Doctoral Dissertation Research: Natural Resources and Immigration Policy in the Era of Trade Liberalization

概述该项目调查了世界各地富裕的先进民主国家的移民政策的决定因素，这一问题与当前关于移民和难民流动的辩论高度相关。总体而言，PI认为移民政治是选民以各种理由反对低技能工人和支持外国劳工的公司之间的拉锯战。与现有的许多关于移民的文献倾向于关注土著选民对移民的偏好不同，PI关注的是劳动密集型公司在移民政策制定中的作用。他将公司分为两大类，即在国际商品市场面临竞争的公司(可贸易部门)和提供不能贸易的国内服务的公司(非贸易部门)。PI认为，贸易部门的公司更有可能支持更开放的移民政策，并找出了支持移民的公司衰落的两个因素：来自石油和天然气等资本密集型自然资源的意外之财，以及全球商品市场日益激烈的竞争。利用荷兰和斯堪的纳维亚的移民政策和实地研究的新数据，PI证明了他的理论框架不仅限于美国和加拿大，而且可以在各种情况下推广。他还发现，一个国家的移民政策通常不会对短期的劳动力需求或无组织的本土反对做出反应，而只是反映了支持或反对移民的群体的相对政治权力。该项目利用了新收集的世界各地富裕经济体移民政策的数据。根据现有的文献，PI将移民政策分为十几个政策维度，包括公民身份制度、对流入的限制和移民权利。PI使用主成分分析提取两个因素得分，一个衡量移民入境的政策限制，另一个衡量移民权利的范围。利用移民政策的时间序列横截面数据，他进行了一系列普通的最小二乘分析，以检验贸易自由化和自然资源繁荣对移民政策发展的影响。为了补充项目中的统计分析，他对荷兰和斯堪的纳维亚的文化和政治相似的福利国家进行了深入的访谈和档案研究，同时将具体国家的政治机构纳入定性研究。这项研究揭示了公司对移民的偏好，以及在缺乏制度化游说的情况下，公司如何寻求影响移民政策的制定。

General SummaryThe project investigates the determinants of immigration policies in wealthy advanced democracies around the world, an issue highly relevant to current debates on immigration and refugee flows. In general, the PI views the politics of immigration as the tug of war between voters who oppose low-skilled workers on various grounds and firms who favor foreign labor. In contrast to much of the existing literature on immigration that tends to focus on native voters' preferences for immigration, the PI focuses on the role of labor-intensive firms in immigration policymaking. He classifies firms into two broad categories, firms that face competition in the international goods market (tradable sector) and firms that offer domestic services that cannot be traded (non-tradable sector). The PI argues that firms in the tradable sector are much more likely to support more open immigration policy and identify two factors that explain the decline of pro-immigration firms: a sudden windfall from capital-intensive natural resources, such as oil and natural gas, and increasing competition in the global goods market. Using new data on immigration policy and field research in the Netherlands and Scandinavia, the PI demonstrates that his theoretical framework is not limited to the U.S. and Canada but is generalizable across a variety of cases. He also finds that a country's immigration policy does not generally respond to short-term labor needs or unorganized native opposition, but merely reflects the relative political power of pro- or anti-immigration groups.Technical SummaryThe project takes advantage of newly assembled data on immigration policies of wealthy economies around the world. Following the existing literature, the PI classifies immigration policy into more than a dozen policy dimensions, including citizenship regime, restrictions on inflows, and immigrant rights. The PI uses a principal component analysis to extract two factors scores, one that measures the policy restrictive of immigration entry and the other that measures the scope of immigrant rights. Using the time-series cross-sectional data on immigration policy, he runs a set of ordinary least squares analyses to test the effects of trade liberalization and natural resource booms on immigration policy development. To complement the statistical analyses in the project, he uses in-depth interviews and archival research for the culturally and politically similar welfare states in the Netherlands and Scandinavia while incorporating country-specific political institutions into the qualitative research. This study sheds light on what preferences firms hold toward immigration and how they seek to influence immigration policy making in the absence of institutionalized lobbying.