The GSS and the Political Externalities of Immigration: A Guest Post by Sam Wilson By Bryan Caplan

GMU Ph.D. student Sam Wilson recently mentioned on Facebook that he was using the General Social Survey to test for political externalities of immigration. He posted a few crosstabs, but nothing more. I immediately publicly offered him the chance to guest blog his findings for EconLog, results unseen. Here’s what Wilson found:

It should come as no shock to readers of this blog to discover that apreponderance of US voters favor rather strict immigrationrestrictions. I also expect that many readers are passably familiarwith some of the excuses forwarded by those in the closed-borders campand are eminently capable of judging the relative merits of each.Almost alone among these reasons, political externalities stand as theone objection that at least partially withstands careful scrutinyusing ordinary economic analysis*.

“Political externalities” is economics jargon. It’s a way of saying

that, in a democratic polity, since we all have to consume what the

majority (perhaps subject to some constraints) wills, any external

shift in the majority opinion towards an unwanted outcome harms

everyone. It’s a form of pollution, in a way. In Arnold Kling’s

terminology, when we resort to using voice, we abdicate our exit

option. By the conventional wisdom, immigrants allegedly corrupt the

national voice.

Bryan Caplan wrote the book on voter irrationality (available here–a

bargain at twice the price) so it is fair to say that you’d be hard

pressed to find another academic as well versed with political

externalities anywhere. Similarly, Bryan makes a habit of

extolling the virtues of free and open immigration. Taken together,

these two policies that almost seem at odds with each other. Using

survey results from the General Social Survey (GSS) and the Survey of

Americans and Economists on the Economy (SAEE), he finds increased

divergence from the informed positions of professional economists

among respondents with low educational attainment. Therefore, if we

know that:

a) uneducated voters make bad decisions at

the polls and

b) low-skilled immigrants tend to be poorly

educated,



then it seems to be at least plausible that we, in our capacity

as concerned voting citizens, would want to keep out the riff-raff

simply to preserve the Republic.



This is not a novel argument. Bryan has discussed it at length

online, in print, and in person: see here, here,

here here

and here for

starters (check here for a more

through summary). Throughout (and in several lunch conversations I’ve

had with him), he admits that this is the closest thing to a

reasonable objection one might have against open borders**. From that

position, he argues quite convincingly that there are a number of

arguments (not the least of which is the obvious

moral case {if you haven’t already read that Cato paper,

please do so now–you won’t regret it}) against accepting the

political externality at face value, but I can’t recall him ever

directly challenging the premise itself using empirical

estimates.



I intend to remedy this minor oversight. Because this is kind of

long-winded, I will do so below the fold.

Like Bryan, I also turned to the GSS for data, but my approach was

slightly different. The questions I am asking are:

Do immigrants

hold substantially different

opinions on those issues we typically use democratic processes to

decide? If so, how do these opinions vary by subject type and construal

level Are there important opinion differences between the median

native-born American and second or third generation immigrants? That

is to say, if off-the-boat immigrants have political biases, are they

passed on to kids and grandkids (alternatively, how successful is

generational assimilation?) If differences exist, how strong are they compared to the effects

of race, gender, education and political affiliation?

The preliminary answers I have gathered point to the following

stylized facts:

For more distant domestic issues like race relations, crime

prevention, drug treatment and environmental protection, the opinions

of immigrants and their children and grandchildren are statistically

identical to other respondents in the sample. For the near-mode issues of mass transit and the fairly generic

“problems of big cities”, immigrants and their descendants tend to

agree that the government spends too little (relative to native-born

Americans) On the issue of foreign aid transfers, first generation

respondents felt the US was spending too little, whereas second and

third generation were statistically indistinguishable from native-born

respondents. On the issue of military spending, first generation respondents

felt the US was spending too much, and the second and third generation

respondents were statistically indistinguishable from native-born

respondents. For those other questions that showed occasional statistical

significance, the coefficients tended to be positive for the

Goldilocks answer: US spending on this issue was “just

right”. Overall, with a few important exceptions, immigrants’ political

opinions just aren’t all that different from anyone

else’s.

