Getty Images
Republicans do better at the ballot box when there are more immigrants — but only immigrants of a certain kind, according to new academic research.
High-skilled people from other countries? No, the opposite, say Anna Maria Mayda of Georgetown University, Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, and Walter Steingress of the Bank of Canada, in a working paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“We find that an increase in low-skilled immigrants affects the vote of U.S. counties in different ways,” the authors write in a new paper, “but in general tends to push voters towards the Republican Party. Non-urban, low-skill counties with high local public spending strongly increased their Republican vote share in response to low-skilled immigration.” The authors associate the GOP with more-restrictive immigration policies, saying that’s what it usually championed in the 20 years they consider.
The authors also found the opposite effect: an influx of software engineers, say, as opposed to agricultural laborers tilts the balance in favor of Democrats. “High-skilled immigration consistently moves the local electorate towards votes for the Democratic Party,” they write, with the effect “particularly strong in areas with large concentrations of low-skilled workers but it is present in all counties.”
Mayda, Peri and Steingress looked at county-level data on election outcomes between 1990 and 2010. Republicans’ fortunes, they write, are mainly due to the local impact of immigration on U.S. citizens’ votes — and “they seem independent of the country of origin of immigrants.”
The paper arrives as President Donald Trump, who took a hard line on illegal immigration and pressed for a border wall during his campaign, is ramping up his rhetoric on the subject once more as the midterm elections approach. “We are going to build the wall, we are already starting the wall,” Trump said last week at a campaign-style rally in Elkhart, Ind.
The authors use a few examples to illustrate their points: in Concho County, Texas, for instance, the share of immigrants rose by 16 percentage points and was predominantly low-skilled. That county was also home to a high share of low-skilled natives, the authors write — leading to an increase in the Republican vote share of 10.6 percentage points.
Republicans’ vote share fell by roughly the same amount — 10.2 percentage points — in Gwinnet County, Ga., where immigration was mainly high-skilled. Its share of immigrants increased by 26 percentage points over 20 years.
Overall, the authors say the net impact of the increased immigrant share on the average U.S. county was negative for the GOP between 1990 and 2010 — since immigration in that period was, on average, college-biased.