Rickman

No 1003, Economics Working Paper Series from Oklahoma State University, Department of Economics and Legal Studies in Business

Abstract: There has been a heated academic debate in the US migration literature regarding whether contemporaneous flows of immigrants displace domestic migrants. While the results of this question are important, it does not answer whether there are cultural avoidance effects in which domestic migrants avoid states with high stocks of past immigrants. The answer to this question would suggest non-labour market responses to immigrants. In assessing the cultural avoidance issue, we examine whether domestic migration responds to the origin countries of the immigrants. We find that after controlling for contemporaneous flows, net domestic migration is negatively associated with larger immigrant stocks from Latin America and Africa and positively associated with immigrant stocks from Canada and Europe. We find that the human capital composition of immigrants also influences net-domestic migration flows—in which native migration is positively associated to immigrant stocks at the tails of the human capital distribution. This pattern suggests that domestic migrants are attracted to immigrants who are complementary to domestic labour. However, origin country effects continue to influence immigration. The implication is that while labour market factors affect immigration, non-labour market factors appear to play a role.

Keywords: internal migration; immigration; cultural avoidance; local labor markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2010-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://business.okstate.edu/site-files/docs/ecls-working-papers/OKSWPS1003.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Chapter: Cultural avoidance and internal migration in the USA: do the source countries matter? (2012)
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:okl:wpaper:1003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Paper Series from Oklahoma State University, Department of Economics and Legal Studies in Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Harounan Kazianga (harounan.kazianga@okstate.edu).