The exceptions tell a Horatio Alger tale of enlightened self- and

family-interest: improved access to mass transit improve employment

opportunities for low-income immigrant families and correcting the

ills of big cities is akin to wishing for better local infrastructure.

The generational stickiness of this opinion is interesting on its own

and may merit closer study, but for now, it’s merely an empirical

curiosity.

The other exceptions conform to my priors. In addition to being a Navy

veteran, my day job is with the military and I am well aware of the

size and the international presence of US armed forces relative to

that of other nations. I am not even slightly surprised that new

arrivals are a bit put off by the scale of the Pentagon’s operations.

Ditto for foreign aid. You don’t have to take a walking tour of Upper

Manhattan to get a sense of just how much wealthier the average

American is than folks abroad. Our streetlights are bright and

ubiquitous, our roads straight and well-paved (I find myself chortling

at accusations of “crumbling” infrastructure, having driven on the E36

in Poland, an exercise in the nail-biting dodging of entirely missing

slabs of roadway for 100km or so), and our water clean and

free-flowing. If you don’t imagine the disparity to be positively

shocking, I urge you to live on your own for a year abroad then judge

again once you return stateside. This disparity by dint of shock value

alone should raise the probability that new arrivals might think the

US should be doing more to help needy foreigners (I might also add

that I’d be interested to see how responses to this question might

change in response to greatly liberalized immigration policy).

Importantly, on the really big-ticket line items like OASDI and

welfare transfer payments, even new immigrants have the same political

opinions as people already here. The myth of the immigrant

welfare-state-expanding freeloader is not evident in the data I’ve

gathered. Furthermore, to the extent that immigrants’ political

preferences diverge from native-born Americans, that divergence is

assimilated away even as quickly as the very next generation. Any

lingering differences can be safely tucked into the “small potatoes”

pile.

I cannot reject the null hypothesis that there are no significant

long-term political externalities to open immigration.

As promised, here are some of the technical details (full outreg

tables available upon request, please find my contact information in

the link at the bottom of this post).

>From the comments section of my STATA do-file:

/*

Do-file to investigate the partial effects of immigration on policy

preferences using GSS data drawn 28 Jun 2012 For use with data set “G:\Immigrant Song\4697_F2.dta” One criticism of open immigration policy is to suggest that recent

immigrants and their descendents will favor a stronger welfare

state and/or more government intervention. To the best of

my knowledge, this assertion hasn’t been adequately challenged using

survey data. I use the following measures of preference for larger government

(questions ask if government is spending too little, just right or too

much): natspac

(space exploration) natenvir (environmental protection) natheal

(health care) natcity

(solving problems of big cities) natcrime (fighting crime) natdrug

(dealing with drug addiction) nateduc

(improving national education) natrace

(improving the conditions of blacks) natarms

(military spending) nataid

(foreign aid) natfare

(welfare [transfer] programs) natroad

(highways and bridges) natsoc

(OASDI-Social Security) natmass

(mass transit) natpark

(parks and recreation, presumably to include Ron Swanson) The independent variables of interest are: 1)

parents born outside the US and 2)

grandparents born outside the US These are categorical variables in the survey: . tab parborn WERE RS

PARENTS BORN IN THIS

COUNTRY |

Freq. Percent

Cum. ————————————-+—————————

Both born in US | 34,404

82.40 82.40 Mother

yes, father no | 1,359

3.26 85.66 Mother

no, father yes | 910

2.18 87.84 Mother

yes, father dk | 79

0.19 88.03 Mother no, father dk |

24 0.06

88.09 Mother

dk, father yes | 8

0.02 88.11 Mother dk, father no |

10 0.02

88.13 Mother dk, father dk |

45 0.11

88.24

Neither born in US | 4,911

11.76 100.00 ————————————-+—————————

Total |

41,750 100.00 . tab granborn

HOW MANY | GRANDPARENTS|

BORN |

OUTSIDE |

U.S. | Freq.

