IMMIGRATION, WAGES, AND COMPOSITIONAL AMENITIES

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Card, David; Dustmann, Christian; Preston, Ian
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Berkeley; University of London; University College London
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1542-4774.2011.01051.x
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 78-119
• 关键词: impact; TRADE

摘要

There is strong public opposition to increased immigration throughout Europe. Given the modest economic impacts of immigration estimated in most studies, the depth of anti-immigrant sentiment is puzzling. Immigration, however, does not just affect wages and taxes. It also changes the composition of the local population, threatening the compositional amenities that natives derive from their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. In this paper we use a simple latent-factor model, combined with data for 21 countries from the 2002 European Social Survey (ESS), to measure the relative importance of economic and compositional concerns in driving opinions about immigration policy. The ESS included a unique battery of questions on the labor market and social impacts of immigration, as well as on the desirability of increasing or reducing immigrant inflows. We find that compositional concerns are 25 times more important in explaining variation in individual attitudes toward immigration policy than concerns over wages and taxes. Likewise, most of the difference in opinion between more- and less-educated respondents is attributable to heightened compositional concerns among people with lower education.