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Sunday, May 05, 2013

'Does Immigration Hurt Support for the Welfare State?'

Does immigration undermine support for social insurance programs?:

Does immigration hurt support for the welfare state?, by Dan Hopkins: ... there is a ... concern about immigration ... that you are more likely to hear from the European left than the American right: that immigration undermines the social welfare state by making voters less supportive of public spending. ...
The striking thing about the United States, though, is that increasing ethnic and racial diversity hasn’t dampened our public investments.
We can study this by looking at U.S. cities. American municipalities vary markedly in their ethnic and racial demographics, and they routinely make decisions about how to allocate scarce dollars. But when we examine cities’ spending patterns in recent decades, we see that growing diversity has done little to change public good provision. Your public library is likely to have seen cutbacks, but it’s probably not because of your neighbors’ backgrounds. ...

He goes onto provide evidence that a 1999 paper by Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir, and William Easterly that came to the opposite conclusion had causality backwards. Correcting for this, he finds that "Among the 1,000 largest U.S. cities, those that rapidly diversified saw the same changes in their spending on those categories as did cities that did not diversify."

    Posted by on Sunday, May 5, 2013 at 09:28 AM in Economics, Immigration, Social Insurance | Permalink  Comments (27)


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