Percent Cum. ————+———————————–

None | 23,681

60.24 60.24

1 | 2,508

6.38 66.62

2 | 4,437

11.29 77.90

3 | 976

2.48 80.39

4 | 7,710

19.61 100.00 ————+———————————–

Total | 39,312

100.00 I grouped these into categorical variables iparborn and igranborn for

the sake of convenience. When using indicator variable commands, the

omitted category is for native-born respondents, handily

enough. I used these categories to create additional dummy variables for weak

and strong 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants. 1st generation: native

= born in US immigrant = not born in US 2nd generation: weak:

foranypar (either or both parents born outside the US or unknown for

either or both [iparborn categories 2-9]) strong:

forbothpar (both mother and father born outside the US [iparborn

category 9 only] extra

strong: secondgen = native*forbothpar [blog note: for reporting results here, I used the “extra

strong” definitions for both 2nd and 3rd generation

respondents] 3rd generation: weak:

thirdgen (any single grandparent born outside the US [igranborn

categories 2-5] strong:

thirdgenstrong (all four grandparents born outside the US [igranborn

category 5 only] extra

strong: thirdgenonly = thirdgenstrong*(1-foranypar) (all grandparents

born outside US, both parents born in US) extra

extra strong: tgenonst = thirdgenonly*native (67 changes to

thirdgenonly, used as a robustness check) Control variables include: year:

survey year (categorical from 1972-2006) educ:

highest year of school completed degree:

highest degree obtained by respondent sex:

dummy, omit male for consistency race:

categorical; white, black, other, omit white for consistency loginc:

log(real income) in 1984 dollars [I have to double-check if that’s

actually the base year] partyid: political party affiliation, as follows: . tab

partyid

POLITICAL PARTY |

AFFILIATION | Freq.

Percent Cum.

—————-+———————————–

STRONG DEMOCRAT | 8,023

15.81 15.81

NOT STR DEMOCRAT | 11,018 21.72

37.53

IND,NEAR DEM | 5,981

11.79 49.32

INDEPENDENT | 7,444

14.67 63.99

IND,NEAR REP | 4,405

8.68 72.67 NOT STR

REPUBLICAN | 8,175 16.11

88.79 STRONG REPUBLICAN | 4,970

9.80 98.58

OTHER PARTY | 720

1.42

100.00 ——————-+———————————–

Total | 50,736

100.00 dem:

strong democrat or not strong democrat ind:

ind, near democrat; independent; ind, near republican repub:

not str republican, strong republican */ I included beta estimates in my outreg tables, and in terms of the

magnitude of effect, political party affiliation, race and gender

tended to outperform immigration status in those cases where

immigration status was statistically significant. If I end up turning

this into a journal-worthy article (and I’m leaning heavily in that

direction), I plan to use better-fit LDV modeling and do some better

data prefiltering, plus maybe track some margins across some of the

categorical variables.

Additionally, the econometric specifications were not of especially

good fit. Most R-squared values were below 0.05. It appears that there

is a lot of unexplained variation in public opinion. I urge the

cautious reader to remember this when interpreting any survey

results, especially those encountered in the media.

*I count cultural externalities as mostly positive on net: immigrants

bring with them wonderful new food, music, stories and celebrations.

They make America a less boring place.

**He also freely admits that I have a point about screening for

communicable disease and criminal record as part of the entrance

process, but that’s hardly controversial.

I would like to take this space to thank Bryan Caplan for

his extremely generous offer to allow me to post this on

EconLog. As a long-time fan, this is a genuinely overwhelming

opportunity. Thanks also to GMU Professor Garett Jones for providing

the impetus to conduct this investigation and American University’s

Daniel Lin for providing the germ of the idea.

Samuel Wilson is an economics student at George Mason University. He

is a regular blogger along with Michael Munger and Jeff Horn at Euvoluntary

Exchange.