Coming to America: Immigration, Political Campaigning, and Polarization

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The world and the U.S. in particular, have experienced rising political polarization and increasing migration flows in recent decades, in addition to growing cleavages around the topic of immigration (Gennaioli & Tabellini, 2019). We aim to examine the impact of immigration on political ideologies and polarization along several dimensions. In Part a), we analyze the impact of immigrants and refugees on political ideologies and polarization at the local level by considering political ideologies of political candidates, the ideological composition of campaign contributions, Pew micro survey data on political beliefs, as well as polarization in TV viewership. In Part b), we examine the political impact of immigration on 16 million campaign donors. Thereby, we advance the literature by understanding the context and conditions that determine differing political responses of individuals to immigration and refugee inflows. In Part c), we analyze the use of immigration-related political advertising and their influence on polarization. As immigration has become an important wedge issue in elections, politicians have tried to influence political outcomes by instrumentalizing immigrants in political campaigns. Understanding the conditions under which these campaigns are successful, as well as the type of donor reacting to these campaigns, will further our understanding of the role of political campaigns in the political impact of immigration. Throughout all parts, the proposed project draws on unique and previously unexploited individual-level microdata on the universe of refugees that entered the United States between 1975 and 2015, which we extend with county-level refugee data up to 2018. Moreover, we develop a new identification strategy based on an arbitrary distance threshold within which refugees without family ties in the US have to be settled. Altogether, we will examine novel questions, introduce new data, and develop new identification strategies.